Delivering life, delivering death: Reaper drones, hysteria and maternity

Abstract

Like all warfare, drone warfare is deeply gendered. This article explores how this military technology sediments or disrupts existing conceptualizations of women who kill in war. The article using the concept of motherhood as a narrative organizing trope and introduces a ‘fictional’ account of motherhood and drone warfare and data from a ‘real life’ account of a pregnant British Reaper operator. The article considers the way trauma experienced by Reaper drone crews is reported in a highly gendered manner, reflecting the way women’s violence is generally constructed as resulting from personal failures, lost love and irrational emotionality. This irrational emotionality is tied to a long history of medicalizing women’s bodies and psychologies because of their reproductive capacities and, specifically, their wombs – explored in this article under the historico-medical term of ‘hysteria’. The article argues that where barriers to women’s participation in warfare have, in the past, hinged upon their (argued) physical weakness, and where technology renders these barriers obsolete, there remains the tenacious myth that women are emotionally incapable of conducting lethal operations – a myth based on (mis)conceptions of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood and the feminine capacity to give life.

Entangled in the Continuum of Violence: How do Women Experience War?

“…The new feminine war experience of operating drones has affected the conceptual image of a female soldier who kills in combat by additionally undermining the traditional myth about the emotional incapability of women as natural life-givers to conduct lethal operations. Clark (2022) analysed how the gendering of drone warfare is coconstituted by concepts of motherhood and hysteria, so as to frame the trauma of a female drone operator reflecting the way women's violence is generally constructed as resulting from personal failures and irrational emotionality. Delving into the colleagues' reactions to the emotional state of a pregnant British Reaper operator, Clark's findings show that most male drone operators doubted her operational fitness and capability for teamwork due to various conditions associated with impending motherhood (2022, 83).…”

Wartime’s “Undeniable Linkages”: Feminist Studies of Everyday Militarisms across Time and Space

“…Additionally, scholars already concerned with feminist critical military studies who, due to their disciplinary histories and silos, are currently separate from the texts discussed here will find cross-pollination on some of the topics suggested in this essay. For instance, work on the embodied experience of drone warfare conceived of as "remote" (Clark 2022) could find much in Kaplan's and Terry's discussions of the long history of how bodies have been separated out from the technological development of killing technologies, even as bodies are still the target for death and destruction.…”