A Centre for Drones and Culture seminar talk (online)
Dr Alex Adams
About the talk
How to Weaponize your Gender: Drone Operators’ Bodies in Contemporary Cultural Production
One of the notable early claims about drone technologies and remote warfare was that they pose dramatic challenges to conventional notions of gendered martial identity. Kill Box argues that representations of drone warfare are particularly bold examples of the reflexivity of cultural production, with many texts prominently acknowledging, challenging, and defusing political critiques of drone warfare. This talk discusses Outside the Wire (2021) and Reaper Force (2018), showing how they work to accommodate the developments in the gendering of warfare associated with drones in ways that in fact bolster, rather than undercut, conventional gender dynamics.
Outside the Wire directly engages stereotypes which position drone operators as ‘desk killers’. When a drone pilot is redeployed to a frontline warzone, the movie positions his drone piloting skills as central to his ability to authentically inhabit and perform warrior masculinity. Second, Reaper Force shows drone operations as an egalitarian military space which enables women to fight alongside men as equals. Crucially, however, its account of female warfighting argues that there is a potential propaganda victory in promoting women’s participation in drone warfare as ‘feminist’ because of the disgust in which Muslim combatants are described as holding such warriors. In reductively instrumentalizing female anatomy in this way, women are used as a ‘force multiplier’, as a tool with which to humiliate the people they execute. For all the discussion of drone warfare enabling revolutions in the constellations of military gender roles, these texts show the flexibility with which cisheteropatriarchal gender roles are made to remain dominant.
About the speaker:
Alex Adams (he/they) is an independent scholar based in North East England. They have published widely on the representation of contemporary political violence, particularly torture, surveillance, and drone warfare. Kill Box: Military Drone Systems and Cultural Production (Rowman and Littlefield, 2024) is their fourth monograph. They are currently writing Godzilla: A Critical Demonology, which will be a comprehensive critical account of every Godzilla movie. Learn more at atadamswriting.com.