Title: An Ethical Critique of Drone Warfare in the Female War Narrative of Grounded

Abstract: George Brant’s political drama Grounded centers on the wartime experience of a female drone operator, revealing the complex entanglement of technological rationality, gender order, and state power in the post-9/11 context. By rendering warfare remote and interface-mediated, drone operations erode the situational foundations of traditional war ethics, transforming violence from embodied confrontation into a decontextualized technological procedure. Within this system, technological rationality operates in tandem with patriarchal discipline to suppress women’s bodily experience and affective perception, leaving the ethical subject in a state of suspension. The play’s feminized imagery—most notably the “Gorgon Eyes”—exposes the aesthetic mechanisms that mask technological violence while also revealing the internal paradox of this symbolic structure. Through its representation of female wartime experience, the drama offers a critical reflection on the violent logic of technologized warfare and, in the faint glimmer of individual ethical resistance, reopens the question of responsibility and human subjectivity in the age of technological war.

Keywords: female war experience, drone warfare, technology, ethics, crisis of subjectivity

Author: Tian Liu, Lecturer, School of Foreign Languages, Hunan University of Technology and Business, Changsha, Hunan, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.01.013