Mother (other) Earth: Feminisms, Ecologies, and Alien Worlds

• In Event: The Final Frontier (of Environmental History): Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Environments Beyond Earth

Abstract

The budding field of exoplanet astronomy has for the past few decades been circulating a story amongst itself and to broader publics. The story centers on a mother astronomer pointing to the night sky to show her children the star around which a planet known to be just like our Earth orbits. Though this is presently a dreamed for future, this story in all of its tellings captures an aspiration that, according to these scientists, such a discovery would allow us to finally know ‘our place in the universe.’ The imagery of the mother and the Earth-like planet offer an opportunity to rethink in the 21st century the relationship between women, nature, and science. In decoding this symbolism and drawing on literature from feminist studies of science and the environment, this paper asks which relations are being re-presented in this story and which are being upended. Critical scholarship has often used the view of the Earth from space as a starting off point to explore the boundaries of nature and culture, but this paper flips the view, looking far beyond the Earth to other planets. In so doing, terrestrial entanglements spread through the solar system, simultaneously de-centering Earth as uniquely meaningful and holding up our planet as the ultimate destination. That a mother connects familiar and alien Earths through a gesture of pointing performs a similar double work of both strengthening the association of woman with Earthly nature and also the technological project of knowing the cosmos that astronomy is presently engaged in. Outer space, far from being removed from Earthly matters, offers a different scale and perspective for examining envirotechnical relations.

Author

• Lisa Messeri, University of Virginia