Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: It is a truism to say that Space is militarized, as it has been the site/sight of satellites of surveillance and observation primarily for the use of the US war machine for quite some time. In a post-September 11 world, the ongoing securitization and reterritorialization of Space by the US state incidentally brings the imagination and production of bodies, borders, and, especially, the identification and visualization of enemies, risks, and dangers. In outer space, bodies are necessarily read by the digital state, as the State is only present there through visual and surveillance technologies – and soon through warfare technologies. Rather than focusing solely on the growing use of surveillance technologies in imagining the US digital state, in this paper, I look at the ever-increasing reliance by the US war machine on outer space assets in its everyday global activities and ask: How are borders imagined and spatialized by scholars and policymakers when it comes to outer space? How are bodies imagined, how are they virtually created, and how do they appear? How can we make sense of the digital articulations of bodies and threats in outer space? How does enmity gets created and managed through the visual and surveillance technologies and how can the “enemy” be made visible in outer space? Hence, the representation and imagining of enemies and threats through geostrategy and visual technologies in outer space brings to the fore the dilemma of exceptionalism versus routinization in the debate on securitization: Against what does securitization take place? What dispositif of security is at play in US global governmentality as it applies to outer space? What dispositif of security is being deployed to make action upon the contingent occurrence of terrorism or danger thinkable and practicable in outer space? Is it a precautionary risk dispositif, a biopolitical dispositif, or a geostrategic dispositif of security? Through a critical astropolitical framework that includes the recently added literature of the risk society thesis in security studies (Rasmussen, 2004, 2006; Aradau and Van Munster, 2007, and Heng, 2006, among others), this paper argues that through the geopolitical dispositif of security enacted by US global governmentality, where the politics behind the securitization and weaponization of outer space still relies on a tie binding sovereignty to territory, the conditions of possibility are created for the US to act as the global manager of the “heavens”, as the “global panopticon” and sovereign power in charge of preserving the freedom of action and mobility in Space. One then needs to question the technologies of risk, of war, and of security and unpack the US global governmentality in outer space that the War on Terror has made possible. I here undertake to do that by engaging a dialogue between Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault on the notions of exceptionalism, sovereignty, and enmity. On the one hand, I will highlights the effect of the US war machine in US governmentality, thus bringing back Foucault’s account of the technologies of military organization as mode of organization for society in the present-day reflection on sovereignty and the management of contingency. On the other hand, notwithstanding the likely failure of the technologies of intervention upon the future, I will question the very securitization of outer space as borderland that the deployment of technologies to manage dangerous irruptions in the future has incurred. This critique ultimately aims to foster a space of discussion and offer elements of reflection and problematization that will feed a critical thought on the management of bodies and the securitization of borders in outer space that the US digital global security state is setting up.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper looks at the portrayals of aliens in science fiction as women: from egg-laying mothers, to ?bitches?, to sexual objects of desire. The paper argues that these portrayals reflect masculine fantasies of dominance over nature and the unknown; over outer space. The paper ties these arguments into the International Relations literature on gender and colonialism, and to ecofeminist writings. We argue that in many cases the genre of outer space science fiction/ fantasy reinforces the discourse of outer space as ?unknown and dangerous?, and in need of human fertilization and dominance through exploration.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: How useful are these categories of �public� and �private� in determining what is �political� and what is not? Do these categories clarify or confuse how we can take action to change human-created environments like communities and cultures? In this paper, I critically examine the thought of the early 20th century intellectual Zhang Shizhao, whose work exploits a longstanding tension in Chinese thought between "inner" cultivation and "outer" world-ordering to draw attention to the wide range of transformative individual actions that are taken neither in deliberate concert with others nor completely independently of them. Zhang�s model ultimately suggests that certain practices central to democracy, including egalitarian participation, can be instituted without reference to public-private divides at all. In the process, he alerts us to further locations for political action that the categories of public and private obscure, and to the activities they categorically constrain by deeming them too limited in effect.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper analyzes audience responses to four makeover shows: The Biggest Loser, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Starting Over, and What Not to Wear. Since fall, 2005, we have collected almost 1,800 survey responses and conducted more than 60 interviews with viewers of at least one of these shows. The data presented here concern audiences� conceptions of the �inner� and �outer� self and the relations between these. Viewers frequently express a reflexive process of transformation, when inner change prompts external change, and vice versa. In most cases, however, viewers assume that there must be congruence between the inner and outer self, and that congruence is evidence of authentic and lasting change. The paper considers how makeover shows encourage candidates to change in line with dominant social norms, and how they interject commercial appeals into the processes of change. It concludes with an engagement with post-structuralist gender, queer, and transgender theory to investigate the usefulness of these approaches to the body for the analysis of makeover audience responses.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The regime for outer space governance continues to evolve in response to the growing presence of commercial space entities in both civilian and military space spheres. Liberalized space market sectors in communications, remote sensing, navigation and launch services, are increasingly diversified both in terms of services offered to global customers, as well as the diversity of nations authorizing such entities. In contrast to the early phases of space exploration and exploitation where governments dominated all aspects of the space arena, today�s liberalized space marketplace is filled by private firms with varying degrees of governmental oversight. The retreat of government supervision poses a conundrum for efforts to re-structure the space governance regime: how to balance national interests between promoting space sector commercialization (requiring a minimization of governmental intervention), while at the same time maintaining options to assert national security interests in the space governance regime. The conundrum is particularly visible for the space regime hegemon, the United States, one of the longstanding proponents for both space commercialization and unfettered access for its military space systems. As a result, this paper argues that the space governance regime will proceed along a parallel path with other transnational commons regimes created by globalizing technological infrastructures (Antarctica and cyberspace).