Politics & Gender, 12 (2016), 50 –77.

Unmanned? Gender
Recalibrations and the Rise of
Drone Warfare
Lorraine Bayard de Volo
University of Colorado

U nmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — drones — are increasingly

prominent in U.S. military strategy (Shaw and Akhter 2012).1 The
U.S. Air Force (USAF) trains more UAV pilots than fighter and bomber
pilots combined (Parsons 2012). A 2011 Defense Department analysis
predicted “a force made up almost entirely of [UAVs] by the middle of this
century” (U.S. Department of Defense 2011).2 Some argue that drones and
other robotics so alter the character and conduct of military operations as to
constitute a revolution in military affairs (RMA) (Singer 2009).3
The growing literature on drones has yet to incorporate a sustained
gender analysis.4 To address this gap, I turn to feminist international

I am grateful to Celeste Montoya, Rob Buffington, Alison Jaggar, Deepti Misri, Emmanuel David,
Lee Chambers, Beverly Weber, Sydney Calkin, Alexis Henshaw, Sinéad Walsh, and anonymous
reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
1. The U.S. military also refers to drones as remotely piloted aircraft (RPA). In this article, the term
“unmanned” is used in the military sense to indicate a human is not in the aircraft, but also from a
feminist critical perspective to question whether unmanned vehicles unman the military itself by
destabilizing the co-constitution of masculinity-warrior.
2. At least 74 other countries currently have drone systems, the majority unarmed. Israel and the UK
are known to conduct armed drone warfare.
3. I use RMA as a means to identify and think through military, social, and political changes driven by
technological innovation. The U.S. military has embraced remotely piloted weapon systems, with a
significant impact on the allocation of resources, training, and combat. Following Sylvester (2013), I
take the study of military technological innovation beyond the focus on military outcomes to
consider war more holistically, including the concrete, embodied, and very local implications.
4. Manjikian (2014) explores the potential of lethal autonomous warfare technology, including
drones, to degender (via cyborgs) or further entrench gender. Manjikian develops an intriguing
Published by Cambridge University Press 1743-923X/15 $30.00 for The Women and Politics Research Section of the
American Political Science Association.
# The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association, 2015
doi:10.1017/S1743923X15000252

50

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 51

relations’ (IR) understanding of gender as a primary signifier of power in

global politics and conflict, a relationship that also operates in reverse, as
militarization and war inform gender.5 If war and gender are mutually
constitutive, then a major shift in one would have repercussions for the
other. In the gender-war literature, the research question is commonly
posed in terms of how war is gendered — that is, how gender informs
war and militarization. Here, I reverse the question. Inquiry into how
war informs gender produces new insights into gender as well as
domestic and global democracy, peace, and security.
As an initial step in assessing the gender repercussions of this new form of
warfare, I ask, Does the revolutionary rise of drone warfare elicit gender
recalibrations, and if so, what are the implications? Do unmanned aerial
vehicles unman the military or foretell a new era of gender equality in
national defense? Are they best understood as precise weapons of a strong
yet just state that punish the guilty and protect the innocent? Or do
drone strikes project a predatory masculine state that draws a local
masculinist response?
Given the early stage of gender research on drones, this project is an
exploratory one. I apply feminist IR’s gender lens, “looking at gender to
see where it leads” (Sjoberg 2013, 45; see also Enloe 2000; Peterson and
Runyan 1999). Viewing the state and individual levels of analysis as
interactive rather than separate, I traversed levels of analysis in search of
gender recalibrations, instances in which drone warfare challenges the
gender status quo (Sylvester 2013, 9). I selected cases that cover the state
and individual levels as well as the United States and abroad.
Accordingly, this project suggests the breadth of the gender-war nexus as
it relates to drone warfare, the diversity of points of impact that this new
weapon system entails, as an initial step toward future research that delves
in greater depth into such relationships. These gender adjustments are
not by military design so much as outcomes of the co-constitutionality of
gender and war, operating in terms of traits closely associated with
militarized masculinity: courage, strength, and mastery of emotions
(Goldstein 2001, 266–67). Intersectional analysis is key to this shifting
masculine hierarchy, as hierarchies within race, ethnicity, sexuality, and
nationality both inform and are naturalized through the gender hierarchy
(Bayard de Volo 2012; Milliken and Sylvan 1996; Peterson 2010).

analysis into the future of warfare fought by robots employing artificial intelligence. My focus is shorter-
range, with agency still vested in the human operators, policy makers, and states.
5. See Goldstein 2001; Hawkesworth 2005; Peterson and Runyan 1999; Prugl 2003; Sjoberg 2013;
Tickner 1992; Young 2003.

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 52 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

I argue that drone warfare is less effective than previous warfare in

conferring traditionally venerated forms of masculinity and thus unsettles
the cross-referential nature of military-masculinity that refers to and
derives meaning from these traits. Despite the relatively low status of
drone operators, the intense military demand foretells readjustments to
the masculine hierarchy in regard to “combat” and “hero.” Although
strength and courage are less relevant for drone combatants, these
seemingly omnipotent killers who cannot be killed are vulnerable to
psychological injury. Such injuries often revolve around gendered and
raced associations of guilt and innocence of drone victims, posing new
challenges to the militarized masculine characteristic of emotional
control. Drone warfare furthermore projects a representation abroad of
the United States as a high-tech masculine predator. This has the effects
of hailing local masculine protectors, whom the United States is likely to
consider enemies, and feminizing the “host nations” over which drones
fly, as well as raising questions about U.S. honor and democracy. In what
follows, after reviewing drone technology and warfare, I proceed to a
feminist analysis of drone warfare’s challenges to military masculinity at
the individual and state levels.

