Leaning into the Sky: Gestures of Grief and Futurity in Operation Babylift

Abstract: This essay tends to the continued lives and potential futures of Operation Babylift refugees as subjects born from "militarized care,' a framework that resists the binary between violence and care to instead denote the affective and sensorial manifestation of both violence and care. By pairing Heidi Bub's story of reunion in the documentary Daughter from Danang with a reparative reading of Operation Babylift photographs, this essay suggests that tire Babylift refugees' gesture of looking out tire airplane window leans into vulnerability and uprootedness in order to dream of alternative futures "up there" and "out there" in the sky.