This is a question I posed on Bluesky in October 2024. To me, the question, methods and results were sort of self-evident, as I imagined they were to many. But not everyone; and in response to the question 'how'? I decided to elucidate. So this post is based on how I expanded the skeet into a narrative. As is often the case, a random thought expressed on social media resulted in, for me, some new avenues to pursue.
Perhaps I should start with the obvious question of what is a map? Wikipedia has a definition which is as good as any: 'A map is a symbolic depiction of interrelationships, commonly spatial, between things within a space'.
Craters are one of the most well-known lunar features. How many of them are named after women? In 2023, the artist Bettina Forget decided to find out, and it turns out it's only 33 out of 1,578 named craters. That's 2% - hardly anything at all. (Dr Catherine Neish, planetary geologist at the University of Western Ontario, told me that there are now 44, an increase of 25% in three years). In the video below, Forget talks about the art she made in response to this fact, including the absolutely stunning hot pink craters.
Let's look at a couple of the craters. There is a one named for Jane Austen, but interestingly this name has never been approved by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), who are responsible for managing the names of everything outside Earth. It's used by scientists, but it's not official.
There's Ann and Annegrit. The Gazetteer for Planetary Nomenclature says that they are a Hebrew and a German female name - just generic names, not a particular person. So from this we learn that there are fewer than 33 actual women (there are generic male names too but this wouldn't make much difference in 1500 or so).
There's a crater named for Mary Adela Blagg, an astronomer who was appointed by the early IAU in 1920 to systematise the lunar nomenclature system which was A MESS.
A very recent one is E. Margaret Burbidge, inscribed in 2023. I guess this is one of the new ones Catherine was talking about.
Of course craters are only one type of lunar feature. Another is the catena, a chain of craters. There are 20 named catenas on the Moon, and one is Brigitte, a generic French female name. Let's pretend that this is the fascinating Brigitte Bardot, who isn't represented anywhere else in the solar system!
Features on the Moon are mostly named after male scientists, philosophers and explorers. These are fields which were barred to women, whose role in European and North American settler society was to provide domestic and sexual services, and subsume their identity, to men and children.
Let's look at more generic names from a different perspective. The Sea of Tranquillity is an old name dating to 1651. This was where the Apollo 11 mission landed in 1969, establishing Tranquility Base as the first human site on the Moon. What does tranquillity mean for women? In the domestic context of contemporary western cultures, it's something women have to fight for, whereas leisure/ a room of one's own/ time to oneself is a male norm. Not all the non-people names bear such analysis, but this demonstrates the point that there doesn't have to be a uniform meaning.
Before I move on, don't forget that there are many places named for women on other celestial bodies. For example, names on Mercury are artists of all kinds (art is less manly than science), and Venus is devoted to the female, so if someone isn't on the Moon you may find them there (Jane Austen is on Venus, thus solving the mystery of why the IAU hasn't sanctioned her name on the Moon).
Our feminist map of the Moon might just include the female names, leaving the vast tracts of unnamed features as a stark demonstration of how women were excluded from the naming of heaven and Earth. This map could be both historical, and future-looking - freeing up places to receive new names.
2. Hidden figures
What if we took some of the places named for men, and looked behind the official story to see if there were women who have been forgotten or left out? We know that the contributions of women to science have often been ignored, downplayed, or just derided. There are many women whose science has dropped out of the authorised patriarchal histories. I was thinking about this recently as I was reading a 19th century account of astronomy. All the standard men got a look-in, and I thought how differently this history came across when you knew about the women who had been left out. And the work women did to make men successful was rarely acknowledged either - their labour and its fruits were owed to the men who had authority over them.
Sophia Brahe.
Credit: unknown
One great example of this is Tycho crater, near the South Pole. It's one of many craters visible to the naked eye from Earth. It's named after the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe (1546-1601). His observations are held to be the most accurate and reliable before the invention of the telescope in 1610. But is this the only story to be told?
Many of the much-vaunted observations for which Tycho is famous were made in collaboration with his sister Sophia Brahe (1556-1643) who he actively discouraged from doing astronomy, while also acknowledging her contributions. What if the crater were named Brahe instead - honouring them both instead of just him? A simple change to make, but it would make a world of difference.
It wouldn't be hard. In fact there is already a crater which does this: Bok, which honours the husband and wife astronomers Priscilla and Bart Bok. The gazetteer says 'Priscilla Fairfield; American astronomer (1896-1975), Bart Jan; Dutch-American astronomer (1906-1983).', but I particularly like this one as Bart Bok worked in Australia as the director of the Mt Stromlo observatory for nine years and was very supportive of the early growth of radioastronomy. Priscilla Fairfield Bok got to do a lot of child-raising and domestic work, but it is said of them 'it is difficult and pointless to separate his achievements from hers'. Together, they wrote one of the most successful astronomy textbooks of all time.
However, Sophia's place in the history of astronomy is apparently more controversial, as I found out when I attempted to amend the Wikipedia page for Tycho Brahe. She was removed in minutes, so fast are the male gatekeepers, and this despite her having her own page which outlines her astronomical work.