DRONE WARFARE AND ITS DISCONTENTS

A drone pilot tracks suspected terrorists for days, receives orders to fire, and
then watches as human beings disappear in an explosion. A few hours later,
the shift is over, the pilot drives down a Nevada highway toward home,
perhaps stopping off to catch a daughter’s soccer game before dinner.
Such are the surreal circumstances in the “robotics revolution” of
modern warfare, in which those identified as U.S. enemies can be
observed, tracked, and killed by remote, without risk to the pilots. Drone
strikes in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria have been run by the military,
whereas the drone program in countries with which the U.S. is not
formally at war — Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — have been
controlled by the CIA. For these latter strikes, the president heads a top-
secret process by which specific terrorists are identified for kill or
capture, “of which the capture part has become largely theoretical”
(Becker and Shane 2012).
The U.S. military perceives multiple advantages to drones. They are
relatively precise weapon systems and can perform surveillance over long
intervals, allowing for tracking of movements, identification of weapons,

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 53

and other forms of intelligence gathering. This is said to translate into lower
rates of collateral damage. Drones can linger over a battlefield and serve as
the eyes of ground troops and human-piloted aircraft. Drones furthermore
allow surveillance, pursuit, and targeting of individual people. They can be
used in high-risk situations without the concern of returning a pilot safely to
base. Finally, they are cost-effective.
Multiple objections are raised against drone warfare, many of which will
be taken up later in this article through a gendered analysis, which offers
new insights and innovative means of engaging with these concerns.
First, drone warfare alienates the U.S. military and public from violence.
This argument views war’s brutality to pose a limit to warfare. On the
battlefield, “the built-in check on killing, namely, that the one engaged
in the killing risks being killed himself [sic], is gone” (Cole 2012).
Rendering warfare less painful domestically might also lead U.S.
administrations to resort to lethal violence more readily.6 Similarly, war
by remote might compromise the U.S. public’s ability and inclination to
imagine living with drones overhead and seemingly random missile
strikes, which would render killing easier.
Second, U.S. drone warfare is criticized as undemocratic. The drone
campaign vests extraordinary power in the executive office, overrides the
judicial process, demobilizes the U.S. public, and militarizes the CIA,
while placing terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens, on a kill list. As
suspects are killed rather than captured for trial, the executive branch, in
effect, adopts a “take no prisoners alive” approach (Becker and Shane
2012). Drone strikes have killed more people than were incarcerated at
Guantanamo, and the latter “at least had a chance to establish their
identities, to be reviewed by an oversight panel and, in most cases, to be
released” (Volker 2012). The administration’s justifications for drone
strikes emphasize that they are cheap and easy, with little domestic
blowback, yet Kaag and Kreps (2012) caution that this replaces moral
justification with practical efficiency.
Furthermore, whereas the post-9/11 large-scale invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq included sustained efforts to rally U.S. popular support, drone
warfare is accompanied by an effort to avoid public attention and open
debate (Boyle 2013). The Obama administration has further closed off
public scrutiny in refusing to release related legal memos. Democracies,
which require the sunlight of public scrutiny to flourish, “do not make

6. Kurbjuweit (2012), for example, notes the guillotine of the French Revolution was conceived as a
more humane means of execution, arguably leading to a greater number of executions.

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 54 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

war on the basis of legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe”

(Becker and Shane 2012).
Third, drone strikes produce collateral damage. Both the Bush and
Obama administrations blocked access to comprehensive casualty
information. Local reporting and human rights investigations, however,
attest that drone strikes frequently yield civilian casualties (Johnsen
2012). For example, in 2009, Obama’s first strike on Yemen mistook a
Bedouin village for a terrorist training camp, killing more than 40. The
noncombatant casualty rates of drone warfare incrementally add up, and
there is the attendant concern that the media will overlook the slow
accretion of civilian casualties (Becker and Shane 2012; Kaag and
Kreps 2012).
Also controversial is the U.S. definition of collateral damage: individuals
and property that are not lawful military targets (Kaag and Kreps 2012).
Central to this definition has been the practice of counting all military-
age males (MAMs) in a strike zone as combatants and thus legitimate
targets. This gendered guilt-by-association logic operates under the
notion that “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a
top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good” (Becker and Shane
2012). But in practice and legally it is not people but men who are
defined as potential threats and thus killable.
Finally, drone strikes are also critiqued as counterproductive. Despite a
perception of drone strikes as fast, convenient alternatives to long and messy
wars, they are “rarely decisive and often incur significant political and
diplomatic costs” (Robinson 2012, 111). Independent journalists and
researchers have argued UAV civilian casualties to be central to Al
Qaeda’s rapid expansion, replacing Guantánamo as “the recruiting tool
of choice for militants” (Becker and Shane 2012; see also Johnsen
2012). Thus, while drone strikes kill Al Qaeda militants and leaders, they
arguably exacerbate the problem of terrorism (Volker 2012).
Conservative columnist Mark Steyn wrote that for many in targeted
regions, drone warfare confirms Al Qaeda’s charges against the U.S.,
[that] we have the best technology and the worst will; we choose aerial
assassination and its attendant collateral damage because we are risk-
averse, and so remote, antiseptic, long-distance, computer-programmed
warfare is all that we can bear. . . . The guys with drones are losing to the
guys with fertilizer — because they mean it, and we don’t (Steyn 2013).

Drones, in this logic, are both counterproductive and an indication of

U.S. weakness.

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 55

FEMINIST PEACE POLITICS, MASCULINITY, AND

THE NEW WAR

This paper uses gender as an analytical tool to illuminate new political

problems and supply new questions, as well as to suggest one means by
which the study of people and their experiences of drone warfare might
productively inform war research on weaponry, strategy, and abstract
considerations of the state (Enloe 2000; Hawkesworth 2005; Ruddick
1998; Sylvester 2013, 4). It builds upon feminist IR research to
investigate “the political effects of . . . the coding of certain forms of
human conduct as inherently masculine or feminine” in order to better
understand the implications for both war and gender relations
(Hawkesworth 2005, 149). As per much of feminist IR research,
furthermore, it understands war and gender as mutually constitutive,
with warfare as an “extension of ‘masculine’ domination and ‘masculine’
domination [as] an extension of and preparation for war” (Ruddick 1998,
196; see also Cohn 1987; Connell 2001; Elshtain 1987; Enloe
2000; Goldstein 2001; Prugl 2003; Scott 2002; Sjoberg 2013; Tickner
1992; Young 2003).
This relation operates at both individual and state levels. At the
individual level, gender is a means of mobilizing men to war, as
“[m]ilitaries invoke for their soldiers and project onto the enemy models
of masculinity that spur fighting” (Ruddick 1998, 199; see also Elshtain
1987; Goldstein 2001). Furthermore, “our” soldiers are hailed as warrior-
protectors, necessary to shield innocents from the enemy, who are
represented as a “particularly malignant form of swaggering masculinity”
(Ruddick 1998, 199; see also Peterson and Runyan 1999). Race and
ethnicity are often deployed alongside masculinity to represent enemy
combatants as particularly dangerous predators (Abu-Lughod 2002;
Bayard de Volo 2012; Peterson 2010; Spivak 1988; Ruddick 1998, 199).
Finally, as Thobani (2002, 291) has pointed out, “Rendering invisible
the humanity of the peoples targeted for attack is a strategy well-used to
hide the impact of colonialist and imperialist interventions.”
Service members’ gender performance is idealized as masculine, with
the expectation that they exhibit courage, strength, and mastery of
emotions (including the suppression of fear and empathy) (Butler 1990;
Goldstein 2001). Masculinity, which confers status, is not an essential
quality that one simply is but rather a quality that must be achieved,
produced, and reproduced continuously. Goldstein (2001) suggests
masculinity itself is a weapon of war, deployed to induce men to fight

