ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the importance of surveillance in warfare and of the technologies used to conduct it. It argue that one of the core concerns of Haunting, specifically in/(hyper)visibility is intertwined with the gendered logics of the watcher/watched dyad. The chapter discusses one of the bizarre elements of Reaper crew surveillance, which is the development of a curious ‘distant intimacy’. It describes in/(hyper)visibility on its head by situating the crews, rather than their targets, as the feminised objects of scrutiny and speculation. The chapter explores reaper crews are usually invisible to their targets, but they are distinctly visible to military leadership through a web of connectivity. Visibility is constructed in feminist thinking in this way in part because of the connection between masculinity and ocularcentric logics, a legacy of the scientific Enlightenment. Maintaining a ‘long screwdriver’ that puts apparently phantom commanders ‘back in the cockpit’ actually serves to remove the crews themselves.
