Louise Akers’ poetic project is an attempt to map the shift of orientation, as well as perspicacity, that accompanies technological advances in war making. If we understand that drone warfare operates on a vertical axis of violence, we can examine its orientation through modes of desire. We look up, we become spotters; we look down, through a monitor–god’s eye view. If, as Sarah Ahmed suggests in her book Queer Phenomenology, a vertical orientation is implicitly heterosexual, what/where are the lines along we can direct horizontal (queer) systems of desire to segment and deflect heteropatriarchal violence? Hijacking the form of the creation myth, Akers draws lines from the antecedents to the operators to the futures of drone warfare as it has become integral to the contemporary US American socio-political/emotional/aesthetic/religious landscape. When territories are surveilled and murder sanctioned from remote distances at great heights, we begin to conceive of space “not as it is, but space as we make it” (Hito Steyerl, Wretched of the Screen, p. 26), thus designating an invisible and ubiquitous theatre of perpetual, US American war. The dialogue is sourced from Gregoire Chamayou’s A Theory of Drone (p.1-9)
Louise Akers is a poet and and educator living in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her MFA from Brown University in May of 2018, and the Rosemary and Keith Waldrop Prize for Innovative Poetry in 2017. Louise currently serves as the Books Editor at Anomalous Press.
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