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 56 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

(252). Femininity serves as the binary contrast, lending meaning to

masculinity by representing that which masculinity is not (Elshtain
1987; Scott 1999). Goldstein (2001) documents the historically
unvarying nature of the gender-war link in which wars have been fought
by men virtually alone. However, the approach also suggests that a
significant change to war would impact gender.
Feminist analyses also examine the gender-war system at the state level
(Bayard de Volo 2012; Milliken and Sylvan 1996; Peterson and Runyan
1999; Scott 2002; Young 2003). Young (2003) argues that taking a
gender lens to war and security “means seeing how a certain logic of
gendered meanings and images helps organize the way people interpret
events and circumstances” (2). She identifies the “logic of masculinist
protection” relative to post-9/11 U.S. security events, revealing a
paternalistic state promising protection from the assaultive masculine
enemy-other in exchange for citizens’ blind obedience, which both
legitimated authoritarian power in the U.S. and justified war abroad
(Young 2003, 2).
Gender as a category of analysis directs our focus toward shifting meanings
of masculinity, militarization, and war attached to individuals and states alike
(Scott 1999). Neither war nor gender is static — how do changes in one
impact the other? What happens when war is roboticized — increasingly
pursued through drones as proxy combatants such that the human soldiers
of superpowers are not endangered?

MILITARIZED MASCULINITY: COURAGE, STRENGTH, AND

MASTERY OF EMOTIONS

Below, I consider how drone warfare challenges the masculinity-war

association through three intersecting traits that define at once an idealized
man, an idealized combatant, and an idealized state: courage, strength, and
mastery of emotions (Goldstein 2001, 266–67). I argue that drones
unsettle militarized masculinity, which refers to and derives meaning from
the performance of these traits. First, courage is linked to physical risk as
well as honor. It is difficult for a drone pilot to demonstrate courage and
thus enhance masculine status by killing remotely while sitting safely
thousands of miles away. Similarly, a state that pursues war surreptitiously
and without risk is open to criticism as cowardly and without honor.
Second, with advancements in war robotics, combatants’ physical
strength, already less important in modern warfare, now verges on

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 57

irrelevance. Drone piloting requires skill and mental stamina, but not the
physical strength and toughness associated with idealized masculinity and
combatants. UAVs open up combat possibilities for those traditionally
understood to be physically disqualified — one drone operator, for
example, “was still sitting in the cockpit, her stomach pressing up against
the keyboard, in her ninth month of pregnancy” (Abé 2012). But they
also unravel the tight knot connecting masculine-militarism to strength.
Drone weapon systems similarly render strength less relevant for the
targeted enemy in terms of resistance or evasion. The U.S. collateral
damage formula by which all military-aged men in a strike area are
considered legitimate targets renders all men within a geographic
location at once both de jure dangerous enemy combatants and de facto
powerless. This equation also contributes to a reading of the U.S. state as
strong but brutal — a strength unchecked by ethics or empathy.
Finally, mastery or suppression of emotions — especially fear and
empathy — is a core trait of militarized masculinity. For the drone crew,
removed from battle and physically safe, mastering fear or resisting the
impulse to flee is not a persuasive means of securing masculinity. Yet
drone warfare takes a high emotional toll on its operators. In contrast, it
renders war less emotionally disturbing for the U.S. public, dampening
public outrage because U.S. combatants are not endangered and civilian
casualties half a world away are often unknown or misrecognized as
enemy combatants.
This overview of the war-masculinity nexus suggests recalibrations in
gender-military affairs, as drone warfare is less effective in conferring
venerated forms of masculinity at the individual and state levels. Below, I
explore this dynamic more thoroughly through specific domestic and
international examples. These cases were not selected randomly. Rather,
I take an interpretive approach to better understand drone warfare in
terms of the meanings attached to beliefs and actions, contextualized in
time and place. I selected cases that have received significant media and
academic attention but little to no gender analysis. Underpinning this
approach is the idea that such research can yield new insights into the
workings of both war and gender.
At the individual level, I suggest that masculinity is compromised for
drone pilots such that we find popular unease with warriors who are
remote from violence, experience no personal risk, rely not upon bravery
or strength but upon high-tech training, and whose work stations
resemble cubicles — in other words, combatants who resemble office
workers. At the state level, drones are a means for the U.S. to

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 58 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

demonstrate toughness to domestic and international audiences. Yet

there is a troubling and potentially counterproductive (for the U.S. state)
paternalist and imperialist expression of rescuing feminized regions
abroad while killing without risk.

MILITARY DISTINCTIONS: MEDALS MAKE THE MAN

In the United States, discomfort with drone warfare goes beyond the ethical
and constitutional issues discussed earlier and rests in part with the
hierarchy within masculinity that informs “combatant” and “war hero.”
For example, an opinion editorial rhetorically asked, “What do we want
to be as a nation? . . . A country where people go to the office, launch a
few kill shots and get home in time for dinner? A country that instructs
workers in high-tech operations centers to kill human beings on the far
side of the planet because some government agency determined that
those individuals are terrorists?” (Volker 2012). In contexts in which
killing in war is otherwise accepted, why is killing by high-tech workers
distasteful? In addition to the implicit argument that it makes war too
easy, I propose that “high-tech worker” operates as a binary opposite to
“war hero” — one is what the other is not, informing a hierarchy within
masculinity in which office worker is the devalued term. Drone warfare,
in removing personal risk from battle, also removes opportunities for
demonstrations of courage. An age-old motivation for war — proving
oneself a man — disappears, along with the possibility of becoming a
hero. Why is it better to have “boots on the ground” doing the nation’s
killing? The op-ed above leaves the phrase “workers in high-tech
operations centers” to speak for itself. What it suggests is discomfort with
relinquishing combat to those with subordinate masculinity — implicitly,
nerds.
Debate over a proposed new medal sheds light on this discomfort. By
2011, the U.S. Air Force was training more pilots for UAVs than for any
other single weapon system (Gates 2011). The scale and speed of this
shift generated intense pressure to direct military personnel into these
new specializations, a challenge heightened by a generalized disregard
for drone piloting. A significant line of criticism within the military and
beyond centers on questions of honor, skill, courage, risk, and the
perceived easy life of drone operators, which in turn reflects upon the
masculine status associated with the job. A British former Air Chief
Marshal, for example, condemned drone strikes as “virtue-less war”

