Dr Space Junk 20 Years of Blogging Feminist as Fuck Edition

This beautiful artwork is by archaeologist Dr Katherine Cook https://drkrcook.wordpress.com/ 

This blog is 20 years old! My first post was in July 2004, when blogging was relatively new. In those pre-microblogging days (that's what Twitter was, for those not around at the time), blogs were where all the action was. We had blog carnivals, blog rolls, web rings, bloggers fighting with each other, and all kinds of shenanigans. 

Twenty years later I have written over 400 posts, and as time has gone on, they've become longer and longer, and more researched. This wasn't a conscious decision, more a reflection of how the blog's role in my writing/research life has changed. 

To celebrate this anniversary, I made a list of the top ten most-read posts. Then I realised that the top ten posts weren't necessarily my favourite posts, so I decided to make a list of them, which turned out to be far more than ten. So I decided to break it into smaller sections, and here we are. These are my most feminist posts, and if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen! (No stay in it because I want you to read them).

Please enjoy my Feminist as Fuck edition!

1. The spacecraft, the shirt, and the scandal (November 16, 2014)

Back in 2014, a spacecraft called Rosetta was woken from hibernation, and as the world waited with bated breath, the Philae lander was dropped onto a comet's surface. It was an extraordinary mission, one of my favourites. But an ill-chosen shirt worn by one of the mission scientists temporarily eclipsed the achievement. Why? I gave my take in this post.

2. The day Pluto came to breakfast: Venetia Burney and a life in mathematics (July 12, 2015)

In 1930, there was tremendous excitement across the world because a new planet had been found. It was named Pluto at the suggestion of 11-year-old Venetia Burney. Of course it's not a planet any more, but the point of this post was to look at Venetia Burney's life in an era where women were not permitted to get university degrees. Sometimes I wonder if men realise just how far women have to be dehumanised to allow them to remain the dominant gender. And I guess this is why I write these posts, as drips that might eventually wear away the edifice of the patriarchy.

3. Women in the kitchen of science: on being excluded from the life of the mind. (Novermber 13, 2015)

This is an account of how I came to hate Hermann Hesse's novel The Glass Bead Game, and how it might feel when the credibility gap for women doesn't exist - when no-one questions who you are and your right to be present.

4. He said, she said, and what the dictionary said  (January 31, 2016)

In 2016 the Twitters were in a spin about language. It had come to the attention of a couple of people that the online Oxford dictionary was using horrendously sexist definitions of some words. A few of us wrote responses to this. The debate is not over, either: in 2019 a petition called for the OED to change how it represented women. The response was that the dictionary reflected language how it was, not how it ought to be. This tells us that we still live in a patriarchal world where women are inferior to men (surprise!), and that dictionaries don't see themselves as agents of change. But why not, I want to ask. It's all in the choices: you can represent current usage while also countering it with the examples chosen. Why do dictionaries have to be the mouthpiece of the politically dominant? (Yes, a naïve question, but why?)

5. An anatomy of street harassment (March 10, 2018)

 

Because I was tired of men:

1. Denying that street (or workplace, or domestic) harassment occurred - you can't believe what a woman says about her own experience, right? See post above.

2. Minimising its impact - you didn't get raped, or physically hurt, right? And it will be couched in such passive language so the harasser doesn't appear.

3. Telling you how to deal with it - just say no, right?

4. And failing to recognise how constant this is, and how much time and energy you have to expend just to stay safe - nothing happened, right? So why are you angry?

I thought I would explain how it works, using a recent example. Sad to say, I sent the post to a male friend to get some feedback and his response was to tell me what I'd done wrong.

Listen up, men, quit your bitching, and change your behaviour.

6. Here now the Sun: a poem for Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space (22 February 2019)

This poem was published in Outer Space: 100 Poems, edited by Midge Goldberg. As I said to Midge when she approached me about including it in the book, it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me!

I wrote it using a technique called erasure, where I removed parts of the original text, in this case the transcript of Valentina Tereshkova's epic spaceflight in 1963. The aim was to centre her voice. I had a wonderful experience in 2023, where a whole audience of people recited the poem together at an event at the Secession art gallery in Vienna. This gave a whole new meaning to the poem - people told me they found it exhilarating and triumphant - not knowing how Tereshkova had been vilified and demeaned, this is how they inhabited her words. I found it quite moving.

7.  Space Age Suds: women, washing machines and the astronautics of everyday life (17 March, 2019)

I always find newspapers such fascinating sources of information about public attitudes, and trawling through Trove, the National Library of Australia's online archive of newspapers, magazines and other popular publications, is such a joy. A search brought up this rather delightful article where beloved South Australian journalist Max Fatchen imagines his wife Jean as the commander of a space module in the form of a washing machine. Reading it again, whole new vistas of feminist analysis open before my eyes - but that can be for another time!

8.  Cat-Women of the Moon: ideas of space travel in the 1950s. (31 July, 2019)

It's hard not to love a movie full of sinister black cat-suited women, and although this one is no cinematic masterpiece, it is a classic example of how women and space governance are seen as mutually exclusive. I analysed the genre of women-only planets in an essay for the Griffith Review (paywalled but contact me or them for a copy if you're interested). Early space age movies are so revealing about implicit societal attitudes to space exploration and gender roles, and there's so much more to watch!

9. Between the house and the stars: the life of Varvara Sokolova who married Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (17 January, 2021)

Konstantin Tsiolkovsky is known as the 'father of spaceflight' and is one of the most famous people in the whole history of humans and space. I'd been citing him and talking about him for years. One day a few years ago I stopped to ask myself the question: what about Mrs Tsiolkovksy, or Varvara Sokolova as I came to know her? What had been left out of Tsiolkovksy's story? I decided to put her back in it, and this is the result.

10.  Valentina Tereshkova and double standards in human spaceflight history (13 June, 2022)

In case you weren't aware that the first woman in space was being disparaged and belittled over 60 years after her spaceflight, let me disabuse you. Every year around the anniversary of her flight, you will find women celebrating her achievement on social media and men trying to tear her down. One of those men issued a challenge to me, and while I would normally react by saying 'do your own research, buttercup', this time I thought I would take him down. 

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So there you have my favourite posts where I have tackled women's rights or applied feminist methods to interrogate space history and public perceptions. If this is an area which interests you, I can recommend these older publications:

Penley, Constance 1997  NASA/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London: Verso

Lykke, N. and M. Bryld  2000 Cosmodolphins: Feminist Cultural Studies of Technology, Animals and the Sacred. London: Bloomsbury Academic

Enloe, C., 1993 The Morning After: Sexual Politics at the End of the Cold War.  University of California Press. 

Nolen, Stephanie 2002 Promised the Moon: The Untold Story of the First Women in the Space Race. Penguin Canada

And these newer ones:

Schwartz, James S.J., Linda Billings, and Erika Nesvold (eds) 2023 Reclaiming Space. Progressive and Multicultural Visions of Space Exploration. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Boucher, Marie-Pier, Claire Webb,  Annick Bureaud, and Nahum (eds) 2024 Space Feminisms. People, Planets, Power. London: Bloomsbury