Between Man and Machine:Masculinity, Technology and Spaces of Empire in AmericanNarratives of the “Global War on Terror”
Bibliographic record
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".