From the Archives: Do the terms we commonly use to discuss space exploration reflect the reality of humankind and our engagements with outer space?
Language matters, as demonstrated by the recent discussion following the discovery of example sentences using sexist stereotypes in the Oxford Dictionary of English. Language about who goes into space also matters, both historically and again now as more people are on the International Space Station for longer-duration missions, and NASA, SpaceX, and others plan to send humans to Mars.
Gendered language matters because it often reinforces both sexism and the idea of a fixed gender binary . This impacts both how we think about who goes into space and those doing scientific research on space. In her forthcoming book Placing Outer Space: An Earthly Ethnography of Other Worlds, anthropologist Dr. Lisa Messeri writes about her research with planetary scientists. “Three of my four chapters, each dealing with a different research project, featured women,” she told me.
The most recent woman in space was Samantha Cristoforetti, a European Space Agency astronaut. Cristoforetti went up to the International Space Station on November 23, 2014 and returned to Earth 199 days later to become the record holder for the longest single space flight by a woman. As of early 2016, 59 women from over 10 countries have gone into space.
Part of the reason gendered language persists is the belief that a dictionary is an authoritative record of language, and from editorial style guides relying on that idea. In 2015, I was involved in a discussion on Twitter with space scientists about this issue. Kenneth Chang, a New York Times reporter, asked for a way to avoid unmanned but noted that since uncrewed is not in the dictionary his editors would simply replace it with the media standard, which is unmanned.
Dictionaries don’t determine which words are real; instead, they record certain words selected by editors because they are used by specific populations, often dominant or powerful ones, in speech and in print. From an anthropological perspective, a word doesn’t need to be in a dictionary to be a real word. It’s real when it can be used to communicate.
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