FutureSpace Talk 8 | Eleanor S Armstrong and Réka P Gál

The Playboy Bunny and the Astronaut Wife:

Constructing Femininities and the United States Space Program

Abstract

Inspired by Ahmed (2010), we follow the figures of the ‘playboy bunny’ and the ‘astronaut wife’ through the cultural legacies of (north american) space flight. Following from our work on what feminist interventions can offer to social studies of outer space (2023), in this talk we work through how femininities of the Other of the hegemonic masculinities of outer space are constructed. Our work asks how these figures reverberate in popular cultures to shape present and futures conceptions of femininity in outer space, and offer pathways that intervene in normative gendered futurities. In following these figures, we think about what illuminating them might do also for directing pathways of feminist scholarship on outer space in the future.

We consider the Playboy Bunny: a construct of the pornotopic 1950s, and the discursive counterpoint to the womanizing young man. Appearing off-handedly in archival interviews about life at Johnson Space Center during the early space programmes of the 1950s and 60s, making her way secretly into lunar checklists worn by astronauts on the Moon, and continuing to draw media attention into the 2000s, we draw on Preciado’s biopolitical theorising (2019) to think through the sexual relations and gender politics of the space programme. Contrastingly on the mother-whore axis, stands the media construct of the “astronaut wife.” Using perspectives from Feminist Communication Studies, we explore how the assigned duties of the astronaut wife upheld the figure of the hypermasculine astronaut. We argue that the caretaking duties assigned to the figure of the “astronaut wife” extended beyond the confines of her homeboundness and homemaking into outer space: she was rendered part of the communication technologies available to take care of the hypermasculine astronaut’s mental health. We conclude by considering how these examples help us pluralise and (re)make future femininities in relation to outer space.

Bio

Eleanor S Armstrong is a Space Research Fellow at the University of Leicester, UK, where she leads the Constellations Lab (on Outer Space & Feminism). She was awarded her PhD at University College London, UK, in 2020; and since then has held positions at the University of Delaware and Stockholm University, and visiting positions at, among others, the University of Cambridge, Ingenium Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation, New York University, and University of Vienna.

Réka P Gál is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Science, Technology and Society at Technische Universität München. She completed her doctorate at University of Toronto‘s Faculty of Information. She is the co-editor of Earth and Beyond in Tumultuous Times: A Critical Atlas of the Anthropocene, published by meson press.