By using this classic feminist method, we'd likely find many more instances where a bit more research will show the women whose work was ignored or written out of official stories.
3. Relationships and perspectives
Another feminist method is to simply change perspective. De-centre the male, turn the story upside down, or turn it in different angles to see what catches the light. An inverse Moon, perhaps, where Alice has gone through the looking glass to find that other logics prevail. Or the lenses of microscopes and telescopes where you can see other worlds at a different scale. In fact Lewis Carroll was well aware of this effect, as evidenced by this quote from Through the Looking Glass:
All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass.
The process of naming could be seen as an act of possession that bends the Moon to a patriarchal, colonial purpose. It's no coincidence that the colonisation of Indigenous lands in the global south were undergoing the process of claiming and naming at the same time as places on the Moon, drawn into the colonial gaze by the telescope. (After 1957, satellites replaced the telescope as an instrument through which to find the things to name). I wonder how much overlap there is between the naming of places in 'virgin' lands and on the Moon - are they called after the same people? It would be an interesting project to undertake, although there were many competing name systems before Mary Adela Blagg sorted it all out!
In a world described, named and quantified by men, perhaps we should seek the female and feminine in the places in between: the bits of the Moon between the craters, seas, and other features held in common with terrestrial maps. A feminist map of the Moon might mean NOT focusing on craters and other features in the IAU system.
Maybe we have categories instead which take into account how a place appears in different lights or times - one which is more relational. This is more in line with how amateur astronomers on Earth often see the Moon. They have features defined by shifting relationships of light and dark, which you might only see if you look at the right time. These also have names - like the Eyes of Clavius - but at anther angle, or time, the feature dissolves and does not exist. Such places are called
clair-obscur effects, and involve a degree of pareidolia:
These lunar illusions are a play of shadow and sunlight interacting with craters and other features, making them appear as something familiar through the eyepiece.
I've been
obsessed with lunar shadowsfor some time, but perhaps I should elevate them to a lunar feature of significance. Their presence in the Permanently Shadowed Regions of the lunar poles is what traps the water ice which is a target of current commercial and lunar economy plans. But there are shadows everywhere on the Moon, in craters, of mountain ranges and rocks, rilles and sea shores, human artefacts. Perhaps the shadows themselves deserve names. Or categories of shadow need to be defined.
A type of feature on the Moon which does not receive names is the light plain. Perhaps this is because they are not as obvious as craters or maria, and were only recognised as a feature in 1965. Here's light plains 101:
What are light plains? They are smooth, flat, maria-like deposits that are higher in albedo(reflectance) than the smooth, flat, dark maria. Light plains cover about 9.5% of the lunar surface, while the maria cover about 16%.
The light plains were mapped by Dr Heather Meyer in 2019 using data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's a video:
They create a very distinct pattern on the Moon, making it look very orange-like. They may have come from a single event - the impact that created the Orientale basin, the dark spot at the lower right. As far as I can tell, no lunar light plains appear in the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature as places. However, as a geological unit, they are also called the Cayley Formation. My purpose in mentioning them here is to show what a different kind of moon you would see if different qualities were emphasised.
Feminist methodology invites us to see other kinds of relationship in the process of map-making, which represent other values.
4. Look beyond the European Enlightenment tradition
Of course all the names/stories I've discussed so far are from one dominant cultural tradition. If we cast our net further, we can catch non-western knowledges and traditions about the Moon. This is a intersectional feminist method, and an acknowledgement of the women who kept and passed on astronomical knowledge - not that they would necessarily frame it like that.
Most Indigenous descriptions of the lunar surface involve patterns in the reflectance features of dark regions like maria. They are not named; instead they are associated with a story which has other moral dimensions to it: the place is embedded in knowledge. Thus we might say reflectance - like the light plains - determines the hierarchy of features, those with the least reflectance having the greater significance. The Moon's phases, how it catches the light of the sun, are important too. There is a light/dark aesthetic at a large scale rather than interest in the fine details of landscape. Of course the purpose of Indigenous stories and knowledge is not to map directly onto scientific facts.
Another aspect of this is that the Moon is seen as a whole entity rather than being divided up, a process I call cadastral colonialism, where geographic features get turned into administrative boundaries relating to western notions of property and productivity. The naming of craters and other features is a prelude to cadastral colonialism. There will be a complete change in our relationship to the Moon when there are more places unrelated to geographic features (like a settlement), and when simply saying the name of the feature will have some sort of cultural resonance for people who have never been there, in the way that, say, Uluru, or the Grand Canyon do. At the moment, I would say that the general public doesn't have any strong associations with any features except perhaps the Sea of Tranquility.
5. Give the Moon back to blood
Western science has decoupled menstruation from the Moon. But it's one of the deepest cultural connections that we have. Half the population of Earth, about four billion people, stands in some kind of relationship to menstruation. 20th and 21st century studies may have shown that menstruation is not driven by lunar cycles - or have they? Recent studies, such as this one, seem to be returning the Moon to the equation. All I'm saying is that we should not be so quick to discard the relationship between the Moon and menstruation, and that the cultural relationship does not need to be based on science to be significant.
