Lauren Wilcox

Embodying algorithmic war: Gender, race, and the posthuman in drone warfare

Through a discussion of drone warfare, and in particular the massacre of 23 people in the Uruzgan province in Afghanistan in 2010, I argue that drone warfare is both embodied and embodying. Drawing from posthuman feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles, I understand the turn toward data and machine intelligence not as an other-than-human process of decisionmaking that deprives humans of sovereignty, but as a form of embodiment that reworks and undermines essentialist notions of culture and nature, biology and technology. Through the intermediation of algorithmic, visual, and affective modes of embodiment, drone warfare reproduces gendered and racialized bodies that enable a necropolitics of massacre. Finally, the category of gender demonstrates a flaw in the supposed perfectibility of the algorithm in removing issues of identity or prejudice from security practices, as well as the perceptions of drone assemblages as comprising sublime technologies of perfect analysis and vision. Gender as both a mode of embodiment and a category of analysis is not removed by algorithmic war, but rather is put into the service of the violence it enables.

Beyond Sex/Gender: The Feminist Body of Security

What makes Feminist Security Studies such an exciting field for me is the depth and diversity of feminists grappling with key issues of the politics of war, peace, and security who are also concerned with sovereignty and autonomy, the meaning and nature of violence, and the connections among violence, subjectivity, and embodiment. Feminists across the disciplines have done much to render problematic the equation of bodies and subjects for their own political purposes, a political/theoretical move that has enormous implications for the way in which we think about the practices of security. In thinking through and even beyond “gender,” feminists in security studies are poised to ask the question of how we might rethink not only how security practices are gendered, but also how the very nature of “security” has lent itself to particular conceptions of “the body” (Butler 2004).

Drone warfare and the making of bodies out of place

The seemingly limitless nature of drone warfare in terms of surveillance and territorial and lethal capacities suggest that this form of violence not only harms and kills certain bodies while keeping other bodies safe, but more profoundly, reorganizes space to produce certain bodies as ‘killable’ enemies. The techno-political processes of drone warfare including ‘pattern of life’ criteria materialize the stateless, formless bodies of enemies in order to destroy them and to locate violence and responsibility for that violence in distant bodies and places.

Politics of the Living Dead: Race and Exceptionalism in the Apocalypse

The zombie, as a Western pop culture icon, has taken up residence in International Relations. Used both humorously and as a serious teaching tool, many scholars and professors of IR have written of the zombie as a useful figure for teaching IR theory in an engaging manner, and have used zombie outbreaks to analyse the responses of the international community during catastrophe, invasion, and natural disasters. The authors of this article would like to unearth another aspect of the zombie that is often left unsaid or forgotten: namely, that the body of the zombie, as a historical phenomenon and cultural icon, is deeply imbricated in the racialisation of political subjects and fear of the Other. Through a critical analysis of biopower and race, and in particular Weheliye’s concept of habeas viscus, we suggest that the figure of the zombie can be read as a racialised figure that can provide the means for rethinking the relationship of the discipline of IR to the concept of race. We read The Walking Dead as a zombie narrative that could provide a critical basis for rethinking the concepts of bare life and the exception to consider ‘living on’ in apocalyptic times.

Making Bodies Matter in IR

Neumann’s call for taking bodies more seriously in IR is a welcome intervention but is framed problematically. Through a reading of Butler, I argue that Neumann’s invocation of a ‘physical body’ that needs to be brought into IR is itself an object of discourse, and that Butler would deny the distinction Neumann makes between the social and physical body. I also discuss Neumann’s call for a dialogue with the physical sciences in reference to recent works associated with the ‘new materialisms’ and conclude by calling for critical attention to the ways in which bodies are brought into IR theory.