ABSTRACT
Nascent IR feminist scholarship on the revolution in military affairs, cyborg soldiers, and drone warfare reveals there is no singular way of thinking about the relationship between gender, violence, and technology and the complex ways in which they interface in practices of war (Bayard de Volo 2016; Daggett 2015; Holmqvist 2013; Manjikian 2013; Masters 2005, 2008; Wilcox 2014). What this scholarship does reveal, however, is that careful attention to gender through feminist sensibilities surfaces new sites of enquiry into the corporeal politics of war – how it is embodied, experienced, and rendered intelligible. This scholarship both extends IR feminist understandings of the relationship between gender and war, specifically research on militarized masculinities, and also offers new insights into untangling what often emerges as naturalized connections between men, masculinity, and violence. The use of advanced technology in war, therefore, presents new challenges for feminist(s) thinking about the relationship between gender and violence. And rather than take gender as a given, even if likely a continued site of war’s intelligibility, this chapter is concerned with exploring the contingent ways in which gender is trafficked and what work it is doing in high-tech practices of war with a particular focus on drone warfare. Taking seriously that at the same time gender might be done in human–machine interfaces, it is equally important to interrogate how it might be undone or loosened in ways that might provoke new ways of being in the world.
