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AS THE UNITED STATES HAS WAGED DRONE WARS in places around the world over the past decade, a new consumer market for drones has emerged. Drones suddenly have a softer, neoliberal side. No longer only used solely for military reconnaissance and targeted killing, drones are increasingly being used by disaster relief specialists, real estate agents, Hollywood production crews, fire fighters, police units, and journalists. Given the expanding array of potential drone applications, how are we to think about this military technology from a poststructuralist feminist perspective? Does the drone import militarization into everyday life by virtue of its seepage into so many different sectors (policing, reporting, property speculation, public safety, media culture)? Or, do the multifarious uses of drones destabilize its militaristic origins and open up the technology to new kinds of contestations and experiences?
Despite decades of feminist research on science, technology, and militarization, only a handful of recently published drone-related articles explicitly engage with feminist epistemologies.1 Crucially, some of this research builds on the theoretical work of Donna Haraway, foregrounding the gendered dynamics of unmanned systems and the agential capacities of drone interfaces.2 Mary Manjikian argues that drones are changing the gendered constructs of war as US military planners position them as "subordinate, as a new type of nature which is dominated or feminized, while 'cyborg soldiers' with technological implants are constructed as hypermasculine.''3 Other feminist scholars have zeroed in on the cracks and fissures that drone technologies have created within military institutions. Emphasizing the phrase "unmanned," Lorraine Bayard de Volo suggests that the "revolution in military affairs" brought about by drones may recalibrate the gendered labor dynamics of the US military and readjust masculine hierarchy.4 And Cara Daggett argues that "killing with drones produces queer moments of disorientation," as it ruptures the spatiotemporal dynamics that make war intelligible, and, in the process, disrupts militarized masculine claims to position and orientation.5 Finally, feminist work in the forthcoming collection Life in the Age of Drones highlights the racializing logics of drone technology and war through analyses of juridical, cultural, and biopolitical formations.6
While the feminist research mentioned above makes important interventions, most scholarly drone research averts feminist perspectives either by ignoring them completely or absorbing their basic arguments and precepts without acknowledgement. This is...