The Lack of Space for Women in Space, or a Society of Science (Fiction)
Zero gravity, infinite resistance: how mutts, cyborgs, and dissident women upend the myths of space conquest - On Silvia Yuri Casalino's No Gravity (2011)
The first terrestrial lifeform to venture into outer space aboard a spacecraft built by Homo sapiens likely did so as an uninvited guest. A bacterium, perhaps — a minute organism and, yet, as philosopher Donna Haraway observes in Silvia Yuri Casalino’s No Gravity (2011), one capable of challenging the masculinist dream of total separation between “man” with his machines and the rest of existence (nature, etc.). Officially, however, the first human to achieve orbital flight was Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who, in 1961, uttered the famous words: “The Earth is…”— no, no, no. He actually said: “I don’t know if I’m the first human or the last bitch in space.” Well, according to the sources, at least those in English and French, Gagarin used the masculine term dog or chien, but as we know, it was only, or predominantly, wandering females who were used in the Soviet space program.
Stray dogs are accustomed to hardship: hunger, cold, extremes. They were, therefore, deemed more suitable as test subjects. Female dogs had an additional physical advantage: space suits could be stitched directly onto their bodies. A legion of mutts was recruited, but it was the mythical Laika who, in 1957, became the first living creature to orbit the Earth, while being cooked alive aboard Sputnik 2. In 1960, Strelka and Belka (russian for “Arrow” and “Squirrel" or “Whitey”) spent 27 hours orbiting aboard Sputnik 5 (Korabl-Sputnik 2), becoming the first higher living organisms to return safely from a journey around the Earth. All of them mammals, all canines, all female, all mutts, all strays, all test subjects. Companion species?
Silvia Yuri Casalino, a woman, lesbian, cisgender, Italian, aerospace engineer, and employee at CNES (the French space agency), found herself, through her work, being gradually absorbed into the homogeneous majority that surrounded her, coded as urban, property-owning, and, above all, male. The opposite of what she had envisioned when she arrived at the CNES, hoping to contaminate the environment with her queerness. For a long time Casalino had dreamed of becoming an astronaut and, when she learned of an opening, she applied and prepared as best she could, building an astronaut-body. It was not enough. Silvia Yuri Casalino, a woman, lesbian, cisgender, Italian, aerospace engineer, employee at CNES, and failed astronaut, became a filmmaker, spawned a double of herself, and made a queer film about space, astronauts, cosmonauts, and what it takes to get there - and, importantly, why. Casalino chose to side with the stray bitches.
If, within CNES, Yuri seems to be whole, outside it, however, a rift emerges between the Casalino-perspective-and-voice that directs and narrates the film and the Casalino-body that inhabits it, the so-called faulted, failed body, the one denied the chance to become an astronaut. “What counts as a standard?” asks Donna Haraway in the film, referring to the astronaut ideal. “Whose interests are served by those industries of standardization?” One Casalino narrates and engages in reflection; the other inserts herself, infiltrating the image.
The Mercury 7—the first seven American astronauts—the filmmaker reminds us, were all male, white, Protestant, married, and jet pilots. She has no interest in them. Her film zigzags through the testimonies of women who have been to space or played crucial roles in that adventure. The use of the word “adventure” here is intentional, for No Gravity is interested in space travel, not conquest or competition. The interviewees list their “extraterrestrial joys”, talk about their favorite science fiction series, and make the spectators understand how the transport systems on the Enterprise worked when taking and transforming those who stepped into them.
John Glenn, the first of the seven to orbit the Earth in 1962 (after Enos, the infant Cameroonian chimpanzee, endured over 70 shocks in orbit to test the procedure’s safety), declared before the U.S. Congress the following year, regarding the possibility of women astronauts, that “the men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in this field is a fact of our social order.” The notion of women in space had long hovered in science fiction, but at the time, Wernher von Braun, former SS officer and then director of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, reportedly referred to the women trained in the same way as the Mercury 7 but nonetheless barred from advancing further as “90 pounds of recreational equipment.” It’s no wonder that, in Casalino’s (outer and cinematic) manless space, Gene Nora Stumbough, a pilot and almost-astronaut who came of age during the Cold War, wears around her neck a medal of Soviet Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman H. sapiens in space.
Russian biologist Adilia Kotovskaya, who speaks with singular tenderness about the cosmonaut bitches - sharing stories of apologies to Laika and the American fate of one of Strelka’s pups - maintains, 50 years after her comrade’s flight, the conviction that the woman-cosmonaut and the woman-mother must converge. Tereshkova, in this sense, could be seen less as a feminist triumph and more as a Soviet experiment in heterosexuality. After her 1963 flight, she married, had a daughter, and, though she wished to return to space, never did. Tereshkova embodied Mother Russia herself, floating in the cosmos.
As Casalino suggests, she could also be The Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond, Fritz Lang, 1929) - Lang’s only other science fiction film besides Metropolis (1927), a true pulp adventure full of scientists, rogues, stolen plans, rockets, and a mountain of gold on the Moon. In this story, however, we find, almost without fanfare, the presence of a woman scientist and astronaut: Friede (“peace”, in German), who abandons her fiancé to join the scientist Helius - a human surrogate for the Sun - on the Moon. Another (doubly) heterosexual myth. Nonetheless, while all of this is true, so is the existence of Tereshkova; even the will of the scientist in Lang’s film is real. Tereshkova is a hero to many aspiring girls women astronauts. She is also a flesh-and-blood woman. The first H. sapiens woman in space.
In Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, a novella by James Tiptree Jr. published in 1975, an extraordinary event catapults an ordinary spacecraft — i.e., one crewed by three men - into the future. There, they are rescued by a future humanity composed entirely of cis women and trans men. Through the behavior of the astronauts - men who belong to the past of the future Tiptree creates, a past that is also his/her own present, 1975 — (s)he explores three distinct types of masculinities. There is the patriarch, who seeks to save the women from the sin of loving each other, from lacking centralized government, and from everything else; the rapist, who views women as sexual playthings to which he has a natural right; and the failure within the society of men, who sees himself as cowardly and poses no threat. In the novella’s climax, the first two escalate into the full physical violence already implicit in their words, while the third finally overcomes his cowardice and takes action, working alongside the cis women and the trans man present in the scene.
Casalino insists on the figure of Haraway’s cyborg. The final line of the Cyborg Manifesto serves as the epigraph to her film: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.” But what is a cyborg under these conditions? In Primate Visions, while discussing Enos as well as HAM, another infant Cameroonian chimpanzee used in NASA’s Mercury project, the philosopher makes an insightful observation:
A cyborg exists when two kinds of boundaries are simultaneously problematic: 1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans, and 2) that between self-controlled, self-governing machines (automatons) and organisms, especially humans (models of autonomy). The cyborg is the figure born of the interface of automaton and autonomy (Haraway 1989: 139).
In No Gravity, Haraway tells Casalino that at the time she wrote the Cyborg Manifesto, “deep in our practice in those years, we were cyborgs. It wasn’t something you chose to be; and it wasn’t about having metal implants or a pacemaker. It wasn’t about that particular notion of adding technology to organisms, but about the world in its thickness being operated on and, in some really deep way, becoming a Command, Control, Communications & Intelligence System - a C3I system”, equating the cyborg with C3I. In such a highly compartmentalized yet communicative military system, the levels of autonomy — of the system or the individuals — may be high or approach zero. This aligns with the definition in Primate Visions. Being a cyborg was not just about the paradigmatic examples of Enos or Laika — insofar as animals embody the tension between autonomy and automaton status in Western thought — but also about how both they and Haraway’s colleagues inhabit a world (not merely a planet) that is itself a vast cyborg. If this is the case, then what does it mean to leave? And what is the space that Casalino seeks through her encounters with women, landscapes, and, intriguingly, critters subjected to zero gravity?
Perhaps we can find one last clue in Primate Visions, where two privileged loci — “the wilderness” and “space” — are discussed as aspects of a single system of desire, one “mediated by modern science and technology.” Bringing up the tropics here is hardly unwarranted, considering that the first scene of No Gravity is set at the Guiana Space Centre, a location that, despite its name, belongs to France. In other words, Casalino’s film begins in the tropics. Haraway, meanwhile, goes on to distinguish the wilderness-half of this system of desire as a dreamlike version of an ecosystem - mythical, “damp, bodily, full of sensuous creatures who touch intimately and intensely” - from its space-half:
In contrast, the extraterrestrial is coded to be fully general; it is about escape from the bounded globe into an anti-ecosystem called, simply, space. Space is not about “man’s” origins on earth but about “his” future, the two key allochronic times of salvation history. “Space” has formal properties; it can be warped, for example, like a topological mathematical figure. Space and the tropics are both utopian topical figures in western imaginations, and their opposed properties dialectically signify origins and ends for the creature whose mundane life is outside both: civilized man. Space and the tropics are “allotopic”; i.e., they are “elsewhere,” the place to which the traveler goes to find something dangerous and sacred (1989: 137).
Mae Carol Jemison, the first Black woman in space, a fan of Star Trek, Lieutenant Uhura, and Nichelle Nichols, declares at the end of a vibrant interview that space travel “is one of our best fantasies.” Is it possible to journey to space — or to the tropics — without seeking something dangerous and sacred, but instead to experience, as Claudie Haigneré puts it, “extraterrestrial joys” (or perhaps earthly ones)? She recounts one of these unforgettable joys: after a space mission, finally exiting the capsule and being able to smell the unique scent of Earth. “We are truly terrestrial beings,” Haigneré concludes. Is it possible that space could be a fantasy that is non-colonial, non-military, non-destructive, non-egoic, non-heroic? A fantasy neither origin-oriented nor teleological? Is there still, as Ursula K. Le Guin once phrased, “room in the bag of stars”?
In Casalino’s beautiful film, space, queered, holds the possibility of creating communities — communities distinct from the ones shaped by rigid and narrow standards. In the seductive vastness of the universe she inspires lies the possibility of a very real dream myth space travel — a dissident one, far removed from the Society of Men. Here, there, wherever else it may be possible.
References
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Links
A conversation between Casalino and sci-fi author Syinat Sultanalieva
Casalino talks about No Gravity (in italian): “Quindi, tipo, il film è un po’ questa storia della ‘conquista’ (tra virgolette) di uno spazio da un punto di vista femminista, non come un’impresa militare di andare nello spazio e costruire dei missili […]”