Military mimicry:the art of concealment, deception, and imitation

Three dominant thematics emerge from the biological mimicry and camouflage literature, namely, concealment, deception, and imitation. These phenomena are interesting in their own right, but conceptually have similar analogs in the military context that have attracted only minimal intellectual curiosity. Accordingly, the purpose of this paper is to apply biological mimicry and camouflage concepts to the military environment. Concealment in the form of camouflage is traced from its nineteenth century origins to the military's imminent twenty-first century perfection of an “invisibility cloak”. Military deception is the art of duping enemies with fakes and dummies. Finally, imitation is examined from three perspectives: firstly, replacement of military personnel with animals; secondly, exploration of bioengineering, including exploitation of avian aerodynamics, insect biophysical structures, and mammal sonar attributes; and, thirdly, Artificial Intelligence that is driving military mimicry along an evolutionary path towards robots, swarms, and avatars in an emerging and novel military technology revolutio

Weaponized Women in Contemporary Visual Culture : Representing Military Women in the ‘War on Terror’

This thesis examines representations of military women in contemporary Western visual culture during the ‘War on Terror’ (2001-present). Through the comparison of cultural productions that center on military women (e.g. films, TV series, etc.), I assess the current perpetuation of representational patterns established by a long tradition of the military/war genre. Moreover, I attempt to identify new patterns and tropes, and also categorize any divergences to pre-established patterns. With this study I intend to explore the hypothesis that military women are subjected to systematic stereotyping when featured in fictional narratives as protagonists, which I understand to be a signal of a larger problem, concerning the instrumentalization of military women by military/political forces. Drawing from the works of Cynthia Enloe, Barbara Ehrenreich, Yvonne Tasker, among other critics who theorized on this subject, I attempt to expand on what was already written, adding original material relating exclusively to the period of the ‘War on Terror’. Through the comparison and analysis of intermedia artworks from the US and European countries (UK, and France), I offer a wide cultural study on the fictionalization of military women. By focusing on US and European cultural representations of servicewomen I aim to verify the existence of similarities which may suggest a transatlantic cohesion in regard to not only representational tropes, but also military/political interests. The thesis is divided into three parts, each corresponding to an important stage in military life. Therefore, chronologically, the first part is dedicated to ‘Boot Camp’, the second to ‘Deployment’, and the last to ‘Discharge’. This structure is intended to compartmentalize stages that introduce different sets of challenges to women in the military. Through this approach, I am able to direct my focus towards each segment as a whole, exploring correspondent cultural products that encompass dominant representations in each stage of military life. The final objective of this research is to acknowledge how fictional depictions of military women can help us achieve a clearer image of a collective Western understanding of what it means to be a female and a soldier. Additionally, I aim to identify how those depictions are used to convey specific ideological messages pertaining to (trans)national interests during the ‘War on Terror’. Furthermore, through this cultural analysis I intend to contribute to an expanding field concerned with gender equality in Western armed forces.Esta tese analisa representações da mulher militar na cultura visual Ocidental contemporânea durante o período da ‘Guerra ao Terror’ (2001-presente). Através da comparação de produtos culturais centrados na mulher militar (e.g. filmes, séries de TV, etc.), examino a perpetuação actual de padrões de representação estabelecidos por uma longa tradição do género militar/guerra. Para além deste trabalho de comparação, identifico novos padrões e estereótipos, ao mesmo tempo categorizando divergências dos padrões previamente estabelecidos. Com este estudo, pretendo explorar a hipótese de que as mulheres militares estão sujeitas a estereótipos sistemáticos aquando protagonizam narrativas ficcionais, o que problematizo enquanto instrumentalização da mulher militar por forças militares/políticas. Apoiando-me nos trabalhos de Cynthia Enlow, Barbara Ehrenreich, Yvonne Tasker, entre outra/os crítica/os que teorizaram acerca deste tópico, pretendo expandir o trabalho que já existe, acrescentando material original relacionado exclusivamente com o período da ‘Guerra ao Terror’. Através da comparação e análise de vários tipos de obras artísticas visuais provindas dos Estados Unidos e de países Europeus (Reino Unido e França), dedico-me a um alargado estudo cultural focado na ficcionalização da mulher militar. Ao focar-me em representações culturais estadunidenses e europeias pretendo verificar a existência de semelhanças que possam sugerir uma coesão transatlântica no que diz respeito não só a estereótipos representacionais, mas também a interesses militares/políticos. Esta tese está dividida em três partes, cada uma correspondendo a uma fase importante da vida militar. Desta forma, cronologicamente, a primeira parte intitula-se ‘Boot Camp’ (campo de treino militar), a segunda ‘Deployment’ (projecção das forças militares no terreno), e a última ‘Discharge’ (dispensa militar). Esta estrutura visa compartimentar períodos que apresentam conjuntos de dificuldades diferentes para a mulher militar. Através desta abordagem, direcciono o meu foco de atenção para cada segmento como um todo, explorando produções culturais correspondentes que demonstram as representações dominantes em cada fase da vida militar. O objectivo final deste trabalho de investigação é identificar o que dizem as representações ficcionais da mulher militar acerca de um entendimento Ocidental colectivo do que significa ser mulher e soldado. Adicionalmente, pretendo também reconhecer como essas representações são utilizadas para transmitir mensagens ideológicas específicas, relativas a interesses (trans)nacionais durante a ‘Guerra ao Terror’. Através desta análise cultural pretendo ainda contribuir para os estudos que apoiam a igualdade de género nas forças armadas Ocidentais

