Carl Silvio, in his essay “Refiguring the Radical Cyborg in Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell,” provides two different ways to read the film. He also describes how these two possible readings relate to/embody the ideas put forth by Donna Haraway in her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”. Though I understand and agree with both of Silvio’s readings of the film in this article, I tend to agree more with the second.
Silvio’s first reading asserts that the film successfully inverts traditional gender roles in its representation of Major and that it echoes Haraway’s theories on how “technology can enable one to transcend the prescriptive limits of our contemporary social environment” (Silvio). He observes that the way in which Major is represented through most of the film (that is, having extraordinary strength and being able to perform feats of great athleticism and power) strips her of the traditional characteristics given to females. Haraway states in her article that “there is not even such a state as ‘being’ female” (pg 155) but alludes to the fact that instead, ‘females’ are a collection of characteristics and limits that society has placed on them. She asserts that the cyborg allows us to transcend these traditional limits placed not only on gender but also on humans in general; and Silvio argues in his first reading that Ghost in the Shell demonstrates this very idea by allowing Major to do things that no human could do.
In this first reading, Silvio also argues that The Puppet Master “represents a truly technologized, posthuman subject, an example of a non-human cyber-consciousness whose computerized existence enables rather than limits”. This echoes Haraway’s assertion that the cyborg (that is, the “hybrid of machine and organism”) allows us to escape from contemporary power structures (most specifically sexual power structures). Haraway claims that “cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms” (chief of which are “self/other, mind/body…[and] male/female”); and Silvio points out that both Major and The Puppet Master embody this idea of escaping from the norms of these dualisms.
In his second reading of the film, however, Silvio argues two main points. The first is that the cinematic aspects of the movie itself and the way that the characters of Major and Botau are represented undermine any chances the film had of serving to deconstruct gender norms. Major and Botau both serve as idealized members of their genders; however, as Silvio notes, “Kusanagi’s body spends much more time in a state of nakedness [and]…none of the male characters ever disrobe or appear naked.” Throughout the film, Major is constantly seen in the nude, and the camera spends a lot of time focusing on the most ‘female’ aspects of her form. This fully undercuts the significance of the fact that she embodies many male gender characteristics, and causes her to appear instead “as [a] passive, eroticized object”. Silvio notes that if the male cyborgs in the film were focused on in a similar manner as Major, this undercutting might not be so severe. The nature of the cinematography and the constant nudity of the character of Major reverse any attempt to use this character to deconstruct gender norms; these things in fact turn her into the familiar paradigm of “woman as sexualized object for the enjoyment of the male gaze”.
The second argument that Silvio makes in his second reading of the film is that Major and The Puppet Master embody conventional gender assumptions that have been around throughout history. The Puppet Master is representative of the mind, reason, and consciousness. These things have all, according to Silvio, been traditionally attributed to the male gender. Inversely, Major’s character is clearly linked to the body, and Silvio states that this echoes the traditional belief that women are more connected to the body and less to the mind. Silvio further asserts that the very language of The Puppet Master’s statement, “you will bear my offspring onto the net itself” places onto Kusanagi the traditional gender stereotype of “the female body as the bearer of life”. Silvio says that associating her with the idea of reproduction (although this language was not necessary, as she is not physically bearing offspring) further undermines any attempts to have this character reconstruct gender norms. Furthermore, Silvio points out that The Puppet Master cannot surmount traditional male stereotypes, because he is “occupying the position of one who enters the female body and enables it to bear its cybernetic fruit”.
Though I agreed in part with both of Silvio’s readings of the film, I think it would be hard to watch the film in keeping with the first reading without by necessity admitting the validity of the second. I agree with Silvio’s statement that the film seems to present to us a “destabilization of binary sexual difference” (emphasis on the word ‘seems’). However, I more fully agree with his assertion that “the sudden activation of this trope [that is, the gender normative stereotypes in the preceding paragraph] within the film’s climactic scene” makes this destabilization almost entirely moot.
