Making martial politics palatable: constructing neoliberal feminist subjects in arms manufacturers’ social media feeds

ABSTRACT

In this article, I examine social media output from three of the largest arms manufacturers (by profit): Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Raytheon, all based in the United States. I ask: how, if at all, are women represented? What do these representations do? To answer these questions, I examine all of the tweets sent by these manufacturers over a three-month period and find that the Twitter content (1) normalizes women within the company context, (2) presents the companies as empowering and inspiring, and (3) shows the companies to be places for individual women to succeed. Central to all of these representations is intersectionality, with the companies depicting women of color frequently, especially Black women. I argue that the social media output of arms manufacturers helps to “make possible” the arms trade by presenting these companies as neoliberal, multicultural feminist beacons of social progress, rendering ambivalent criticisms about the suffering inflicted by their products.

KEYWORDS:

• Martial politics
• arms trade
• neoliberal feminism
• social media
• visual analysis

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Louise Pears, Rosie Walters, Emma Dolan, and Sam Louden-Cooke for providing detailed feedback on a draft of this work. Thanks are also due to Emily St Denny and Althea-Maria Rivas for offering comments and tips in their role as editors as part of the 2021 British International Studies Association Postgraduate Network “Meet the Editors” session, as well as to the organizers of the event. I am also very grateful to Laura Shepherd, Jamie Gaskarth, and Ben Bowman for helping me to polish the abstract of this article, as well as Deborah Ring and Ben Woolhead, who have done a stellar job in copy-editing the work for publication. Finally, I would like to thank my three anonymous reviewers, who (kindly!) pushed me to make this article as strong as possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Academic understanding of social media ethics has not kept pace with use (Williams, Burnap, and Sloan 2017), partly because of the aforementioned public/private ambiguities. I suggest that there are subjects from whom it is unnecessary to obtain explicit consent in particular contexts, and the social media output of arms manufacturers falls into this category. This is because of the serious harm that their products inflict and because these companies expect their tweets to be read, as evidenced by their employment of public relations companies (in this case, Sprinklr) to manage output. See Jester (forthcoming) for a longer discussion about ethics in this context.

2 According to Lockheed Martin (2015), 25 percent of its workforce is female.

3 Raytheon’s CEO at the time of writing was a Black man named John Harris, who was named or depicted six times within collected tweets.

4 This is a quote tweet of @ivankatrump.

5 The middle portion of this quote is interesting for a different reason: “see so many other women on console, or doing other things here.” The companies selected derive more than 85 percent of their sales from arms, and thus “other things” refers implicitly to martial activities.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Natalie Jester

Natalie Jester is a Lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire, UK. Her research focuses on the relationship between identity and security in digital spaces. Common themes include gender, state identity, violence, and the everyday. Her research interests are reflected in her teaching, which covers a range of modules related to international issues and identity.