Facing Forward: Art & Theory from a Future Perspective

Contributors to this volume include participants in the Facing Forward Project of 2011-12, which started as a collaboration between the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, ..

Ambivalent animal

The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.Ph.D.Committee Chair: Bolter, Jay; Committee Member: DiSalvo, Carl; Committee Member: Do, Ellen; Committee Member: Prophet, Jane; Committee Member: Thacker, Eugen

Bugs After the Bomb: Insect Representations in Postatomic American Fiction and Film.

As cold-blooded invertebrates which more often provoke disgust than delight, insect tend to be overlooked within animal studies in favor of warm-blooded beings in whom it is easier to perceive expression of emotion more “like ours.” Since insects and other arthropods are often conceived of as smaller, “lower,” and more “simple” forms of life, they are thought of as more like machines than animals, lifeless automatons that react to the world with blind instinct rather than agential beings who respond to the world with proclivities and inclinations all their own. This dissertation examines how such a view of insects and other bug-like creatures embodied cultural anxieties about postatomic life in 20th century North American literature, film, and culture. I coin the term “insectoid figuration” to expand beyond Linnaean classification to account for the more affectively motivated layperson’s categorical understanding of “bugs” in order to argue that insectoid figuration became a powerful political register for articulating concerns about American social order, language, dehumanization, and xenophobia. I bridge critical animal studies, materialist feminism, affect theory, and posthumanism to reveal how humanism depends upon abjection of animality by espousing exceptionalist views of human affective capacities. The various insectoid figurations which I explore in this dissertation—the bevy of mutated, big bugs which stomped across the celluloid screen in the 1950s; the centipede as an agent of viral control in William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and other cut-up experimentations; the femme fatale gynoid modeled on insect mimicry and praying mantises in Philip K. Dick’s dystopic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?; the Oankali, an insectoid alien species which seeks genetic trade with humans in Octavia E. Butler’s speculative trilogy Lilith’s Brood—shuttle between the literal and figurative, the material and semiotic, encompass a range of affects and anxieties, and ultimately form a signifying constellation which lays bare shifts in how American social order was conceptualized after the chaos of World War II and in the aftermath of atomic potentiality especially in response to severe environmental degradation.PhDEnglish and Women's StudiesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/133284/1/cscassel_1.pd

Thinking goddess/nature: feminist metaphysics and the thealogical imagination

This thesis contributes to a small but growing body of academic research that is concerned with the late twentieth and early twenty-first century religion of Goddess feminism and the religio-political discourse of thealogy. Current academic approaches to Goddess feminism have been primarily historical, -- I- phenomenological, psychological and sociological studies that have presented descriptive and/or functional accounts of this religion. Relatively little academic work has emerged from within Goddess feminism. Still less has attempted to delineate the meaning of a female/feminist deity and religious worldview in a philosophical manner. This thesis attends to these areas of academic neglect by combining philosophical concems and methods with a position of thealogical advocacy. By developing a thealogical reading of the principal reality-claims embedded within a number of influential Goddess feminist texts it is, I propose, possible to address philosophical questions that have not, as yet, been confronted by Goddess feminists, and also theorize the contours and coherence of what may be termed a feminist metaphysic. Most Goddess feminists, I contend, presently emphasize the affective, experiential and performative dimensions of their religion, to the detriment or exclusion of the conceptual, philosophical and metaphysical. I argue in this thesis that there are no compelling reasons why Goddess feminists should reject philosophy and metaphysics. There are, rather, good political, practical and religious reasons for feminist thealogians, to produce an alternative metaphysic of deity and the world to those deployed by patriarchy. Throughout this constructive work of thealogy recurrent Goddess feminist models, myths and reality-claims, such as those of the cosmogonic womb, the cycling processes of Birth-Death-Rebirth, and the web of life, are conceptually unpacked, developed and elucidated so as to provide a comprehensive thealogical, and thereby metaphysical, account of the fundamental organization of reality and the human condition. The originality and significance of this thesis lies in its elaboration of a feminist metaphysical account of the Goddess as nature, Goddess/Naturet,h, at has largely been assumedr ather than articulated by most Goddess feminists. I conclude that although it is not, as yet, possible to articulate a complete Goddess feminist metaphysical theory, it is possible to develop a philosophical and systematic thealogy that delineates the primary metaphysical commitments and reality-claims implicit within Goddess feminist discourse in a coherent manner. This thesis is a prolegomena to future works of philosophical thealogy and feminist metaphysical theorizing

