Militarism, Gender and (In)Security

This book examines the biopolitical fetishisation of technology in contemporary practices of war, and thus explores how masculinity is being rearticulated within the context of US militarism.

More specifically, it explores the ethico-political possibilities of technology and the attending claims that advanced technology are both liberatory and transgressive. It seeks to explore a dual question: is technology and its attending technologies of power liberating us from the strictures of gendered regimes of knowledge and thus from the deadly politics of war? In considering this question, the project inquires into the representative practices at work and the ethico-political implications therein. It does so by tracing various moments of militarism through both techno-scientific and masculinist discourses of power.

Thinking through disciplinary and biopolitical sovereign power, the book critically engages how in constituting technology through discourses of gender and difference, bodies are more and more absent in visual representations, and thus ‘realities’, of war. The driving concern is that the more bodily matters are taken up by the military and government institutions, the more bodies are disappeared and thus made absent from politics. Navigating the ethical possibilities and implications of militarism and the constitution of gendered subjectivities requires thinking through the processes by which technology has been constituted in the contemporary war on/of terror to the detriment of the living, laughing, loving body. It therefore seeks to ask after the conditions that enable, and indeed demand, the absence of fleshy bodies in contemporary configurations of techno-war.

This book will be of much interest to students of critical security studies, gender studies, social theory and IR in general