Collier, Sarah Helen; (2024) Between Man and Machine: Masculinity, Technology and Spaces of Empire in American Narratives of the “Global War on Terror”. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis reads military masculinity as an expression of empire to examine how selected American representations of the “Global War on Terror” contend with intersecting discourses of crisis surrounding American masculinity and military power at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Looking across literary, cinematic and popular narratives, I consider how emerging visual technologies— specifically unmanned aerial vehicles and handheld cameras—are articulated alongside embodied masculinities, and how these configurations mediate American domestic and military space. I argue that such configurations of military masculinity help to give narrative shape to the notoriously disparate series of interventions known as the long war on terror. Read together, these texts speak back to historic war stories and mythic culture, and especially the potent and resilient mythology of the frontier that undergirds the American war imaginary. While looking back, these narratives also cast an anxious glance towards the future, intimating uncertainty over the role of the man, the soldier, and the broader apparatus of US imperial power as we move further into the twenty-first century. This thesis fills a critical gap in scholarship by attending to how masculinity is represented via the relationship of mythology to modern visual military technologies. While much critical attention has been paid to the representation of military masculinity during the war on terror in areas including trauma, embodiment, technology and the western genre, these areas have yet to be bridged in a way which generates a picture of empire through such intersecting articulations of masculinity. This thesis thus brings these various elements of scholarship together: firstly, to question how American mythology is reimagined in an age of technologised war, and secondly to present a framework for interpreting contemporary imaginaries of empire by way of their representation through masculinity.

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