Like all warfare, drone warfare is deeply gendered. This article explores how this military technology sediments or disrupts existing conceptualizations of women who kill in war. The article using the concept of motherhood as a narrative organizing trope and introduces a ‘fictional’ account of motherhood and drone warfare and data from a ‘real life’ account of a pregnant British Reaper operator. The article considers the way trauma experienced by Reaper drone crews is reported in a highly gendered manner, reflecting the way women’s violence is generally constructed as resulting from personal failures, lost love and irrational emotionality. This irrational emotionality is tied to a long history of medicalizing women’s bodies and psychologies because of their reproductive capacities and, specifically, their wombs – explored in this article under the historico-medical term of ‘hysteria’. The article argues that where barriers to women’s participation in warfare have, in the past, hinged upon their (argued) physical weakness, and where technology renders these barriers obsolete, there remains the tenacious myth that women are emotionally incapable of conducting lethal operations – a myth based on (mis)conceptions of the ‘naturalness’ of motherhood and the feminine capacity to give life.

像所有战争一样，无人机战争也具有深远的性别意义。本文探讨了这项军事技术如何沉淀或破坏在战争中丧生的妇女的现有观念。这篇文章以母性的概念作为叙述性的组织话，并介绍了母性和无人机战争的“虚构”描述以及来自英国收割者经营者的“现实生活”中的数据。这篇文章考虑了收割者无人机工作人员遭受的伤害以高度性别歧视的方式报道的方式，反映了女性暴力通常是由于个人失败，失去的爱情和不理性的情感所造成的。这种非理性的情感与长期使妇女的身体和心理医学化的历史有关，因为她们的生殖能力特别是 他们的子宫-本文以“歇斯底里”的历史医学术语进行了探讨。文章认为，过去阻碍妇女参与战争的障碍取决于其（争论的）身体虚弱，而技术使这些障碍过时，仍然存在着顽强的神话，即妇女在情感上无能力进行致命的行动。神话基于对母性的“自然”和赋予生命的女性能力的（误）观念。