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 59

involving neither heroism nor courage (Mayer 2009). According to an

investigative media report, “Drone pilots were seen as cowardly button-
pushers” (Abé 2012). Journalist Glenn Greenwald, asserting that
“[k]illing while sheltering yourself from all risk is the definitional
opposite of bravery,” observed that the military justified drone warfare by
“pretending that the act entails some sort of bravery, so the U.S. military
is increasingly taking steps to create the façade of warrior courage for
drone pilots” (Greenwald 2012).
I argue the façade is a gendered one, an effort to bolster the masculine
status of drone pilots. Some military officials, for example, de-emphasize
the drone advantage of protecting pilots, redirecting attention from this
demasculinizing representation. U.S. General Michael Moseley insisted
that rather than keeping “pilots out of harm’s way,” the drone’s key
advantage is the ability to “stay airborne for up to 14 hours fully loaded”
(U.S. Air Force 2006). The military also emphasizes drone continuity
with traditional aircraft: drone operators are “pilots,” wear flight suits, and
“can speak of having ‘served . . . through telewarfare in Iraq and
Afghanistan’” (Blair 2012, 69).
These associations seem tolerated (if barely) within the military, but the
proposed Distinguished Warfare Medal for drone operators crossed a line,
generating intense and ultimately successful criticism. The standing
military recognitions for drone operators did not acknowledge
exceptional acts of service, negatively impacting drone operators’ careers
as well as the overall status of the job. In 2013, outgoing Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta proposed the Distinguished Warfare Medal
(DWM) to honor drone pilots and other troops far removed from battle
for “extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat
operations, but that do not involve acts of valor or physical risk that
combat entails” (Garamone 2013).
Major David Blair (2012), in an influential military journal, identified
medals as one of the military’s highest forms of recognition, the ranking
of which sends a powerful message about “what the service considers
valuable and worthy of respect” (Blair 2012, 66). In the current award
system, “we tell people that what they are (and what they fly) matters
more than what they do. . . . [which] reinforce[s] the caste structure”
(Blair 2012, 66). I suggest this hierarchy, in which drone operators rank
far below fighter pilots, is a gendered one.
Critics disparaged the DWM as “the Nintendo Medal” and “the Geek
Cross” (Chakraborty 2013; Shane 2013). Some questioned the need for
such a medal, while others argued against its high rank, above the

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 60 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

Purple Heart and Bronze Star with “V” (for valor) medals, awarded to those
wounded or killed in action and for specific heroic acts performed under
fire in combat, respectively. Senator Joe Manchin explained, “Awards
earned in combat for heroism, patriotism and a commitment to make
the ultimate sacrifice for the freedoms we enjoy every day should not
rank below a medal earned in relative safety” (Maze 2013). In the midst
of intense criticism from veterans groups, the media, and elected
officials, incoming Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel halted production
of the medal less than a month after Panetta announced it.
Medals, then, are broadly understood as recognition for valor at personal
risk. Killing without risk is questionable in terms of virtue and can seem
predatory, as the Predator drone’s name advertises. But why does drone
warfare require this pretense of medals, this gesture toward courage?
That Panetta intended this medal to rank above those earned on the
battlefield suggests both the future importance of “unmanned” forms of
combat as well as the challenge of attracting military personnel to such
specialties. It further suggests recalibrations in gender-military affairs in
which transformations in warfare pressures the gender status quo.
Blair’s (2012) argument for drone warfare medals generated debate on
military electronic forums, including flyingsquadron.com. There, Champ
Kind dismissed Blair’s argument: “How about we just answer this in the
same manner that you tell that questionable piece of ass in the morning:
‘Of course I respect you. . . . Now. . . move along. . . .’”7 Cap-10, a pilot
stationed in a conflict zone, responded more vehemently to Blair: “SHUT
YOUR MAN PLEASING CAKE HOLE! You get to go home every night,
throw the wife’s heels to the ceiling, and watch kiddo’s t-ball games and
NFL Sunday Ticket on the weekend.”8 Lawman invoked the danger faced
by traditional pilots by trading heavily on ethnicity, sexuality, and gender:
If you can’t fall to the ground [from an aircraft] only to be rolled up by a bunch
of cavemen wearing man dresses who will gladly beat you, rape you, put you in
front of a flag tied and bound, then cut your #######ing head off for anyone to
see on youtube including your family, you don’t get an Air Medal.9
Medals are gendered status markers. They identify heroes, and heroes are
popularly conceived as men (and sometimes women) who have

7. Champ Kind (posted May 3, 2012 at 12:54 p.m.) http://www.flyingsquadron.com/forums/topic/

19062-drone-pilots-we-dont-get-no-respect/?pid=311136 (accessed June 20, 2015).
8. Cap-10 (posted May 3, 2012 at 1:06 p.m.) http://www.flyingsquadron.com/forums/topic/19062-
drone-pilots-we-dont-get-no-respect/?pid=311136 (accessed June 20, 2015).
9. Lawman (posted May 4, 2012 at 03:52 a.m.) http://www.flyingsquadron.com/forums/topic/19062-
drone-pilots-we-dont-get-no-respect/page-2 (accessed June 20, 2015).

