Rethinking the embodiment of gender in Mamoru Oshii’s film Ghost in the shell

College

College of Liberal Arts

Document Type

Article

Source Title

Suri

Volume

7

Issue

2

First Page

94

Last Page

110

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

This paper critically examines the posthuman narrative of Mamoru Oshii’s film Ghost in the Shell as it depicts a posthuman embodiment that addresses a complex and shifting relationship between body and technology. Considering how cyborg feminists and posthumanists find the technological particularly productive in redeploying embodiment within a gendered context, this paper particularly analyses the deployment of posthuman bodies in the film and the extent to which technology in the (re)formulation of subjectivity has been bound up with gender. The portrayals of cyborg bodies throughout the film, the paper argues, provide a valuable site of exploring (1) how a gendered subject specifically emerges within the general corpus of cyborg texts, and (2) how the gender performativity that the subject executes offers a queer imaginary—one that potentially undermines and denaturalizes heteronormativity. This implies that the ways in which the film uses the cyborg figure to articulate the discursive constitution of the posthuman body offers significant implications for the theorization of the posthuman and human that is in dialogue with the questions of gender.

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Disciplines

Arts and Humanities

Keywords

Posthumanism in motion pictures; Gender identity in motion pictures; Mamoru Oshii, 1951-; Motion picture producers and directors—Japan

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