Delivering life, delivering death: Reaper drones, hysteria and maternity

Lindsay C Clark

doi:10.1177/0967010621997628

Abstract

Like all warfare, drone warfare is deeply gendered. This article explores how this military technology sediments or disrupts existing conceptualizations of women who kill in war. The article using the concept of motherhood as a narrative organizing trope and introduces a ‘fictional’ account of motherhood and drone warfare and data from a ‘real life’ account of a pregnant British Reaper operator. The article considers the way trauma experienced by Reaper drone crews is reported in a highly gendered manner, reflecting the way women’s violence is generally constructed as resulting from personal failures, lost love and irrational emotionality. This irrational emotionality is tied to a long history of medicalizing women’s bodies and psychologies because of their reproductive capacities and, specifically, their wombs – explored in this article under the historico-medical term of ‘hysteria’. The article argues that where barriers to women’s participation in warfare have, in the past, hinged upon their (argued) physical weakness, and where technology renders these barriers obsolete, there remains the tenacious myth that women are emotionally incapable of conducting lethal operations – a myth based on (mis)conceptions of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood and the feminine capacity to give life.

Highlights

The idea ofembodiment is an integral point of contestation because of the gendered discourses that associate the feminine with the body in opposition to the association between the masculine and the mind (Peterson and Runyan, 2010)
What I have explored in this article is the way in which the gendering of drone warfare, as an example of women’s violence, is tied to and co-constituted by two concepts, motherhood and hysteria, that are used to frame the trauma caused by that violence as somehow less legitimate and less rational than the male equivalent
Situating interview data against a play, I have looked at how women are produced through these discourses as subjects, and as such, aim to write an ‘ideational reading of female agency in political violence’, in both ‘fictional’ representations and from ‘factual’ interview data (Åhäll, 2012b: 290)

Summary

Introduction

I use the term ‘hysteria’ in this article not to suggest a biological or medical condition which afflicts women’s minds because of the alleged delicacy of their reproductive organs, but rather to signal the continuing social and cultural relevance of the trope of the ‘hysterical woman’ in representations of women, and women engaged in violence What, does this mean, for the women who conduct drone warfare? The two examples I consider here are the play Grounded (2017) by George Brant and reported interview data from ‘Tara’ in Reaper Force (2018) by Peter Lee and I have chosen these examples because they are the only two pieces I have found that look only and at female drone operators.11 They provide, as far as I am aware, the only two accounts of female drone operators who are pregnant or who have recently become mothers, providing an important and interesting juxtaposition of lived reality against the discursive organizing trope of the myth of motherhood. As Miller argues, ‘Brant seems to imply that the maternal instinct is inescapable and the façade of masculinity the female warrior must adopt is an illusion, only to be dominated by biology in the end’ (2017: 13)

Conclusion

Findings

I offer the following caveat