Unmanned? Military Masculinities in Filmic Representations of U.S. Drone Operators
Unmanned? Military Masculinities in Filmic Representations of U.S. Drone Operators. In this “Men and Masculinities” article, Bjerre examines how U.S. drone operators are constructed and represented in the context of military masculinities in the films Drones (dir. Rick Rosenthal, 2013), Good Kill (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2014), and Eye in the Sky (dir. Gavin Hood, 2015).
Drones have become the new face of American warfare, challenging institutional and cultural norms about what it means to be a soldier. In the context of military masculinities, Bjerre examines the representation of the U.S. drone operators in three films: Drones (dir. Rick Rosenthal, 2013), Good Kill (dir. Andrew Niccol, 2014), and Eye in the Sky (dir. Gavin Hood, 2015). The films feature a male-female team of drone operators and can partly be seen as counter-narratives to the official idealized story of drone warfare by exposing some of the moral dilemmas facing the drone operators. Yet rarely do the films address the larger ethical issues of how drone technology skirts the legal framework of war. Additionally, the films’ reconfiguration of the white male drone operator as morally courageous and a potential savior of innocent women and children on the “battlefield” obscures the racialized and imperialist ideologies bound up in the U.S.-led “war on terror”.
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