Intimate Outer Space: Towards a Politics of Gravity, Waste, and the Spatial Orientation of Bodies

Examining the feat of maintaining life in orbit draws a sharp focus to the relationship between the human body and its environment, the porous and circulatory matter that blurs any boundaries between habitat and habitant. These intimate, engineered spaces evoke a microcosm of urgent planetary concerns surrounding air and water resources, and waste capture, storage, and elimination. This paper explores NASA’s management of biological operations and discharge wastes in low gravity environments. Without strong gravitational fields, liquids coalesce at the location they are created, instead of flowing down and away. Such excesses disrupt the orderly engineered environments and minutely monitored bodies of these techno-scientific endeavors. Analyzing astronaut tears, space gynecology, zero-g surgery, and NASA’s “Space Poop Challenge” through feminist queer and disability theory, new materialist, and discard studies lenses, this paper seeks to refigure the deeply entangled relationships between fleshy bodies and planetary bodies, biomass and geomass, and prompt new discussions of gravity politics.