The space race has historically been conceived as an exercise in masculinity, grounded in colonial ideologies of conquering the unknown ‘Other’ and reinforcing anthropocentric systems of exploitation and control. The astronaut continues to embody a modern masculine archetype and is symbolically positioned to domesticate outer space. Nowadays, human spaceflight remains a predominantly men’s affair, and women entering this field often face an organisational culture shaped by hypermasculine norms and values that reproduce gender inequalities. Despite this legacy, recent initiatives - such as the European Space Agency (ESA) call for more women and people with disabilities to join the astronaut corps (ESA, 2021a) - suggest a shift toward greater inclusivity. This research aims to explore how gendered subjectivities are shaped through ESA’s organisational material-discursive practices and materialities, thus conceiving the organisation as an assemblage in which human and nonhuman entities dynamically intersect, challenging traditional boundaries and dichotomies and enabling new forms of becoming. The research adopts a feminist new materialist theoretical framework, which conceptualises the (becoming) woman astronaut as a phenomenon - an entanglement of flesh, material-discursive practices, physical spaces, and technological artefacts intra-acting with other human and nonhuman relata. To account for the nonhuman involved in the (re)production of gendered subjectivities and institutional inequalities, this study employs a Baradian diffractive reading of interviews, biographies, online videos, and ESA’s official communications, identifying moments where data glow through affective intensities. These illuminate how astronauts’ gendered subjectivities are shaped by material-discursive practices and power relations embedded in a male-dominated organisational culture, while also revealing the agentic role of nonhuman entities in the performative constitution of working subjectivities. The project itself is conceived as an assemblage, where theoretical frameworks, the researcher, human and nonhuman entities, and methodologies converge to produce something emergent and unpredictable.
Alessandra Fenu (Thu,) studied this question.