Virtual Reality and the Modern Ideology of Order and Control

In this thesis I will examine the construction of the concept of Virtual Reality. I argue that rather than a technology of liberation as it is often perceived, virtual realities\u27 conception has been influenced significantly by a discourse of control and order. I examine books, articles and films concerning Virtual Reality to support this claim. Furthermore this discourse of control and order is born out of a larger ideology of Western culture that values order and control. Throughout modernity this ideology has manifested itself through techniques and technologies of social and environmental control. I provide a brief historical outline highlighting some of these techniques and technologies focusing particularly upon surveillance. I suggest that under the guiding influence of the ideology of order and control one possible future use for Virtual Reality technology may be as a surveillance technology. The ideology of order and control is born out of a desire to transcend the unpredictable nature of life. This desire is reflected in the VR proponents aim to create a totally known and controlled artificial environment. I contend that an alternative way of thinking is needed so that objects such as Virtual Reality can be used for more appropriate purposes other than controlling and ordering. I draw upon the philosophy of Martin Heidegger to outline a thinking that is more open, and reflective, and that embraces the chaotic nature of existence. Such a thinking that is focused more upon the actual conditions of our everyday lives, may yield uses for technologies such as Virtual Reality that are more focused upon people\u27s needs

Subterranean Echoes: Curriculum Theory as Cultural Studies.

Cultural studies has emerged in recent decades as a popular realm of academic inquiry (During, 1993). Giroux (1994), while noting the field\u27s increased acceptance, ponders why cultural studies has yet to permeate critical analyses of education and simultaneously questions cultural studies\u27 reticence in considering schools as an important site of cultural production. Edgerton (1996) concurs with Giroux and notes that cultural studies\u27 use in colleges of education is extremely rare. The realm of popular culture, one of the central foci of cultural studies, has especially been marginalized in academic discourses. My project is to explore the implications of curriculum theory as cultural studies, devoting special attention to the realm of popular culture. I use post-modern notions of recombinant texts (Miller, 1996) to interrogate the possibilities of alternative sites/metaphors for curriculum theory which might be generated from popular cultural forms and practices. I pay particular attention to the modes of theoretical re-presentation that seem most prescient to the future of the curriculum theory field, and utilize multi-tiered textual strategies to elaborate the significance of such sites/metaphors. In reconceptualizing curriculum as culture, and in utilizing the antidisciplinary (Edgerton, 1996) methodology of cultural studies, I believe we approach Pinar\u27s (1991) notion of curriculum study as a visionary search. The cultural forms that I study and re-present, namely museums, rap music, science fiction, Bruce Springsteen\u27s work, and vampire films, epitomize fluid spaces which point us toward new modes of knowing and new means of relating to the world

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe cultural interaction between nuclear technology and the American West was a two-way process. On one side, an elite brotherhood of scientists and engineers at Los Alamos incorporated the romance of the frontier into the nation's atomic origin story. On the other side, the mythical construct we call "the West" mutated and matured due to its entanglement with the nuclear cycle. Only recently has it become clear that the engineer left an indelible mark on the American West equal to or even greater than that left by the cowboy. However, the engineer and the cowboy were always twin figures in the western imagination, even if the engineer usually lurked in the cowboy's shadow. The links forged between these two symbols early in the twentieth century were deliberately co-opted into the national atomic story after the war. In response, a variety of western atomic discourses began to emerge that both resisted and interacted with national narratives. As nuclearism wrote itself into the West, the stories westerners tell about themselves and their history started to change. Although the focus of this research is on the atomic literatures and discourses of the West-including fiction, memoir, poetry, drama, and nature writing-this is a multidisciplinary project that incorporates an extensive amount of history as well as a bit of scientific theory in order to more fully explore how nuclearism contributed to the changing cultural constructions of wilderness and technology in the twentieth-century American West