The Cult of the American Sniper in the Age of the Imperial Security State

Abstract

This essay analyzes the cult of the American sniper, a figure associated with “covert ops”, atomized violence, and the surprise element of targeted shots fired at long range, as key to the militarization of modern life in the imperial security state. I examine some of the countless books, video games, and websites devoted to teaching civilians how to “shoot like a sniper”, with a “warrior attitude”, urging citizen-soldiers to “remember: complacency kills”. Building on the recent work of Inderpal Grewal, Matthew Thomas Payne, and others, this essay explores the sniper as a fetishized “man as machine” imperial technology, the cyborg analog of the drone in many respects. Recent movies like American Sniper and television series such as Homeland humanize the white male American sniper at the expense of racialized others, particularly Arab and African American characters. However, the position and power of the American sniper has not only been taken up by those who seek to enact white imperial hypermasculine patriarchy; the American sniper has a more complex genealogy that has also been imagined and enacted by African Americans and racial, ethnic, and religious others who turn the state's weapons back on itself. The sniper, like all killing technologies and militarized subjectivities, cannot be fully contained, controlled, or deployed. I consider examples of counter-hegemonic sniping (both imagined and made manifest), with particular interest in the politicized “blow back” of those cultural workers and veterans of colour in the late twentieth and early twenty-first-centuries who trained critique and/or their weapons on local police officers. As we demystify and deconstruct the cult of the American sniper, we come to understand the fallibility, the vulnerability, and the volatility – the insecurity – at the heart of the white supremacist empire and the security state.