Feminist Astropolitics with Natalie Treviño

As told to Kirthi Jayakumar

Natalie Treviño is a space theorist and award-winning educator and is currently a postdoc at the Open University in the UK as part of the Space Ethics Group. Her PhD is from the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at Western University in London, Ontario. Her research focuses on how the colonial legacy of space exploration limits the vastness of the futures in space. As an educator, Natalie loves to create dynamic learning opportunities to engage students with ideas, actions, and possibilities.

Natalie is pictured before a backdrop presenting an artistic rendition of the Moon. (Photo credits: Natalie Treviño - Profile picture | Kirthi Jayakumar - Astronomical Art)

What brought you into the field of decolonizing outer space?

I grew up on a sheep farm in the middle of nowhere in Michigan, United States and the best thing about that was that I had access to the dark skies every single night of my childhood and into my teens. That was when I started stargazing and fell in love with the moon. Going into university, I was sure that I wanted to work in space because I wanted to help humans go into space and explore it. Then, I took my first chemistry class and realized that science was not for me. But I was good with politics and theory, so I followed that route. The longer I worked within philosophy, sociology, and cultural studies, along with my interest in space, the more I started to recognize that the language of space exploration was inherently colonial. I wondered if this was just rhetoric or if there was some logic behind this.

My PhD dissertation looked at the colonial logic underlying space exploration, especially in Western cultures. My aim was to say that going into space itself is not a colonial expedition, but the way in which we are going about the exploration of space is colonial in that it has a set agenda where you're trying to go into space to find and extract resources, and the people who will do that extracting most likely are going to follow the colonial line. It is not going to be Elon Musk in a spacesuit mining on the moon, but the lowest paid person who doesn't have an option because they need a job to feed their families. This follows everything we've seen for the last 500 years following colonialism.

What does it mean to bring the decolonial lens to understanding outer space and human interactions with it?

It can be quite Earth-based. When we talk about a decolonial perspective on space exploration, it is important to remember that so much of the possible colonial work has not been done in space yet, but has been done on Earth. Most space ports or space launch sites are on stolen indigenous land, or in colonized countries. Most materials that are used to produce the technology come from formerly colonized nations that are still under colonial rule in a lot of ways, although we don’t say that officially anymore because, well, I hear colonialism ended in the sixties. What we're really looking at are the ways in which the space industry itself reinforces already existing colonial norms and oftentimes, that comes through the fact that space companies are also defence companies. They make their money off of war, they don’t make their money off of space.

A lot of it also has to do with how which we talk about the benefits that come from space and who gets to benefit from space. Oftentimes, we will hear that space is for the benefit of all humankind. Except for private companies who want to own it, and the military companies who get to cause war to bring their stocks up to then get to explore space, no one else is currently benefiting from it. The way we frame the entirety of going into space and what we're going to do there reinforces white supremacist ideas of what a human actually is. When we're saying space is for all humankind and we see all the practices, it is clear that space is actually for the rich white men from the global north. Of course that is not all of humankind. That's less than 13% of the global population!

In an article you recently wrote, you talk about space exploration having two sites, namely the silver space age optimism and it's ugly underbelly which includes the use of stolen land, Nazi affiliations, and the military industry complex. Can you unpack that for us?

I'll start with the Nazis because they have a lot to do with space exploration and it's rather unfortunate. The original construction of the V2 rocket that Wernher von Braun helped design and build, was built in a concentration camp during World War II by slave labour. Those V2 rockets didn't go into space, they landed in London during the war. It's always the joke that Wernher von Braun just wanted to send them up, and that didn't matter where they came down. We know that Wernher really loved space exploration. He wanted to design a rocket to go to Mars. He ended up doing that on the understanding that the Nazis were going to give him money, and that he could build his rocket while not being bothered about much else.

We see this over and over again. Elon Musk wants to go into space, so he's building a starship and it doesn't matter how much environmental damage he causes in Texas, where he's launching these things from. He just wants to do it and he's saying that it is going to save the world. You cannot save a world while actively destroying it. That's not how it works. When we're talking about the very essence of space exploration, the technology of space exploration was built on sacrificed human lives, for the purported purpose that it is all supposed to be for all of us. That hurts my heart in a very profound way.

Then you have the military industrial complex, which has always been a part of space exploration. These things were never separate even if we like to say they are. For example, NASA in the US context is a civilian organization and is not military, but most of the work that goes towards space exploration or the research gets transferred into some kind of military capacity. Even if it's not the military making it, it's the military using it.

We look at space as the final frontier, and the way we take colonial approaches to it makes one feel hopeless. Is change possible? If it is possible at all, what would that look like?

I love to answer this because this is where things kind of get really beautiful again. One of the things I've learned in my research, partially through engaging with indigenous cultures and their knowledge and also a lot of archaeoastronomy, is that interest in space and our human and/or cultural relationship to the Earth and space is something that every culture around the world has. They are all very different and that's really beautiful. It's not just this one-track approach of “We will go to the moon and mine it.” There are these vast arrays of practices: For example, Aboriginals in Australia have sky country. There are shamans who go to the moon, who are Inuit. These kinds of relations to space are abundant.

