As I said last week, I’m responding to Sarah’s recent series of posts on drone sexuality. In this post, I want to follow through/push one of Sarah’s concerns about the way her account relied on binaries–both gender binaries (masculine/feminine) and subject/object binaries. I don’t know if Sarah would want to follow my argument all the way, but, that’s one thing that’s great about thinking with someone–you can develop different but related versions of a theory, and more fully explore the intellectual territory around an issue, topic, or question.

What if droning isn’t something “masculine” phenomena do to “feminine” ones, but a process that everyone/everything undergoes, and, in sifting out the erstwhile winners from losers, distributes gender privilege? In other words, droning is a set of processes that dole out benefits to “normally” gendered/sexually oriented phenomena (masculine, cis-gendered, homo- and hetero-normative, white, bourgeois ones), and that subject “abnormally” gendered/sexually oriented phenomena (feminine, trans*, queer, non-white, working class) to increased vulnerability and death?

Before I get into my argument, I want to first summarize what I understand Sarah’s argument to be. I want to make sure I’m not grossly misreading her ideas (or, maybe, just clarify my reading so Sarah can then point out my mistakes/our points of divergence).

Sarah is asking two main questions: (1) “what happens to sexuality in a surveillance state,” and (2) “What happens when being known isn’t the task of human beings but of machines?” This second question shows, I think, that Sarah’s actually asking about what happens to sexuality under a specific type of ubiquitous surveillance–surveillance performed by machines, through machines, and in which machines tell us not just “the” truth, but our truths, who I really am as a person (I’m riffing here a bit on Foucault’s History of Sexuality v1, in which he argues that we think our sexuality contains some deep inner truth about ourselves). Rob Horning has done some really excellent work on this question of machines telling us our truths, telling us who we really are as people. We barf data into the algorithms, and they spit out our “selves” for us and everyone else to see. The important thing to take from Rob’s work is that these “machines” include algorithms and big data; algorithms also drone. But, back to Sarah’s question: these machines aren’t just surveilling us, they’re producing knowledge. (And, to connect back to the sexuality question, there’s that nice resonance between “knowledge” in the epistemic sense and “knowledge” in the carnal, “biblical” sense.) So, drones (the surveillance machines) produce us as beings capable of knowing ourselves (i.e., conscious, self-aware subjects), and as beings capable of being known carnally, i.e., as sexual subjects. I’ll return to the question of how drones produce us as knowing and knowable/known in a bit.

Importantly, as Sarah emphasizes, this surveillance is not limited to the state.

I don’t think we always explicitly identify the surveillant power of drones specifically with a state. I think that drones are both vaguer and more flexible than that, and for me the idea of droneness is something that isn’t reliant on a state for its existence. A drone itself is a manifestation of and a symbol for potentially any and all forms of surveillance, power, violence, control.

…and, of course, pleasure. So, “drone” is Sarah’s term for a general condition–the contemporary configuration of power, domination, control, and maybe even resistance(?). Drones can, in this account, be specific instruments used to maintain and intensify that configuration (e.g., autonomous aircraft, data algorithms, watch lists, etc.). But, if droning also a “symbol for potentially any and all forms” this configuration of power can take, then droning is also a condition, the contemporary condition produced and maintained by these instruments.

I want to think about droning as a condition not just because this builds on my earlier account of droning, but, more importantly for my purposes here, because I think it helps show how Sarah’s account can work without relying on the binaries that she found troublesome. Sarah says:

The Gaze of a drone is penetrative, because all Gazes are fundamentally penetrative. Sexual violence is gendered: the aggressive performance of violence is masculine performance, and suffering the consequences of violence is constructed as a feminine act. Likewise, traditional forms of sexual power and control. Cisgendered men are powerful; women are weak and submissive. Men watch; women are available for the watching.

I should note here that I’m treating this as more of a binary than I’m strictly comfortable with, and in future I hope this framework can be expanded to allow for a better approach to the diversity of gender, because I think there’s some fascinating stuff going on there.

