Since the development of flight early in the 20th century when flying captured the collective imagination as a technological project, its potential has been firmly harnessed by patriarchy. This project engages artistic and theoretical propositions that remove flight from monopolisation by militarist domination and commercial profit, to reimagine flight as a protective planetary capacity. The thesis has three main themes: flight and militarism; flight from a feminist perspective; and flight reimagined through the ‘hapticity’ of textiles. It asks how we can reimagine flight away from the military-industrial complex and capitalised hardware, and why it is important to do so. This investigation is rooted in the study of my family archive and research into my family members who occupied important positions in early Soviet aviation, between 1910-1970. I contextualise the history of aviation and space flight by focusing on the role of the women who enabled and endorsed the men’s explorations into flight. By problematising the geo-politics of flight in relation to personal histories and feminist thought, this research develops new artistic and theoretical visions of flight. It centres auto-ethnography as a method that enables me to connect my family history with my practice, where I reach and touch transgenerational traumas by metaphorically and physically connecting myself to them through threads of intricate and intimate handmaking. I draw on Silvia Federici’s historical reconstruction of the early capitalist demonisation of women’s bodily autonomy, and the enclosure and prosecution of women through witch trials. This perspective informs a reconsideration of Xenofeminist understandings of emancipating flight technology extrapolated by Laboria Cuboniks that I critique as remaining too proximate to outlines of capitalist and accelerationist trajectories of technological development. By engaging with Laura U. Marks’ theoretical writing concerning the ‘haptic’, I examine how contemporary artists deploy visual strategies to generate visions of flight. Whilst Fiona Banner, Anselm Keifer and Yael Bartana represent flight in mastering, militarised terms, Ilia Kabakov, Kutluğ Ataman and Simon Faithful envision flight as a utopian DIY dream and symbol of an uncertain future. The activation of the communal solidarity and collective care evidenced in the work of the Association of Autonomous Astronauts and the Ukrainian refugee women’s group, suggest visions of flight as a vehicle for freedom and resistance. Reflective of these ideas, this project reimagines flight through the materiality of textiles, fibre-based installations, and performative activations. In doing so, it suggests rerouting the trajectory of flight towards more intimate, embodied realms, where the liberatory qualities of flight are reclaimed through the domestic territory that reimagines flight and its technologies as an intrinsic part of the planetary eco-system that needs to be cared for, and not the frontier to be conquered. I argue that dreamworlds of flight could be channelled, through the softening, haptic qualities of thinking-through-hand-making, into empowering women to reimagine their role in relation to technologies, where instead of the automation of labour, visions of a posthuman feminist futures can be built around eco-communality and post-technological solidarity.

Funder: AHRC (LAHP) [AH/R012679/1] Some elements of this thesis have been redacted for reasons of copyright