Description
A key dimension of the War on Gaza has been the extensive use of drone warfare, the scope of which is without precedent in global histories of mass violence. Exploring the queer politics of quadcopter drones, this paper interrogates the various practical and ontological implications of drones being deployed in the War on Gaza. It begins by first exploring the queer relationship between terrorism and drone warfare, as well as the eliminationist epistemologies that drone warfare constructs. It then explores the extent to which drone warfare challenges private/public/international (Enloe, 1990) boundaries by invading and targeting the private sphere at close quarters to an unprecedented extent. Beyond this, it studies the weaponisation and mechanisation of gendercide (Jones, 2000, 2006) through drone warfare, whilst situating the queer politics of quadcopters within the broader context of the War on Gaza and the geopolitics that sustain it. Cumulatively, the paper makes the case that by queering intimate/distant, terrorist/civilian and human/machine binaries, quadcopter drones are being used to extend the genocidal project and the rhetoric that sustains it to the greatest possible extent.