The anthropological, sociological, psychological, medical, and scientific literature on menstruation is vast and I'm not going to pretend to be across it. But I do think it's worth noting that the Moon's significance for women is very different than it is for men. The cultural values associated with the Moon and menstruation are profound. I think we should reclaim this. Visually, this means emphasising the phases of the Moon rather than the lunar surface. But it also means co-opting these new telescopic, satellite and ground images of the Moon into the web of meaning rather than leaving it to men to determine this meaning.
Is the decoupling of the Moon from women an important prior step to treating it as a resource to be exploited? Or is the continued association of the Moon with women something which allows the exploitation of its resources under patriarchy? I'll drop these questions here as a reminder to myself to return to some classic literature eg Carolyn Merchant's Death of Nature, and some newer literature which sounds amazing eg The Menstrual Imaginary in Literature: Notes on a Wild Fluidity by Natalie Rose Dyer.
What sort of map does this make? Not the traditional cartography, but remember the definition that we put in the introduction to this post. We might find different ways to physically represent this relationship to women's bodies, such as Bettina Forget's use of deep pink. I'm sure there are many other creative ways to represent these values.
You might say that what we have already, in the way the Moon is represented, is the male wet dream of the Moon as something to conquer, where unmasked nature is the enemy. This is, I think, a strong element of Musk and his followers' urge to be 'multiplanetary'. Let's take back the phallic rocket which penetrates the mineral-laden mantle as we see in Georges Meliés' iconic film La Voyage dans la Lune. Let's have instead a god who bleeds now.
a god whose wounds are not
some small male vengeance
some pitiful concession to humility
a desert swept with dryin marrow in honor of the lord
we need a god who bleeds
spreads her lunar vulva & showers us in shades of scarlet
thick & warm like the breath of her
our mothers tearing to let us in
this place breaks open
like our mothers bleeding
the planet is heaving mourning our ignorance
the moon tugs the seas
to hold her/to hold her
embrace swelling hills/i am
not wounded i am bleeding to life
we need a god who bleeds now
whose wounds are not the end of anything
- Ntozake Shange
6. Inscribe new meanings
Women aren't bound by what came before. I put another query out to Bluesky: what new rituals will we need for the Moon? I particularly loved writer and documentary photographer
Nancy Forde's response:Sacred pilgrimages to the Dark Side. Mourning rituals for Earth alternating between locations of Lacus Doloros (Lake of Sorrow) and Lacus Mortis; Academic Conference at Mare Ingenii (Sea of Cleverness); Insomnia clinics at Palus Somni (Marsh of Sleep); Pride Marches at Sinus Iridum (Bay of Rainbows)
This gives all the place names we talked about completely new resonances by overwriting them with repeated rituals, ones that are not tied to Earth. I love it.
The naming of features, and the process of carving the Moon up into places where you can make habitations, mine water ice or other minerals, land rockets, or dispose of waste, the zoning or property values of the lunar surface, is cadastral colonialism. We should be wary of it as it will creep up on us: the meaning of these names could change quickly.
Instead of making the Moon a resource, why not make it kin? This is a new meaning that completely changes our relationship with the Moon. In
this articleI talk about Val Plumwood's co-participation model:
Then we might ask, what does the Moon need from us in order to survive? Another unstated assumption is that without living ecosystems, atmospheres, oceans and plate tectonics etc, that the Moon is less complex than Earth and hence less vulnerable to harm. In fact we don’t know any of these things. We don’t know what the Moon’s vulnerabilities are yet. We only know something of ours. ... The co-participation model does not close off the possibility of humans using lunar resources, but it does lead to a greater recognition of the Moon as an active agent, and a rebalancing of how resources are allocated: taking into account what the Moon needs to maintain its ecological integrity.
In the Earthrise photo, people are always so fixated on Earth. But what if, instead, we asked what the lunar surface we see illuminated by Earthshine is? It has a glassy, translucent look to me, like quartzite, like it would fracture conchoidally in the same way that stone selected by humans for making stone tools does. It's undulating, white/grey in colour. The craters aren't dark, shadowed pits: they're illuminated. There are bright white spots. The image apparently shows the eastern limb of the Moon near the equator.
This is not necessarily anything to do with women, but it is the application of a feminist method, and the kind of thing that one could make a new meaning around. This piece of lunar ground makes it an Earthrise photo, yet few analyse it, seeing instead the Earth as the focus. No-one, it seems, has disputed the 'lifelessness' of the landscape over which the living Earth rises. But what if we look at it as a differently animated land - a place or more pure lights and shadows than are possible on Earth - a landscape of light, effectively? Does this give us a meaning that we can base action on? I don't know; I'm just trying it on for size.
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| Image credit: NASA |
People assume that my position is that we can't go to space or explore the Moon. Far from it. I just think the Moon is too important to approach it with a narrow western patriarchal, capitalist eye. Looking at the map as expressions of relationships of power, there are ways to represent these relationships that don't reinforce existing terrestrial inequalities. I think the possibilities are worth exploring.