We have to look a bit differently at what we want to do. Recently, I was on a panel with a space scholar, Hilding from Canada, and he made the point that we are always asking what we can get from space rather than what we can give it. I think that's a beautiful idea: What if we can bring seeds to the moon to grow a garden? That would be beautiful! I think it can be really pessimistic because colonialities are everywhere, and neo-colonialism is everywhere. But it's also through resisting it that we start to build a better future. One of the things I tend to say a lot, especially nowadays, is: “A free Palestine is a free moon.” Those two things are so linked! Working here on earth rapidly changes what the future holds and I think using your love for space like I do to do actions on earth is not just the only thing we can do, it's the best thing to do.

One of the things that tends to get ignored or sidelined in conversations around space is gender and intersectional feminism. What can the values of intersectional feminism bring to spacefaring?

That's a fun question because most space research is very masculine-centred even in the way we think about what the future in space could look like. If you ever read any of the research on what will happen when we put women into space, it always involves the reduction of “women” to cis women, and in the process, the body of a cis woman is problematized. Questions that are thrown about include, “What happens with pregnancy in space? What happens with death in space?” And yet, we know that toxic masculinity has had terrible effects on space exploration, but it's never categorized as such. Oftentimes, you'll see NASA’s reports naming something that you and I would call a completely stereotypical, toxic masculine response to a situation, as normal psychological pressure. I've read so many NASA studies where they say that two male astronauts got into an argument and their communications broke down and that there was nothing they could do.

A feminist would see that and explore what's actually happening there from a gendered viewpoint, and perhaps investigate how a feminist deconstruction might help this situation, perhaps engage with it from that lens, and actually help solve it. One of the things that is oftentimes a far more feminist conception of the world is collaboration, communication, and working through difficulties instead of shutting down or becoming violent, which are things that we actually see happen with men in space. Right there, you have a solution to a massive problem. If you look at astronauts, taikanots, or cosmonauts going to Mars, you're not going to be able to afford to have a breakdown in communication and just have a bunch of astronauts not speaking to each other or possibly becoming violent over the course of the nine months that it takes to get there! You're going to need a better way of resolving conflict. Feminist ideas give us the answer to that as they always have. But there's resistance, because it's never considered objective. It doesn't come out of the Western canon a lot of times, so it's dismissed as not really necessary. In reality, taking a feminist lens to a problem of space flight can solve so many issues and yet it's not being done.

What are your thoughts on Space Laws? Can they be a site for transformation at all, given that the Space Law paradigm reflects colonial attitudes?

I don't know if laws can really change what needs to be changed when it comes to changing the world. I think what we actually need is more grassroots organizing, as it can lead to systemic change. If there are possible laws in the future that would help regulate those, we couldn't possibly see or know what they look like because, really, in my heart, I hope that the world will be so radically different that I couldn't even give an answer. I think we can start from where we are, knowing that laws oftentimes reinforce oppression rather than liberation and knowing that then we can say is there a way to use law to make the small changes that we need in the meantime. The major changes are going to have to be grassroots-based, because it really is calling for a change in the fundamental relations of the world. That can start from communities and then go out from there into larger circles.

There's been so much demonization of indigenous ways of spacefaring. How do we make a shift toward bringing those ways of spacefaring to coexist with the techno-optimist approach we see unfolding?

I think the first thing we need to realize, like for me as people from the West, is that you cannot build technological solutions for social problems. This is fundamental, because I think so much of space right now is thinking we can just build something to solve the problem at the time. What is that? What does that even mean? What is a robot that can take on patriarchy? I think one of the things that we need to step back and we as the West should understand that technology is meant to be a tool, and not an overarching way of relating to the world. I think if we can follow indigenous people rather than try to appropriate from them, we can see a way of relating to the universe where we as Westerners, because we're great at gadgets, can contribute to the expansion of humanness across the stars, without having to make it central to our identity as war mongering people, but rather as an expression of the universe getting to see itself.

I think it's a matter of learning that we as Western white people need to stop, slow down, and learn from our mistakes. It took 500 years for the West to take over most of the world and then completely destroy it to the point where we're now seeing catastrophes and climate change. Indigenous peoples had, for centuries, been stewards of the world and made it livable in all sorts of contexts. We go there claiming to have “civilization,” and we've destroyed everything. I think that in itself shows we have so much left to learn! We need to step back and really take humility into account. That means releasing power. That's where the struggle comes from, because when you have power it is all corrupting. It is both a revolutionary fight and a very psychological one, to say that this isn't the way you want to exist in the world. There is also fear of what we don't know: Could it be worse or might we even face retaliation? Why wouldn't people treat us the way we treated them? Humans are much better than this, and we can be better. That's where I have hope, because from my research, which I've been doing for over 10 years now, I can see that the entire world is different when it comes to space exploration. People are asking critical questions. They weren't doing that 10 years ago. To me, that's really beautiful. I'm seeing massive amounts of change. And that gives me hope!