Gender and Women's Studies

Is collegiality to collectivity as friendship is to love, blander but safer, steadier but less intense, more likely to endure but less likely to innovate and transform? I picture collegiality as the more masculine of the two, dressed in tweed, chatting in leather chairs, even drinking sherry. In contrast, collectivity connotes for me women in jeans, sitting on the floor vigorously discussing ideas, with a pot of chili bubbling on a stove nearby.

Because tests at Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) ranges can often only be conducted under specific atmospheric conditions, climatologies of each range could be a very useful tool for long-range test planning. Such datasets can provide the probability density function of near-surface wind speed, percent cloud cover, temperature, precipitation, turbulence intensity, upper-atmospheric wind speed, etc., as a function of the month of the year, time of day, and location on the range. The STAR Institute with guidance from the Ohio Supercomputer Center is working on porting the Climate Four Dimensional Data Assimilation (CFDDA) technology developed by the National Center for Atmospheric Research to version 3 of the Weather and Research Forecast (WRF) model for use on systems within the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program. The fully parallelized WRF-CFDDA system uses data-assimilation by Newtonian relaxation, to generate a regional reanalysis that is consistent with both observations and model dynamics for every hour of the past 20 years, at fine scales (3 km grid) over the Dugway Proving Ground range.

This article explores the complex relation of image and sound in the work of Sri Lankan diasporic musician, producer, and designer Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam (a.k.a. MIA). With her eclectic visual style and synthesis of hip-hop, electronica, dance, and global pop music, MIA has now been a trailblazer in music, fashion, and political culture for a decade. Recently named one of Time Magazine’s "75 Most Influential People" of the 21st century, MIA is the first artist of Asian descent to be nominated for an Academy and Grammy Award in the same year. This article introduces the concept of “queer cartographies,” a critical listening to MIA’s beats, which allows us to grasp not only the nexus of race, gender, and globalizing security in the context of US warfare, but also the unlikely intimacies between diverse histories of terrorism and the political agendas of social movements and radical uprisings across the globe. “Sonic Contagions” is motivated by the emergent articulation of global public health surveillance programs with recent security panics over bird flu and swine flu. Together, these bio-political developments provide the discursive terrain in which to ask how existing US security apparatuses are being reconfigured to shape new assemblages of organizations, techniques, and forms of bio-political expertise. At stake here, and in contrast to this emergent “bio-security” framework, are the aesthetic practices of artists like MIA, which provide a critical moment of refreshment—an opportunity to re-activate our political imaginations and conceptualize “contagion” anew. After a brief elaboration of her complex visual performances, I prioritize an account of the sonic realm in MIA’s work to argue that sonic processes of affective contagion, or “sonic contagions” make available alternative utopian possibilities that offer other ways of hearing and conceptualizing queer collectivity, belonging, and pleasure in the midst of the devastations wrought by security panics and warfare.

This chapter examines the contemporary expansion of drone strikes and extra-judicial “targeted killings” in the context of US global counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns. My principal goal is to illuminate the differential “disposition matrix” of misery produced by the state and to interrogate the questions conjured by this violence for coalitional politics in the drone age. The chapter unfolds in three parts. The first section offers a primer on the geopolitical and racial logics of drone wars as the latest installment in a long history of US military presence in the Middle East and South Asia. The second section seeks to intervene into emergent drone criticism by prioritizing an account of the destabilizing effects of these militarized technologies on social relations for civilians living under the constant threat of aerial bombardment. Finally, the chapter concludes that the durability of the drone forces us to contend with and challenge the ethical common sense of Washington on the conduct of war and the grammar used to make sense of US state violence. I assert that drones are not exceptional but endemic to racial domination and capitalist exploitation at the heart of US empire. Their expanded deployment both at home and abroad should be of central concern to activists and scholars of race, war, and empire.


Keywords:

Comparative racialization, counterterrorism, double-tap strikes, disposition matrix, drone wars, Af-Pak, imperial violence, US homeland security state, social relations, jirga, coalition