Through a discussion of drone warfare, and in particular the massacre of 23 people in the Uruzgan province in Afghanistan in 2010, I argue that drone warfare is both embodied and embodying. Drawing from posthuman feminist theorists such as Donna Haraway and N Katherine Hayles, I understand the turn toward data and machine intelligence not as an other-than-human process of decisionmaking that deprives humans of sovereignty, but as a form of embodiment that reworks and undermines essentialist notions of culture and nature, biology and technology. Through the intermediation of algorithmic, visual, and affective modes of embodiment, drone warfare reproduces gendered and racialized bodies that enable a necropolitics of massacre. Finally, the category of gender demonstrates a flaw in the supposed perfectibility of the algorithm in removing issues of identity or prejudice from security practices, as well as the perceptions of drone assemblages as comprising sublime technologies of perfect analysis and vision. Gender as both a mode of embodiment and a category of analysis is not removed by algorithmic war, but rather is put into the service of the violence it enables.

What makes Feminist Security Studies such an exciting field for me is the depth and diversity of feminists grappling with key issues of the politics of CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

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Insects and 'the swarm' as metaphors and objects of research have inspired works in the genres of science fiction and horror; social and political theorists; and the development of war-fighting technologies such as 'drone swarms', which function as robot/insect hybrids. Contemporary developments suggest that the future of warfare will not be 'robots' as technological, individualised substitutions for idealised (masculine) warfighters, but warfighters understood as swarms: insect metaphors for non-centrally organised problem-solvers that will become technologies of racialisation. As such, contemporary feminist analysis requires an analysis of the politics of life and death in the insect and the swarm, which, following Braidotti (2002), cannot be assumed to be a mere metaphor or representation of political life, but an animating materialist logic. The swarm is not only a metaphor but also a central mode of biopolitical and necropolitical war, with the 'terrorist' enemy represented as swarmlike as well. In analysing the relations of assemblage and antagonism in the war ontologies of the drone swarm, I seek inspiration from what Hayles (1999, p. 47) describes as a double vision that 'looks simultaneously at the power of simulation and at the materialities that produce it'. I discuss various representations and manifestations of swarms and insect life in science/speculative fiction, from various presentations of the 'Borg' in

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