The offer of space tourism to rich women is a pastiche of feminism which acts only to showcase the shallowness of corporate liberalism
~ Sourdough ~
Earlier this month, for the first time since Valentina Tereshkova’s 1963 spaceflight, an all-female crew briefly took to space aboard Jeff Bezos’ New Shepard for a total of 11 minutes before touching back down on Earth.
The vanity project of Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez, the flight also included pop star Katy Perry and TV personality Gayle King, among others, marking the tenth such flight of Blue Origin and one of many more private space flights to come. Although subsequently reviled and mocked widely online for its performative nature, the rebuttal came largely from misogynist spaces and has seen comparatively little critical class coverage in comparison to its widespread coverage in the mainstream press.
This flight acts as the apotheosis of liberal feminism. Liberal feminism privileges a select few women to, literally in this case, rocket out of the stratosphere and break the glass ceiling, all the while allowing the shards from such a rupture to lacerate the women below them. While these women take to space, the working women of the world who toil and labour to allow their journey to subsist under the oppression and misery of patriarchy.
As a purely symbolic move, the flight continues the capitalist project’s watering down of feminism from a radical movement to a marketing campaign, preventing the destruction of the system of patriarchy that governs all women today. While women’s rights decline around the globe, the ever-precarious position of women is overshadowed by spectacles such as this spaceflight, as seen just two days later as the UK Supreme Court ruled to exclude trans women from the legal definition of womanhood.
Upon reaching space, the crew engaged in a chant, “take up space”, that served as the theme of the outing. While the rich have always sought greater and greater thrills to occupy their time and overburdened wallets in the quest for ever more thrilling vacations, the phenomenon of privatised vanity trips to space is still relatively new. Where space travel was once the sole domain of the State, it has been increasingly privatised, as is everything in the capitalist system, in the scarce pursuit of further profit. With little work and fulfilment to be found at the top of the world, the rich must turn to utter nihilistic hedonism to amuse themselves to death.
This pursuit is a great example of the mindset of the bourgeoisie in our current moment, which sees the world as a playground for their amusement and entertainment. In a time when the planet burns and people starve, they take up an exorbitant amount of space and resources on the planet for their overblown holidays. Ever rapacious, just owning the world will never be enough to satisfy the capitalist and their monstrous system, it must consume everything and grow regardless of drive or feeling.
Spaceflight was once a symbol of possibility for the human race, a grand demonstration of what we could accomplish together as a species. A future that once seemed to be out among the stars has been eroded into just another frontier for corporate profit, stripping the dream of exploration and plenty away from the heads of the people and into the hands of the powerful few who already hold enraptured all the dreams of human freedom to be found on Earth.
We must remember that humanity is a shared dream, and while the vast majority of women throughout the world remain oppressed, there can be no liberation. Liberation can not be the elevation of a select few, but the elevation of all women to choice and autonomy as should be afforded to every human being. At the intersection of class and patriarchal domination, we must form the bonds of solidarity and cooperation necessary to liberate ourselves from capitalism’s mirage of progress. The environment can not be allowed to continue to burn to fuel the dreams of the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone. The future belongs to everyone, and while space now belongs to the state and its corporate stooges, it is we who own the future. It waits out in the stars for us to meet it.
Pic: Lauren Sánchez after returning from the flight, courtesy of Blue Origin