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 61

performed acts of valor, which in turn assumes a context of personal risk

(Braudy 2005; Goldstein 2001). But medals serve another military
purpose as incentives for doing what the military requires of combatants.
Historically, the challenge has been to encourage men to disregard
personal safety in order to kill, rescue comrades, and possibly die. This
definition of military hero overlaps with idealized masculinity, the
definition of a Real Man (Braudy 2005). Currently, however, the military
particularly needs highly trained individuals to sit in trailers in the
Nevada desert to work long and irregular hours at a relatively low-status
job. As it appears to not require courage, strength, or toughness, this job
does not overlap with traditional idealized masculinity. Indeed, drone
operators are commonly perceived to have cushy-armchair, button-
pusher jobs readily performed by low-status men (e.g., geeks or nerds)
and women. If the military seeks achievements irrespective of acts of
valor, what will “hero” come to mean? An Andy Singer cartoon (see
Figure 1) depicting a statue of a future war hero — a stout man in
T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops clutching his “weapon,” a video game
remote — suggests both the absurdity and the popular fear underpinning
this alternative masculinity that threatens to depose the familiar brute
force masculine heroes.
The clash between shifting military needs and militarized masculinity
suggests gender recalibrations. Remote-controlled weaponry, in effect,
decouples strength and courage from military heroism such that these
attributes coexist with and are increasingly displaced by other attributes,
such as technical prowess and manual dexterity.10 Traditional arguments
barring women from combat, such as lack of upper-body strength, are
rendered moot. However, the numerical and normative masculine
domination of the computer and video gaming industry suggests the
possibility of new barriers for women (Parkin 2014). Although this
section has linked drone warfare readjustments in the masculine
hierarchy relating to combatant and hero, I argue below a different
tension in the gendering of the U.S. state, one between protective and
predatory masculinity.

PROTECTOR OR PREDATOR? MASCULINITY AND THE STATE

At the 2010 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, President Obama told

a not-so-funny joke about his command of drone strikes as he introduced

10. For an example of such realignment, see Cockburn 1991.

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 62 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

FIGURE 1. What will “hero” come to mean? http://www.andysinger.com/

the Jonas Brothers, a pop band. In mock seriousness, he warned the band
members to steer clear of his daughters: “Sasha and Malia are huge fans,
but boys, don’t get any ideas. Two words for you: Predator drones. You’ll
never see it coming.” The logic of patriarchal masculine protection in
national security is rarely expressed so literally, but the anecdote is
faithful to the general narrative (Young 2003). In brief, the patriarch
(a national leader or the state itself) assumes protection of the feminized
weak (figuratively, “womenandchildren” at home or abroad) in the face
of a menacing or predatory masculine threat (Enloe 1993).
However, one person’s masculine protector is another’s masculine
predator. I propose that not only is U.S. drone power experienced by
many abroad as the menacing predator against which one needs
protection, but this is arguably counterproductive to stopping terrorism.
To say the least, drones have become “a provocative symbol of American
power” (Becker and Shane 2012). In addition to attacks on civilians
mistaken for militants, there are reported incidents of “follow-up strikes

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 63

on wounded survivors of initial strikes, killing not only the intended targets
but also anyone attempting to rescue the injured” (Amnesty International
2013, 30). From the perspective of the strike zone, such rescuer attacks
signal a powerful yet abusive masculine.
A 2013 U.S. Justice Department white paper substantiates this
assessment, declaring the president would not be constrained by national
sovereignty: “[a drone strike will proceed] with the consent of the host
nation’s government or after a determination that the host nation is
unable or unwilling to suppress the threat” (U.S. Department of Justice
2013). This suggests the U.S. to be the self-appointed global patriarch, as
nations that do not consent are rendered, in effect, legally incapable of
consent and thus wards of the (U.S.) state. Unable to protect their own
borders against penetration by U.S. drones or al Qaeda, countries such as
Pakistan and Yemen are demasculinized. The global patriarch is the
decider on behalf of feminized host nations; though unlike a benevolent
patriarch considering the best interests of women and children under his
care, decision making revolves around the best interest of the global
patriarch.
Meanwhile, the United States as masculinist protector directs
U.S. public attention away from a civilian terrain bloodied by drone
strikes (Shaw and Akhter 2012, 1502; Thobani 2002). The Obama
administration generally refuses to provide information on particular
strikes or estimates on civilian casualties (Amnesty International 2013).
Drone violence is magnified when we acknowledge the psychological
trauma on local populations from the omnipresent possibility of a strike
(see Amnesty International 2013). Abroad, this has been interpreted as
evidence of an unremorseful, arrogant, and menacing superpower,
“[f]eeling no obligation to apologise or explain, count bodies or answer
for its crimes” (Monbiot 2012). Commentators sometimes fault the U.S.
with a sense of omnipotence: “Those now dispensing judgment from on
high are not gods, though they must feel like it” (Monbiot 2012).
Indeed, as Obama declared in his 2012 State of the Union speech,
“From Pakistan to Yemen, the al Qaeda operatives who remain are
scrambling, knowing that they can’t escape the reach of the United
States of America.”11 They can run, but they can’t hide. In U.S. drone
warfare, if evasion is futile, death is normalized. The U.S. military has

11. Barack Obama, “Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address.” January 24, 2012.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/01/24/remarks-president-state-union-address (last
accessed June 24, 2015).

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 64 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

FIGURE 2. This symbol first surfaced on the Internet in an Instagram photo posted
by Wired reporter Spencer Ackerman. http://instagram.com/p/NvzD_5v5LW/?
modal=true (last accessed October 14, 2014).

assigned its drones bellicose names and imagery. The U.S. Navy Program
Executive Office’s emblem for its Unmanned Aviation and Strike Weapons
features the Grim Reaper, replete with scythe and glowing red eyes (see
Figure 2). The Reaper’s predecessor, the Predator, is similarly menacing,
as it indicates a weapon that preys on humans. Though surveillance is a
primary purpose even for drones with strike capability, the names and
imagery advertise their lethality, operating to dehumanize human targets
as preyed upon or reapable in the natural order of things.12 As the predator
hunts and kills prey, Mother Nature is not so much cruel as inevitable and
necessary. Similarly, the Grim Reaper of centuries past patiently waited
bedside with an hourglass for the appointed moment to harvest a life,
evoking the cycle of life, the normalization of death. Such representations
at once pose weapon systems as agents (reapers and predators) while
obscuring the human hand that guides remote killing and encouraging
the misrecognition of violence for natural and timely death.

12. The lethal names also signal to a domestic political and military audience that military drones
extend beyond “just” surveillance into hunter-killer mode, arguably upgrading the status of the drone
systems.

