Constructing autonomy: smart homes for disabled veterans and the politics of normative citizenship

Abstract

At a time when the US military is cutting costs for retired service members and veterans, there are many charitable and corporate organizations looking to fill in these gaps. For example, the US Department of Veterans Affairs offers small grants to enable some retrofitting of houses for disabled veterans. Meanwhile, charities offer purpose-built Smart Homes to a small minority of severely disabled veterans that utilise technological and spatial engineering and feed into the culture of what might be called home improvement pornography. Smart Homes for disabled veterans are situated at the intersection of various and discrepant fantasies – domestic, consumerist, gendered, professional, military-industrial – of the automated home, and as such are full of technologies that are marked as much by their claims to independence and autonomy as they are by their claims to security and privacy. This article explores the ways in which discourses of independence and autonomy – as instantiated through the example of the Smart Home – represent a contradictory historical shift, one that is structured around a simultaneous movement away from government commitment for the welfare of veterans and a movement towards the promotion of technology as a neoliberal tool for remaking the character of post-service civilian life and private citizenship. Veterans and their civilian counterparts are made dependent on technological devices which offer an illusion of autonomy but are highly orchestrated products of social control through which citizens are spatially and politically isolated.