Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell - The Diigo Meta page

• 27 Jan 20
  

  vjmvjm

  mscedc

• 19 Mar 13
  

  sandyle
  • "When bodies are [thus] constituted as information, they  can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to  market pressure" (86; my italics). This is one of the most feared aspects  of cyborg technology, its ability to transform the material body into something  akin to coded information, thereby making it more amenable and vulnerable to  social control.
  • "When bodies are [thus] constituted as information, they  can not only be sold but fundamentally reconstituted in response to  market pressure" (86; my italics). This is one of the most feared aspects  of cyborg technology, its ability to transform the material body into something  akin to coded information, thereby making it more amenable and vulnerable to  social control.
  • the malleability   and submission of the body in relation to the larger system not only makes it   more amenable to social control but, by virtue of the very devaluation which   necessarily accompanies this process, suggests that it is alterable, or even   dispensable, as well. While the body’s status as nothing but a "shell" may work   to control the occupant of that shell, it also suggests the possibility that the   shell could be re-coded, exchanged for another, or discarded entirely.
  • Cyber-technology’s capacity to "dematerialize" the body can  thus be articulated with a strategy for escaping contemporary institutions of  power. This transcendence of the limits of corporeality
  • Such an image of the female body would seem to possess  a tremendous potential to destabilize normative conceptions of sexual identity  because "To be both female and strong implicitly violates traditional codes  of feminine identity"
  • While I have  suggested that the attribution of "masculine" characteristics to this  character works to minimize the significance of its feminine coding, we can also  argue exactly the opposite.
  • The visual objectification of Kusanagi’s nudity  more likely serves to negate the significance of her occupation of a masculine  narrative position.
  • here is no gratuitous lingering of the camera’s gaze on his  body in shots that seem designed exclusively for erotic enjoyment.
  • Kusanagi is  thus reinscribed within one of our most familiar paradigms of femininity: woman  as sexualized object for the enjoyment of the male gaze.
  • I  would argue, however, that the film does more than simply mirror certain  contradictory cultural attitudes towards technology, that it works instead to resolve  these contradictions by privileging a more conservative version of sexual  identity than that offered to us by Haraway’s radical cyborg.

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• 06 Dec 07
  

  Nele Noppe

  academic anime general ghost_in_the_shell oshii_mamoru

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