Outer Space is a Commons...and Other News

This is a multi-media performative lecture from a QSN-TV news anchor covering the latest global legal developments governing the uses of ‘land’—or any material that can be commodified as property and extracted for private gain—in outer space. QSN-TV is a subsidiary of Queer Space Network (QSN), which is a collaborative media and performance space laboratory that uses technology to create audio-visual investigations through queer drag performance, media production, and queer techné.

Deep space is the frontier of the 21st century. State and private actors are in a new race to stake formal territorial claims to ‘land’ in space. Outdated international agreements have created a diplomatic grey zone that allows state and non-state actors to frame space/land in neocolonial terms, creating new political, military, and commercial spheres of influence contrary to the ‘heritage of humankind’ principle of existing space treaties.

Frontiers like deep space have important visual components, and technology and media have historically played crucial roles in framing and reinforcing colonial narratives through the production and circulation of images. This research-creation project will use space/land as an entry point for examining international and national space law from an anti-colonial perspective, emphasizing issues of rights and access based on gender, sexuality, economic background, and residual dominance from the Western colonial period and the Cold War era.

The new deep space cultural and political frontiers are a site where subject-hood, ownership, and embodiment are presently being redefined. This research-creation project exposes underlying coloniality in Western narratives of ‘land’ in space through an interdisciplinary use of art, science, and international relations. This continuous, iterative, and collaborative process creates a queer counter-public in space: a new inclusive futurity that is both horizontal and plural rather than embedded in established norms of possession, extraction, and political dominance. The project aims to expand our theoretical and practical imaginary of space beyond the race for resources and a new habitat for white, cis-gender futurity.