Invincible Bodies, Bodies of Care: Reading Sovereignty in Military Discourse

This PhD places a critical analysis of the military body at the centre of theorisations of sovereignty in international relations (IR). It does this by drawing on both ancient traditions describing state power through bodily metaphors and recent critical, feminist and queer IR analyses of relationships among humans, sovereignty and security. Two contributions from IR theory are especially important to this research. One is Richard Ashley's claim that the authority of the sovereign state is anchored in specific understandings of the human (what he calls 'statecraft as mancraft'). The other is Cynthia Weber's extension of Ashley's analysis considering the multiple, seemingly contradictory ways sex, gender and sexuality craft the
sovereign human body (what she calls 'queer logics of statecraft'). Centring these theoretical contributions, this PhD examines how the military body is discursively sexed, gendered and sexualised in order to authorise the sovereignty of the nation state.
My main contention is that analyses that neglect to investigate how the military body is discursively invested with sexed, gendered and sexualised meaning by the state fail to understand the precise workings of sovereignty. In so doing, they do not fully comprehend how the complex intertwining of sovereignty, sexuality and security affects contemporary military doctrine and strategy - from the Responsibility to Protect to drone warfare to network-centric warfare. This complex relationship is illustrated by states' invocation of the military body. Most often, government and military officials describe a nearly invincible body whose capacity is augmented by complex technology. For instance, the human eye of the analyst is enhanced by drone-mounted Gorgon Stare video technology allowing them to track multiple targets over long periods of time. At other times, officials speak of frail and vulnerable bodies. For instance, the Air Force launched the RPA Get Well Program in 2015 to improve the well-being of drone crews plagued by chronic fatigue. The US military thus discursively deploys both the hyper-masculine, high-tech 'invincible body' and the feminised 'body of care' to signal what version of
the human shall be used to authorise the sovereignty of the nation state. This contemporary version of the human is markedly different from earlier renditions relying exclusively on attributes of strength and domination, and is testament to an evolving notion of the human used to embody sovereignty. Based on this observation, this PhD asks, 'How does the US military create specific sexed, gendered and sexualised versions of the human to authorise the sovereignty of the nation state? Why is the version of the human that is discursively deployed to embody sovereignty seemingly contradictory and subject to change? How does sovereignty, expressed simultaneously through strength and vulnerability, impact analyses of security practices?'
My aim is to empirically investigate how the US military creates specific versions of the human, and analyse how these versions of the human authorise, sustain and threaten the sovereignty of the nation state. I will conduct a discourse analysis of military documents in the mode of Foucauldian archaeology, which recovers discursive rules from a close reading of texts, but also situates these texts in their institutional and political contexts. After assembling a corpus of documents, I will apply a coding method adapted from grounded theory to trace discursive rules, as well as other methods from poststructuralist discourse analysis, to examine how these discourses produce particular types of sexed,
gendered and sexualised sovereign subjects.