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

我的项目，题为“后人类战争：种族，性别，技术，以及美国军事未来的形成”，研究了美国帝国和战争在目前，并认为，技术支持后人类的幻想是一个重要的和未被充分研究的因素背后最近和不久的将来的技术发展和军事实践。实现这种“超越人类”地位的可能性有时被认为是不可避免的和政治上中立的，是技术进步及其应用于人体的自然结果。此外，它可以被视为一种道德责任，由于其他国家和非国家行为者对技术进步的威胁而必须这样做。然而，通过调查构成这种思想基础的物质和意识形态的假设和投资，我的研究确定了必然性，政治中立和必要性的感觉已经被用来为美国帝国的暴力提供掩护。我的方法开始检查“人”本身作为一个政治类别，从根本上是种族和性别，我进行我的分析，通过三个案例，说话，并帮助概述当代美国战争：无人机战争，训练和增加使用特种作战部队，并在军事医学的进步。在整个调查过程中，我揭示了社会进程的连续性，这些社会进程是这些发展的基础和驱动力。我认为，这些连续性揭示了美国民族国家和帝国的组织方式是基于对人进行分类和构建价值等级的方式，但这些类别及其含义可以根据美国权力的服务而发生急剧变化。我在探索性的工作中，有目的地在广泛的地理和时间范围内，进一步巩固这些主张和理论，以证明战争和帝国主义在种族和性别制造的程度上执行种族化和性别化功能的各种方式。我展示了这种暴力如何成为日常生活的一部分，并进一步被自然化，进而将种族和性别的概念自然化为不可避免的、政治上中立的类别。这些过程的一个结果是，种族和性别是战争和帝国主义行为中的重要因素，而迄今为止大多数批判性学术在很大程度上没有得到重视。这项工作使“人类”和“后人类”的类别问题化。我发现，这些类别不仅从根本上是种族和性别的，但关键是，他们是可塑性的。这种可塑性是通过种族形成和性别划分过程的长期连续性而形成的，我通过对一些历史事件的研究以及对人类是什么的概念的研究来确定这一点，这些历史事件和概念一直回响在现在。我还发现，由于这种可塑性，“人类”和所谓的新兴“后人类”都成为维护和扩张当今美国帝国的重要而强大的工具。我的研究表明，质疑这种“后人类”的想法和对未来的幻想对于批判现代美国战争和帝国，以及如何通过部署所谓的中立甚至全球有益的军事技术来发生暴力至关重要。

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.