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

我的项目名为“后人类战争：种族、性别、技术和美国军事未来的形成”，研究了美国帝国和当前的战争，并认为技术支持的后人类的幻想是最近和不久的将来技术发展和军事实践背后的一个至关重要但未被充分研究的因素。实现这种“超越人类”状态的可能性有时被框定为不可避免的、政治中立的，是技术进步及其在人体上应用的自然结果。此外，由于其他国家和非国家行为体感知到技术进步的威胁，它可以被视为一种道德上的必要性。然而，通过调查这种思想背后的物质和意识形态假设和投资，我的研究确定了必然性、政治中立和必要性的感觉被用来为美帝国的暴力提供掩护。我的方法首先是将“人类”本身作为一个政治类别进行考察，从根本上讲，人类是种族和性别的，我通过三个案例进行分析，这些案例有助于概述当代美国战争：无人机战争、特种作战部队的训练和增加使用，以及军事医学的进步。在整个调查过程中，我发现了社会进程的连续性，这些连续性是这种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建立在对人进行分类和构建价值等级的基础上的，但这些分类及其意义可以根据为美国权力服务的东西而发生巨大变化。我将这些主张和我的理论进一步建立在探索性工作的基础上，这些工作有意广泛地涵盖地理和时间范围，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。我展示了这种暴力是如何成为日常生活的一部分，并进一步自然化，进而将种族和性别的概念自然化，成为不可避免的，政治中立的范畴。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的重要因素，在很大程度上，迄今为止大多数批判性学术都没有充分认识到这一点。这部作品对“人类”和“后人类”的分类提出了质疑。我发现这些分类不仅从根本上是种族和性别的，而且至关重要的是，它们是可塑的。这种可塑性是通过种族形成和性别化过程的长期连续性锻造而成的，我通过对一些历史事件和人类概念的研究发现了这一点，这些历史事件和概念一直回响到现在。我还发现，由于这种可塑性，“人类”和所谓的新兴“后人类”都已成为当今美国帝国维持和扩张的重要而有力的工具。我的研究表明，质疑这种“后人类”的想法和对未来的幻想，对于批评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是至关重要的。

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.