Jun 02 2022
something fundamentally male about escaping to Mars…
“And there is something fundamentally male about this narrative of exit [establishing colonies on Mars, for example], of escape as a means toward the nobility of self-determination. The cultural critic Sarah Sharma has argued for an understanding of exit as an exercise of patriarchal power, ‘a privilege that occurs at the expense of cultivating and sustaining conditions of collective autonomy.’ It’s a force that she places in opposition to the more traditionally maternal value of ‘care.’ The politics of exit are pursued, she insists, at the expense of pa politics of care. ‘Care,’ she writes, ‘is that which responds to the uncompromisingly tethered nature of human dependency and the contingency of life, the mutual precariousness of the human condition. Women’s exit is hardly ever on the table, given that women have historically been unable to choose when to leave or enter inequitable power relations, let alone enter and exist in a carefree manner.'” (p.131, italics mine)
from Mark O’Connell, Notes from an Apocalypse
fiction
