Women and Drones in the Perpetual State of Exception

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

Recent feminist work in international relations has explored how the increasing use of drones challenges and reshapes the performance of gender in the military, stretching to its limits Cynthia Enloe’s observation that “the military has to constantly redefine ‘the front’ and ‘combat’ as wherever ‘women’ are not.” Such redefinitions echo and borrow from the contortions needed to maintain the “feminine” quality of privacy. Even as women are persistently defined as exceptions to combat (so that the “enemy combatant” is paradigmatically defined as male), the drone works precisely by rendering domestic space available to mass surveillance and warfare—and by framing necropolitics as domestic, reproductive, and care-oriented. Thus, women are serially cast as exceptions to war (“they’re in noncombatant roles”), politics (“it’s a domestic matter”), and state action (“it’s an NGO”), even as drone warfare and the use of commercial drones makes these distinctions increasingly untenable.

This panel examines varieties of women’s notional exemption from the logics of war, arguing that it is this very status as supposed exception, as “off limits,” that renders heterofeminine and heterofeminized bodies so crucial to drone logics. Examining three spectacles of female bodies in peril—the white woman deshabillée at home, the Muslim girl at school, and the visually dismembered bodies of near-identical white women in precision dancing—the panel shows how female exceptionality propagates logics of the state of exception and, in particular, does so in ways that order and reconstitute the gendered symbolic structures that the rising use of drones has notionally put in disarray. Posited as sites of innocence-production, white and/or youthful feminine bodies in peril activate narrative and poetic genres that ramify around them: noir and gothic, in Jen Schepf’s analysis, a weaponized Bildung, as Molly Geidel explores, and a modernist poetics of precision, in Natalia Cecire’s paper. They are thus also the exceptions at the heart of the rule (the genre or generic convention), remediating what Paul B. Preciado has identified as the necropolitics of heteromasculinity as the biopolitics of heterofemininity.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Elizabeth Verklan, Cottey College

Individual Presentations

• Securing the Lady of the House: The Domestication of Drone Form - J.D. Schnepf, Princeton University

• Waiting for Supergirl: Educated Girls in the Global War on Terrorism - Molly Geidel, University of Manchester

• Those Various Scalpels: Female Precision and Drone Aesthetics - Natalia Cecire, University of Sussex