25 FEBRUARY 2025 

PANEL 1. SPATIAL JUSTICE & CLIMATE POLITICS.

DISCUSSION WITH SOHAILA BALUCH & MINNA POLLANEN

MODERATED BY SHEHRAZADE MAHASSINI

Varvara Keidan Shavrova

Haptic Flight: Feminist Perspectives on Flight Technologies Reimagined Through Textiles

The thesis has three main themes: flight and militarism; flight from a feminist perspective; flight reimagined through the hapticity of textiles. How can we re-imagine flight away from the military-industrial complex, and why is it important to do so? This investigation is based on the study of my family archive and research into the family members who occupied important positions in early Soviet aviation. In this context I am focusing on the role of the women in enabling and endorsing the men’s explorations into aviation. My research provides an analysis of the connection between private and public conceptualisations of flight, flight as metaphor, and the relationship between the individual and the state in relation to the development of the technologies of actual flight.

Since the development of flight technologies early in the 20th century flight and flying has captured the collective imagination, yet its potential has been firmly harnessed by patriarchy.  This thesis analyses the contemporary perspectives on flight through the feminist thinking of Silvia Federici, Sadie Plant, Rosie Braidotti, Laboria Cuboniks. 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. These reimaginings of flight aim to offer transformative iterations for our future with flight technologies that sets aside any reliance on the male dominated techno-industrial capitalist militarism that continues to contribute to ecological collapse, climate catastrophe, and global refugee and migrant crises.

In this paper I will explore what flight represents from a feminist perspective – by defining flying, lifting off, as well as fleeing, escaping – whilst trying to re-imagine what a subjectively emancipatory, politically deterritorialised mode of flight might look like, when flight is reimagined and reclaimed through haptic technologies, and collaborative and collective feminist practices of textiles and fibre-based art projects. I argue that there is knowledge that can be enhanced through resistance to cartesian, patriarchal form of vision: the knowledge that is intensified through haptic viewing and haptic making. Hapticity is a non-patriarchal domain, it signifies the close-up, the nomadic, the emergent, the collective forms of knowledge. Following on from Federici via Deleuze and Guattari, and drawing from collective feminist practices, I am developing haptic reimaginings of flight technologies that suggest resisting the dominant techno-capitalist notions of flight. My argument suggests 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.