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 65

Despite such ascriptions to its weapon systems, domestically the U.S. has
assumed a protectionist masculine role in the name of protecting
feminized others from a predatory — and often racialized — masculine
(Abu Lughod 2002; Shepherd 2006; Spivak 1988; Young 2003).
However, the perspective radically shifts in nations targeted by drones.
For example, from Iraqi soldiers’ perspective, surrendering to drones
reflected negatively on the masculinity of both predator and prey: “[I]t is
regarded as somehow unseemly or cowardly for a man to hide behind a
machine in taking prisoners, and the act of surrendering to something
less than a man (like a woman or a machine) is regarded as shameful”
(Manjikian 2014). Alternatively, drones with strike capabilities can
project a predatory masculinity, a powerful and abusive masculine that
both emasculates targeted men and calls forth a local masculine
protector.
Concerned with this latter reading, some military strategists and
commentators call attention to blowback: that drone warfare “allows our
opponents to cast our country as a distant, high-tech, amoral purveyor of
death. It builds resentment, facilitates terrorist recruitment and alienates
those we should seek to inspire” (Volker 2012). General Stanley
McChrystal allowed that in some regions, drones are “hated on a visceral
level” and contribute to a “perception of American arrogance”
(Alexander 2013). After an attack killed two local leaders who had been
resisting Al Qaeda, infuriated villagers protested: “[S]ome . . . say there
was an upwelling of support for Al Qaeda, because such a move is seen
as the only way to retaliate against the United States” (Worth, Mazzetti,
and Shane 2013). I propose a gendered lens provides new insight: drone
warfare is perceived on the ground as a ruthless expression of predatory
masculinity, which in turn invites and legitimates a masculine response.
Furthermore, although these unmanned aerial vehicles in a sense
unman states such as Pakistan and Yemen, it is also rather simple to turn
the masculine expression of drone strikes on its head: “Drones are the
weapons of cowards” (see, for example, Kurbjuweit 2012; Manjikian
2014). From American arrogance to blowback and cowardice, gender is
threaded through the meanings attached to drone warfare and the state.

GENDERING BODIES: OUR ENEMIES, OUR SELVES

Drones are feared in part for their precision. However, distinguishing by

remote between terrorists and civilians, enemies and innocents, is

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 66 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

imprecise, with no resemblance to a court of law. Rather, the drone crew

and video analysts, unfamiliar with and disdainful of local customs and
traditions, attempt to identify weapons and interpret behavior of those
they are tracking. They can fall back on judgments based upon
visible characteristics such as height and clothing. As I show, these crude
proxies are highly gendered, a point often missed in critical analyses of
drone warfare.
To explore the gendered nature of tracking and targeting “baddies,” as
they are sometimes termed in military parlance, I examine the U.S.
attack on February 21, 2010, that killed 23 civilians in central
Afghanistan. This was a coordinated effort between the drone crew in
Nevada, civilian video analysts or “screeners” in Florida (employees of
military contractor SAIC, Inc.), U.S. Special Forces in a Taliban-
controlled area, as well as an A-10 jet and two Kiowa helicopters. The
unprecedented release of the drone crew communication transcript and
Department of Defense investigation of the attack provide a rare glimpse
into drone warfare (Cloud 2011).13
Several critiques of drone warfare have examined this transcript, yet
none employ a gendered analysis (Crawford 2013; Gregory 2011;
Pugliese 2013). A gendered lens yields new insights into the meanings
the drone crew attached to their actions and points to gender
implications of the technology. Below I chart an oscillating predatory
and protective imperialist masculinity that is constituted by the object of
its aggression: first, feminized men, then feminized women and
children. An imperialist racism informs this gendering of human targets:
an Afghani woman as “an object of protection from her own kind” is
used to justify “white men saving brown women from brown men” (Abu-
Lughod 2002; Spivak 1988, 296). Drone crews charged with close
observation of the human impact of the violence they unleash are
viscerally immersed not only in combat, but also postcombat carnage
(Gregory 2011, 203). The gendered, raced, and aged bodies of those
killed and maimed speak back to the crew, marking a crucial distinction
in warfare with gendered implications: unlike other combat pilots, drone
crews perform post-attack surveillance that can call into question the type
of masculinity they performed.14

13. The full transcript is available at http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-

Attack (accessed June 20, 2015).
14. This dynamic is familiar to infantry, who more regularly confront the postbattle carnage inflicted.

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 67

The operation began predawn, when U.S. surveillance identified a

three-vehicle convoy as possible Taliban closing in on a U.S. Special
Forces team. An armed Predator was called in for surveillance. As the
five hours of recorded drama unfolded, the drone crew shifted
subjectively from a baldly predatory masculinity directed at enemy
military-aged males (MAMs) to a protective masculinity on behalf of
embodied women and children, both masculine subjectivities informed
by race-ethnicity. The drone crew was primed to identify the group as
exclusively MAMs, marking them as both a menacing enemy and a
killable target. While the enemy, it seems, can be imagined as
feminized, it cannot be imagined as embodied women.
One hour into the surveillance, the drone pilot, relying on infrared
sensors that read temperature differences, asked crew members if one
figure on the video feed was holding something across the chest. The
drone sensor agrees, “Yea it’s kind of weird how they all have a cold spot
on their chest.”15 Despite many possible explanations, the pilot asserts
that the cold spots are rifles hidden under “man dresses,” rendering these
bodies culturally inferior and effeminate, but a menace nonetheless, as
they are men with weapons. When passengers exited the vehicles to pray,
this confirmed to the drone crew that they were tracking Taliban who
were “gonna do something nefarious.”16
The civilian video analysts (“screeners”) in Florida, however, identify
one and possibly two children in the group.17 The drone sensor erupts,
“Bull (expletive) . . . where!? . . . I don’t think they have kids out at this
hour [roughly 5 a.m.], I know they’re shady but come on.”18 The pilot
clarifies that identifying the figure in question as a MAM “means he’s
guilty.” By implication, a child present could shut down the attack.
Frustrated by cautious screeners, he further laments, “[W]hy are they so
quick to call (expletive) kids but not to call (expletive) a rifle?” At just
over three hours, the ground force in Afghanistan inquires, “[W]hen
we say children, are we talking teenagers or toddlers?” to which the

15. Conversation at 0:59 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-

Attack (accessed June 15, 2015).
16. Statement at 01:48 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack
17. According to the partially declassified documents of the CentCom investigation, the primary
screener was a woman. The investigation notes an “almost constant rejection of the screeners calls or
assessments.” See https://www.aclu.org/files/dronefoia/uruzgan/drone_uruzgan_attachtabA_part_12_
FOIA_10-0218_pp37-49.pdf (accessed June 29, 2015).
18. Conversation at 01:07 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack.

