Grim reapers: ghostly narratives of masculinity and killing in drone warfare

Abstract

This article embraces the spectral turn and sociological framework of 'Haunting' to investigate the gendered implications of armed drones for the individuals who crew them. Introducing original interview data from former British Reaper drone crews, and focusing on their experiences of conducting lethal operations, this article builds on feminist and queer theorising to illuminate the instability of the binary distinction between masculinity and femininity as traditionally understood. Developing 'Haunting,' I draw out three themes: complex personhood, in/(hyper)visibility, and disturbed temporality as the frames through which the intersection of gender and drone warfare can be examined. I draw upon the conceptual metaphor of the ghost to explore the dead that is also alive, the absent that is also present, and that silence that is also a scream. Through this, I argue that Haunting provides a framework for both revealing and destabilizing gendered binaries and is therefore a useful tool for feminist security and international relations scholars.

Drones and Surveillance Cultures in a Global World

“…And here, the turn to art and creativity becomes the avenue for expressing dissent against drone wars, while humanizing their deadly effects. But as we shall also see, drones and surveillance in cultural production raise complex questions about the power of art to register dissent and resistance, and foreground the uneven terrain of freedom and responsibility negotiated by culture producers and consumers; they shed light on the gendered inscriptions of drone warfare in military culture, which feminize drone piloting, because of its distance to and immunity from real-life battlefield risks of injury and death, while affirming the technological superiority of the countries that engage in drone wars, and the manifestation of male anxieties in celebrating bravery and honour produced in the drone techno-spatial ecosystem (Schnepf 2017;Hensley 2018;Clark 2018). They also seek to resist the power of the "robotic imaginary," which Jennifer Rhee (2018) describes as the "shifting inscriptions of humanness and dehumanizing erasures evoked by robots" that emerge in "the inextricable entanglement of 'technology' and ' culture'."…”

‘Everyday droning’: Towards a feminist geopolitics of the drone-home

“…Scholars have used Haraway's 'god-trick', describing the 'illusion of being able to see everywhere from a disembodied position of 'nowhere'' (Gregory, 2011a;Wilcox, 2017: 13; see also Parks, 2016). In seeking to 'destabilize' this 'god's eye view' (Naylor, 2017: 27) through an engagement with feminist geopolitics, Williams (2011: 381) draws upon 'firsthand accounts' to explore how drone operators embody and 'experience combat' (see also Clark, 2018;Manjikian, 2014;Parks and Kaplan, 2017;Wilcox, 2017). In further critiquing the geopolitical 'tradition of adopting a downward looking view-from-above', Williams (2013: 225) calls for an 'active re-orientation to encompass discourses and practices of looking up'.…”

The Psychosocial Effects of Drone Violence: Social Isolation, Self‐Objectification, and Depoliticization

“…Military drones were first used in the “War on Terror” in Afghanistan in late 2001 and have since become a staple of the United States' weaponry. Many of the United States' friends and allies in the “War on Terror” have also used military drones for years (the United Kingdom and Israel) (Clark, ; Cole, , ; Joronen, ; Pugliese, ; Rogers, ), are in the process of acquiring their own drones (Australia, Canada) (Greene, ; Middleton, ), or lend their support to U.S.‐led drone operations in other ways such as intelligence processing for drone targeting (Australia via Pine Gap Joint Military Facility and Germany via Ramstein Air Base) (Dworkin, ; Manjikian, ; Zappalà, ). Government and military spokespeople in these countries refer to drones as precise weapons that manage to accurately identify and kill insurgents while leaving civilians in targeted areas largely unscathed.…”