Posthuman War: Race, Gender, Technology, and the Making of U.S. Military Futures

This dissertation investigates drone warfare, the production of Special Operations Forces, and innovations in the medical treatment of war-related trauma, drawing these together to propose they may be read as indicative of a larger military “Posthuman Project” that is driving technological developments and practice in the U.S. military. Through a critical race theory and feminist war studies framework, it addresses this military posthumanity as a fantasy vision of future invulnerability, total knowledge, and control that is inseparable from fantasies of white supremacy that are built into the foundations of U.S. empire. It argues that in this context, the posthuman as well as the human remain exclusionary political categories that have their sense made through processes of gendering and racialization, in spite of military discourses of technologically-driven neutrality and progress away from human fallibility. In the course of examining the three case studies, this work finds that the state wields the categories of human and posthuman as tools to justify and naturalize empire and war-waging, and in so doing it justifies and naturalizes race and gender as tools of oppression. This reveals, ultimately, the malleability of these categories, and demonstrates the extent to which harnessing this malleability is a primary way of making state power itself seem necessary and inevitable. This work seeks to contribute to recent discussions about how race and gender produce warfare, and likewise have their sense made through acts of war and the development and deployment of advanced technologies. Similarly, drawing on lessons about the violence of the “human” from Black feminist thought, it seeks to suggest to critical scholars ways of thinking about the posthuman and war that do not lose sight of the inherent violence of these categories.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Moore, Lena

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Wilcox, Lauren

• race
• gender
• technology
• U.S. military
• militarism
• empire
• drones
• special forces
• medicine
• racism
• posthuman
• war
• space
• torture

Licence

• https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/f6ef6263-6784-4177-be60-6768b618fe43/download
• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.69766

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/322307