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 68 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

drone sensor responds, “Something more towards adolescents or

teens.”19 The ground force and drone crew agree that “12 – 13 years
old with a weapon is just as dangerous,” thus transforming children
into killable targets.
With a jet, helicopters, and a Reaper UAV also called in, the Predator
crew worries they will be left out of the kill; the drone pilot intones,
“[H]ope we get to shoot the truck with all the dudes in it.”20 At 4:17
hours in the transcript, based on drone intelligence, ground command
gives the go-ahead and the helicopter fires, destroying the vehicles,
killing 23 and wounding another 12. But the drone crew immediately
senses something “weird,” as individuals are not running for cover as
would be expected of trained militants. Five minutes later, one asks, “Are
they wearing burqas?” and another allows, “That guy looks like he’s
wearing jewelry and stuff like a girl, but he ain’t . . . if he’s a girl, he’s a
big one.”21
Twenty-five minutes after the attack, the screeners identify “3 females
and 1 child [and] 1 possible child,” and victims are observed waving in
surrender.22 The drone crew seems defensive but is also concerned to
pass along the new information to protect these Afghans from another
U.S. attack. The drone sensor admits, “Yeah, at this point . . . I personally
wouldn’t be comfortable shooting at these people.” The tragedy
continues to dawn on the crew:
Pilot: That lady is carrying a kid, huh? Maybe.23
Safety Observer: No.
Mission Commander (MC): No.
Sensor: Uh, yeah.
MC: The baby, I think on the right. Yeah.
Sensor: Yeah . . . Right there in the crosshairs.

19. Conversation at 03:08-03:10 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-

Drone-Attack.
20. Statement at 03:17 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack (accessed June 20, 2015).
21. Conversation at 04:23 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack (accessed June 20, 2015).
22. Conversation at 04:42-04:43 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-
Drone-Attack (accessed June 20, 2015).
23. Conversation at 04:43 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack (accessed June 20, 2015).

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 69

The Sensor observes another individual who looks “[y]ounger than an

adolescent to me.”24 From omniscient vision, the crew backtracks into
the fog of war:
Sensor: No way to tell from here.

Pilot: That’s a kid there. To the left.

MC: Yeah, that’s what they were calling the adolescent earlier.

Sensor: Yeah. Adolescents don’t move like that.

The drone operators, now aware they called a strike on civilians, including
women and children, express anger at the perceived masculine
shortcomings of the civilian men just attacked for not tending to or
attempting to protect the women and children. In effect, the drone crew
morphs from masculine predators into masculine protectors as the sensor
declares, “These guys all need to get their asses kicked. . . . These dudes
over here. One’s that are standing up [versus those lying wounded or
dead]. . . . All their women are over here. Kids.”25
The transcript ends as the drone pilot, the last to abandon the subject
position of predatory masculinity hunting MAMs, radios ground forces
approaching the destroyed convoy: “[B]e advised . . . we have . . .
multiple MAMs . . . wandering around the vicinity.”26 Another crew
member interjects: “Well don’t forget the women and children, dude.
. . .” The pilot concedes, “I know. I know.” As the drone crew seems to
struggle against the notion that they are the enemy in this scenario, the
process is profoundly gendered. To attack armed Muslim MAMs
indicates one version of masculinity performed by the drone crew,
unarmed civilians including Muslim women and children quite another.
Military and academic literature often discusses counterinsurgency as
“war amongst the people” in which “enemy combatants look like
everyone else” (Defense Science Board 2004, 154; Gregory 2011, 200).
A gender lens reveals a problem with this claim, as the U.S. military
attempts to differentiate men from women and children in strike
zones. This gender distinction, in which men are guilty and
“womenandchildren” are innocent, does not necessarily protect women

24. Conversation at 04:46-04:47 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-

Drone-Attack (accessed June 20, 2014).
25. Conversation at 04:48 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack (accessed June 20, 2014).
26. Conversation at 04:59 in transcript. http://www.scribd.com/doc/52825019/Transcripts-of-Drone-
Attack (accessed June 20, 2014).

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 70 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

and children (Enloe 1993). It is unclear how often the U.S. has deferred
strikes due to the presence of women or children. Pakistani Taliban
leader Baitullah Mehsud was with family when a CIA drone strike
targeting him killed his wife and several other family members (Becker
and Shane 2012). Under the Obama policy, unlike adult men, his wife
was not guilty by association with Mehsud.
At first glance, this suggests a feminist catch-22. On the one hand, a
feminist position militates against women as legal children, incapable of
consent, ideology, enmity, or combat (see Shepherd 2006, 20). On the
other, women are not as empowered as men to make decisions, much
less engage as combatants, and so are less likely to be considered
legitimate targets in war. But the feminist issue goes deeper, as this U.S.
drone policy essentially judges people guilty and killable on the basis of
gender. As drone warfare circumvents the accused’s day in court, the
crude means by which all but Al Qaeda and Taliban upper echelon are
judged as legitimate targets revolve around gender. As men are rendered
dangerous and thus killable, women are rendered de jure children.
The recalibration in gender-military affairs, then, foretells a high-tech
patriarchal imperialism, and citizens of the global periphery living under
drones suffer the daily trauma and periodic mistakes of war, with the
familiar lack of acknowledgement, much less alarm, from the imperialist
center. In this high-tech patriarchal imperialism, informed by ethnicity,
nationality, and gender, brown women and children need protection
and brown men need killing. Ultimately, for all the purported precision,
this new weapon system is not equipped with special insight into
people’s hearts or an ability to parse the intricacies of consent and intent.
Instead, the clumsy and imprecise stand-ins of gender, physical stature,
mannerisms, and travel companions are used to determine guilt and
innocence. Within a drone strike zone, all MAMs are guilty, all
womenandchildren are innocent, but no one is protected.

UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL: REMOTE KILLING AND

EMOTIONAL CONTROL

Control of emotions, particularly fear, is a key measure of masculinity and

ideal warriors (Goldstein 2001). This would seem a simple challenge for
those who kill by remote. However, for all the physical ease of drone
strikes, it can extract a severe emotional toll on drone crews. Compared
to other methods of long- and medium-range killing, drones return the

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 71

gore to war for those doing the killing, as the audio-visual technology
“viscerally immerses physically remote operators in combat” (Gregory
2011, 203). One drone controller recalled the first time he fired a
missile, killing two men instantly: “[H]e could see a third man in mortal
agony. The man’s leg was missing and he was holding his hands over the
stump as his warm blood flowed onto the ground — for two long
minutes” (Abé 2012). The problem is compounded by the familiarity
that a drone crew develops with those they track: “We watch people for
months. We see them playing with their dogs or doing their laundry. We
know their patterns like we know our neighbors’ patterns. We even go to
their funerals” (Abé 2012).
Perhaps to counteract the intimacy of killing in high resolution, drone
crews employ language that dehumanizes their human targets: a person
killed by a strike is “bug splat,” likening human bodies to dead bugs on a
windshield; survivors who run for cover are “squirters” (see Cohn 1987).
Nonetheless, killing half a world away produces psychological trauma in
drone crews, particularly those who have seen video of casualties of
women, children, or other civilians (Chapelle, Salinas, and McDonald
2011; Dao 2013).
In this sense, drone warfare is radically distinct from the visual
experience provided by the “smart bombs” consumed by the U.S. public
during the Gulf War (Butler 1994; Chow 2006; see also Gregory 2011).
Butler posited that the Gulf War’s video-equipped bombs championed a
“masculinized Western subject,” as the U.S. TV audience identified
“with both bomber and bomb, flying through space . . . and yet securely
wedged in the couch in one’s own living room” (Butler 1994, 44 –45).
As the camera was destroyed on impact, “recording . . . a thoroughly
destructive act which can never record that destructiveness,” viewers
enacted “the allegory of military triumph . . . through the disembodied
enactment of the kill that produces no blood,” thus “a figure for imperial
power which takes the aerial, global view, the disembodied killer who
can never be killed” (Butler 1994, 45).
The view of the killer who can never be killed no longer self-destructs
upon impact. In increasingly higher resolution, the view reveals blood
and dismembered limbs and the desperate efforts of those who struggle
to hold on to life. Such is the intimate virtual proximity of the new view
that it triggers emotional trauma in drone crews and is withheld from
public consumption (Gregory 2011). The rare transcript of a drone strike
gone wrong, discussed above, reveals the hyperfocus on the gendered,
ethnicized bodies of potential targets, which ultimately divides the

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 72 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

wounded and dead into two categories — successes and mistakes. Is that
body wearing a burqa? Is that a rifle in his man-dress? Is that a killable
man or a woman-child? The gendered corporeality of those destroyed
speaks back to the killers, telling them about themselves: you are a hero/
you are a murderer. It is this gendered voice that pierces the drone
warrior virtual armor, inflicting emotional wounds to the combatants
who cannot be killed.

GENDER, DRONES, AND DEMOCRACY

This paper set out to explore gender recalibrations prompted by the rise of
drone warfare, as drones challenge characteristics defining the ideal man,
ideal combatant, and ideal security state. I argue that as the new weaponry
renders courage and physical strength nearly irrelevant, the traditionally
valorized masculine attributes associated with heroism are eclipsed. As
this masculine recalibration unfolds, the U.S. state applies a strict gender
distinction to the strike zones abroad by which male ¼ combatant and
female ¼ noncombatant, thus defining all military-aged men as enemies
and all women as innocents. As the state creates new gendered and
racialized means of adjudicating guilt and innocence, the immersive
nature of drone warfare and subsequent emotional damage to drone
crews is also gendered.
The state and individual levels further interact as the United States
maintains a demobilized population through secrecy, presenting a
contrast to the post-9/11 protective masculine state identified by Young
(2003) and posing new threats to democratic values. For Young, citizens
and residents who accept the security state out of fear of attack “allow
themselves to be positioned as women and children in relation to
paternal protector-leaders” (Young 2003, 20– 21). But with low-intensity
drone warfare, leaders do not promulgate fear so much as encourage a
blind faith in a high-tech patriarchal state that, with purportedly laserlike
precision, eliminates terrorists abroad.
Drone combatants, hampered in their performance of traditional
militarized masculinity but in high demand by the military, suggest new
militarized masculine performances as well as enhanced opportunities
for women combatants. The disassociation of strength from combat
theoretically opens opportunities for a range of body sizes and abilities.
Do these developments suggest a new era of degendered militarization
and gender equality? Three decades ago, Stiehm (1982) rejected the

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 UNMANNED? GENDER RECALIBRATIONS AND THE RISE OF DRONE 73

gendered protector/protected hierarchy in favor of a society of men and

women defenders: “citizens equally liable to experience violence
and equally responsible for exercising society’s violence” (374). Drone
warfare potentially fosters future gender equality among citizen-
defenders. However, these remote defenders, equally responsible for
exercising society’s violence, would be equally unlikely to experience
violence from those the U.S. considers enemies. If the U.S. transitioned
from a domestic protector-protected dichotomy that sustains gendered
inequalities in citizenship toward a society of men and women
defenders-by-remote, this gender equality could be achieved through
warfare defending an increasingly predatory masculine state.
Indeed, though the U.S. state self-represents as masculine protector,
for many who fall under their shadow, drones project a representation
of the United States as masculine predator. This in turn summons
local masculine protectors, potentially growing the ranks of those the
U.S. considers terrorists but that a local population might well
understand as heroes and real men. In this sense, rather than
prophesying the end of militarized masculinity, drones suggest a
gendered cycle of violence.
Future feminist IR research on drone warfare would be enhanced by
intra- and interdisciplinary collaboration and cross-pollination.
Sylvester’s (2013) recent call to study war as experience provides an
analytical bridge linking such diverse gendered inquiries. As per
Sylvester (2013), as feminist IR develops its analytical focus beyond
states, strategies, and militaries to include the human experience of war
from multiple perspectives, the field must expand its methods and
literatures. Among these, an interpretive approach employing
ethnographic methods is well suited to examine the experience of war,
as it attends to the meanings individuals attach to beliefs and actions,
contextualized in time and place (Bayard de Volo 2001). What is the
gendered, lived experience of drone warfare for leaders, combatants,
victims, and their loved ones? How do meanings attached to U.S.
drone warfare domestically and internationally vary across race,
ethnicity, class, and gender? Addressing such questions are key
proximate steps in delving deeper into the gender-war nexus to flesh
out the implications of the robotics revolution and remote killing for
shifting conceptions of democracy and equality within the U.S. and
globally, including the danger of a paternal authority circumventing
consent to assert its will.

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 74 LORRAINE BAYARD DE VOLO

Lorraine Bayard de Volo is Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and

Chair of Women and Gender Studies at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, CO: [email protected]

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