The Ocular Politics of Targeting: Disembodiment and the Perpetrator Gaze in the War on Terror

Abstract

This article analyses the politics of seeing as a way to examine the elision of civilian casualty in the War on Terror. The author particularly focuses on the ambiguities and paradoxes at play in this discussion: the question of distance, the question of visibility and the role of the body. In doing so, she tells the story of how terrorism has emerged as a form of violence that centralizes bodies, focused on the figure of the innocent victim whose body has been destroyed by the body of another, even as the technology of drone strikes also operates by exploding bodies, but through the purported precision of techno-military operations. Such technology re-categorizes civilian death as collateral damage, defining these deaths as technological effects rather than as biological, embodied ones. This acts to disembody dead civilians even as increased attention is being given to soldier bodies (both dead and injured). In this sense, the author is not arguing that civilian death has become disembodied by virtue of the distancing caused by the drone apparatus. Rather, she seeks to tell a more complicated story of how the drone gaze functions as a perpetrator gaze, and who and what it sees.