So, in her post Sarah framed droning as something the privileged do to the less privileged: “men watch; women are available for watching.” But what if droning isn’t something we do (or is done to us by others), but something that’s more like a precondition for our action (or interaction)? What if droning is, as I mentioned earlier, something that makes us knowing and knowable? In other words, what if droning is the process that positions us as people with specific identities (knowing) and desires for (knowable) particular sorts of people with specific identities and desires? Droning, in other words, would be what determines your position in white cisgender hetero- and homo-normative patriarchy. Let me try to explain (and again, this is pretty provisional, so if it doesn’t make sense lemme know!):

As I see it, droning is a configuration of the relations of social, political, economic, and ideological production. It’s like a musical drone in the sense that it’s the constant, consistent background that gives shape to the middle and foreground. Or, it’s the field that lays out all the possibilities for gameplay. Navigating our way through these relations individual people, emerge with (a) an identity (however normative or queer that identity might be) and (b) a position in relation to others, and in relation to hegemonic institutions like the state, patriarchy/rape culture, white supremacy, etc. I think this gets us out of the need to think strictly in binary terms bit doesn’t frame droning or surveillance as something one person or group does another (“woman as image, man as bearer of the look,” as Laura Mulvey puts it), but as something that affects us all. And those affects (and effects) don’t have to manifest in strictly binary terms; we’re produced as men, women, trans*, queer, and everything in between. In other words, navigating through these relations, we come to know who we are, and we become legible to others as that sort of being. Our identities and our social status are less like pregiven essences and more like emergent properties, properties that can’t be known or foreseen without the intervention of, say, number-crunching algorithms.

Droning is done to us all, and often demands our constant participation and complicity. But some people will be better situated to recover from and/or be exempted from it, while those of lower (socioeconomic, citizenship, racial, gender, ability/health, etc.) status aren’t as well-equipped to recover, and don’t get a de facto pass. Just think about the TSA and stop & frisk. For the white, cisgendered, and able-bodied, TSA screenings are a common inconvenience in contemporary middle-class life; for non-white, trans* and genderqueer people, and people with disabilities, routine TSA screening can be violent and violating, and, obviously, people from these groups are often subject to more extensive screening. Similarly, stop & frisk technically applies to anyone who behaves “suspiciously,” but really it applies to black and latino men. I really don’t think I need to go into all the “outs” white people get from encounters with law enforcement (I have cried my way out of a ticket in the past…). Those who most easily and successfully recover from and/or avoid the negative effects of droning (often because they disproportionately benefit from droning), these are the people who count (i.e., who are known and knowable) as “white,” as “masculine,” as “cisgendered,” that is, as members of the privileged classes. Those who cannot successfully recover from and avoid the negative effects of droning (often because they disproportionately experience its harms), these are the people who count, who are known and knowable as non-white, feminine, trans*, queer, undocumented, poor, fat, disabled…

In this way, droning is the set of processes and practices that produce micro-level phenomena (individual people as raced, gendered, sexual subjects) for the purpose of maintaining a macro-level society that naturalizes and privileges whiteness, masculinity, and hetero/homonormativity (that is, non-queer sexuality and cis gender identity). If we traditionally think of (panoptic) surveillance or the gaze as controlling and restricting individual behavior, droning doesn’t control or restrict individual behavior; rather, it allows individuals to respond to a situation in whatever way they like. Droning is the stacking of the deck so that only certain kinds of responses from certain kinds of people will be successful. Put in market or economic terms, the gaze is regulatory, but droning is deregulatory.

As I see it, “droning” could include phenomena such as NSA/big data surveillance, autonomous aircraft strikes, traffic cams, watch lists, TSA checkpoints, drug, fitness, and credit “testing” or “checking” (for social services, for health insurance, for employment), stop & frisk, even something like austerity politics. This understanding may be too metaphorical…for example, some uses of actual drones might not fall under this definition of droning (e.g., the Amazon delivery drones might not). But maybe this is something we should talk about.

I don’t at all disagree with Sarah’s original post. What I did was read a bit into some of her earlier claims about what drones are and how they work to try to push her analysis past some of its limitations (which I think were really just made for convenience and clarity in trying to pin down the original idea). In other words, what I think I did here was to show how Sarah’s own idea can avoid the binary problem she diagnoses. I want to emphasize that her posts are wonderfully incisive and provocative and have really spurred me to think long and hard about my own ideas on this.

If I can get my act together next week (which is our first week of classes at UNC Charlotte), I will try to say something about the role of transgression in Sarah’s posts.

Robin is on twitter as @doctaj.