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Ambivalent Portrayals of Female Cyborgs in Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell and Innocence
Yoshie Endo
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2012.05.001
Osaka Gakuin University, Osaka, Japan
What we witness is that Oshii’s narrative and patriarchal technology creates the female cyborgs, who simply mirror male heterosexual desire and who are denied agency in their role. Oshii does not imagine any possibility that might destabilize his newly-imagined order, such as a cyborg that might upset heterosexuality. The absence of any female agency or desire in his cyber fantasy questions its subversive potential. Oshii seems to be immune to feminist theories on posthuman existence that conceptualizes subjectivity outside the gender polarities. Oshii describes a society where high technology only reinforces gender polarities. The representations of women’s relationship to technology in Oshii’s film, therefore, are quite problematic; the transgression of boundaries does not work out to reduce or annihilate domination by patriarchal needs and desires. Despite the fact that Oshii denies his female cyborgs a subject position other than that based exclusively in patriarchal fear and desire, his representations mark an ambivalence inherent in cyborg resistance, and feminist politics need to pay attention to such ambivalence.
posthuman, cyborg, doll, psychoanalysis
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