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

My project, titled "Posthuman War: Race, Gender, Technology, and the Making of U.S. Military Futures," examines U.S. empire and war in the present and argues that a fantasy of technologically-enabled posthumanity is a crucial and underexamined factor behind much recent and near-future technological development and military practice. The possibility of achieving this "more than human" status is at times framed as inevitable and politically neutral, a natural outcome of advancing technology and its application to the human body.

Moreover, it can be presented as a moral imperative, necessary due to the perceived threat of technological advances by other state and non-state actors. By investigating the assumptions and investments both material and ideological that underlie such thinking, however, my research determines that the senses of inevitability, political neutrality, and necessity have been used to provide cover for the violence of U.S. empire.

My approach begins with examination of the "human" itself as a political category that is fundamentally raced and gendered, and I conduct my analysis through three cases that speak to and help to outline contemporary U.S. warfare: drone warfare, the training and increased use of Special Operations Forces, and advances in military medicine. Throughout the course of investigation, I uncover the continuities in social processes that underlie and drive such developments.

These continuities, I argue, reveal the ways that the organization of the U.S. nation state and empire has been based on categorizing people and constructing hierarchies of value, but that these categories and their meanings can shift drastically according to what serves U.S. power. I ground these claims and my theorizing further in exploratory work that purposely ranges widely geographically and temporally, in order to demonstrate the variety of ways that war and imperialism perform racializing and gendering functions, to the extent of race- and gender-making.

I show how this violence can become part of the everyday and become further naturalized, in turn naturalizing notions of race and gender as inevitable, politically neutral categories themselves. An outcome of these processes is that race and gender are vital elements in the conduct of war and imperialism, to an extent largely underappreciated in most critical scholarship to date.

This work problematizes the categories of both the "human" and "posthuman". I find that not only are these categories fundamentally raced and gendered, but, crucially, that they are malleable. This malleability is forged through long continuities in processes of race-making and gendering, which I identify through examination of a number of historical events and conceptions of what it is to be human that echo into the present.

I find, also, that due to this malleability, both "human" and the supposedly emergent "posthuman" have become important and powerful tools for the maintenance and expansion of U.S. empire in the present. My research shows that interrogating this "posthuman" idea and fantasy of the future is vital for a critique of modern U.S. warfare and empire, and how violence can occur through deployments of allegedly neutral or even globally beneficial military technology.