Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity Author(S): Sharalyn Orbaugh Reviewed Work(S): Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol

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Sex and the Single Cyborg: Japanese Popular Culture Experiments in Subjectivity Author(s): Sharalyn Orbaugh Reviewed work(s): Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 29, No. 3, Japanese Science Fiction (Nov., 2002), pp. 436- 452 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241109 . Accessed: 19/08/2012 21:49

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http://www.jstor.org 436 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002)

SharalynOrbaugh

Sex and the Single Cyborg:Japanese Popular Culture Experimentsin Subjectivity

I found that these people possessed a method of communicating their experiences and feelings to one another by articulate sounds.... This was indeed a godlike science, and I ardently desired to become acquainted with it ... for I easily perceived that, although I longed to discover myself to the cottagers, I ought not to make the attemptuntil I had first become master of their language; which knowledge might enable me to make them overlook the deformity of my figure; for with this also the contrastperpetually presented to my eyes had made me acquainted. (Shelley 121-24) What is really being debatedin the discourse surroundinga cyborg futureare contemporary disputes concerning gender and sexuality, with the futureproviding a clean slate, or a blank screen, onto which we can project our fascinationand fears. (Springer322) Visual representationsof cyborgs are ... not only utopian or dystopian prophesies, but ratherreflections of a contemporarystate of being. The image of the cyborg body functions as a site of condensationand displacement. It containson its surface and in its fundamental structure the multiple fears and desires of a culture in the process of transform-ation. (Gonzalez 267) As ClaudiaSpringer and Jennifer Gonzalez contend, cyborgs are not aboutthe future,they are aboutcontemporary society and its currenttransformations. In this essay I will discussrecent Japanese narratives that use the figureof the cyborgto explorenew paradigmsof subjectivity,as theadvanced nations of the worldbecome increasingly postmodern, postnational, postindustrial, and even posthuman.In particular,I will focus on two aspectsof subjectivitythat have been fundamentalto the modern-as opposed to postmodern-notionof personhood:sexuality and singularity. The figure of thecyborg-that embodied amalgamof theorganic and the technological-confounds the modernist criteria for subjectivityand, when featured in narrative,allows readers/viewers to think throughthe ramificationsof the changeswe currentlyface. The culturalproducts that engage the notionof the cyborghelp us to come to termswith the meaningof thisnew relationshipbetween the human body and technologyas thatrelationship unfolds: narrative helps us to workthrough the fearsand desires of a particularhistorical-cultural moment. We are eachof us alreadycompelled daily to face the breakdownof the distinctionbetween the mechanical/technologicaland the organic/biotic. Cyborg narratives allow us, in JenniferGonzalez's phrasing, to personify,condense, and displace the anxieties andhopes raised by this situation. DonnaHaraway, the best-knowntheorist of cyborgsubjectivity, explains some of the fears and hopes that most fundamentallycharacterize cyborg narrative:"In retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths of originof Westernculture. We haveall beencolonized by thoseorigin myths, with theirlonging for fulfillmentin apocalypse"(175).' She suggeststhat the only way to avoid the hypocrisiesand dangersof Westernculture's current SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG 437 trajectoryis to recastorigin myths-which culturesuse to explaintheir own ontologyand subjectivity to themselves-to confrontand subvert narratives of (false) innocenceand apocalypse. I would contendthat, in general, Japanesepopular-culture forms work throughissues of apocalypse,survival, and the impossibilityof establishing innocencefar moreoften andin termsof greatermoral complexity than those of NorthAmerica. For example,Susan Napier has arguedthat a multitudeof Japanesepopular-culture products-from the 1950s GODZILLAfilms to the internationallypopular anime film Akira(1988)-can be seen as attemptsto grapplewith issues arisingfrom the 1945 atomicbombings and the very real possibilityof globalannihilation that they implied (Anime 197). In the Godzilla filmswe see anothercommon characteristic of Japanesepopular narrative: both the destructive and the potentially productive aspects of technology are explored. Consequences, including occasionally the pointless deaths of protagonists, are rarely evaded in Japanesepopular narrative. In anothersense, too, Japanesecultural production may offer a particularly fertile area for the study of cyborgs and subjectivity. Japanesesocial discourse incorporatesrobots and cyborgs with little of the implicit dread often found in North American references. Manga artist SHIROMasamune has remarkedthat from childhood Japanesechildren are educatedin robots/robotics.Starting with [the cartoon characters] Astro Boy and Arare-chan, and progressing to Doraemon-these are all robots. Japanesechildren give robots names and see them as friends, and are raised from the beginning with an image of robots that portrays them as extremely useful.... (qtd in Ueno 116). As opposed to the terrifying figure of Darth Vader-one of the first memorable cyborgs encountered by children in North America-Japanese children enjoy a wide range of characters that mix human and machinic elements.2 Certainly it is difficult to overlook the large number of robots, cyborgs, and "metal fighting suits" in Japanese television, animated videos (anime), and comic books (manga). While many of these narrativeproducts can be dismissed as unimaginativeor derivative, others are complex andthoughtful, and their sheer quantitymeans that the various issues at the heart of the new cyborg paradigm are explored in Japanese popular culture perhaps more thoroughly than anywhere else. (And, given the extraordinarypopularity of manga and anime outside Japan, this exploration is shared by increasing numbers of internationalviewers.) Further, Japanese popular culture may enjoy a particularly significant, persistent engagement with the cyborgian because of its participationin what I call the "Frankensteinsyndrome." I have proposed this notion as a parallel to what film theorist Rey Chow has called the "King Kong syndrome." Drawing inspirationfrom the 1933 film, she identifies a tendency on the part of Western countries to read the non-West as the "site of the 'raw' material that is 'monstrosity,' [which] is produced for the surplus value of spectacle, entertainment, and spiritual enrichment for the 'First World"' (84). My inflection of the parallel notion, the "Frankensteinsyndrome"-inspired by 438 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002)

MaryShelley's 1818 novel rather than any of the fims-refers to the tendency of developingcountries, those defined as "monstrous"and "raw" by thealready developednations, to see themselvesin thosesame terms. WhenJapan re-opened to theworld in themid-nineteenth century after more than250 years of isolation,one of the most powerfulmessages of Western discoursethe Japaneseabsorbed was the "scientificallyproven" racial and culturalinferiority of the "Asiatic"race. Less thanfifty yearslater, Japan had replicatedevery aspect of Anglo-Europeanmodernity with astounding success: cutting-edgescience, medicine, and technology; a colonialempire supported by a powerfulmilitary; a fully developedindustrial economy. Nonetheless, after helpingthe Allied powersdefeat Germany in WWIand becoming a founding memberof the League of Nations,Japan was once again relegatedto the position of anomalousOther by the other foundingnations' refusal to incorporatea statementof basicracial equality in its charter(Dower 204). Likethe monsterin Shelley'sFrankenstein, rejected first by his creatorand eventuallyby all the otherhumans with whom he triedto establishcontact, the peopleof modernizingJapan were forced time and again to recognizethat even the completeacquisition of the "godlikescience" of language-in the formof thediscourses of industrial,post-enlightenment modernism-was not enough to save themfrom the curseof monstrosityin the eyes of the West. All modern Japaneseliterature and arthas been (andcontinues to be) producedunder the shadowof this recognition,leading to an unusualconcern with monstrousor anomalousbodies/subjectivities and various attendantissues. In striking similarityto the key themes in Shelley's Frankenstein, some of the most pressingissues for Japanese modern narrative have been questions of legitimacy andillegitimacy (based on animproperly resolved oedipal crisis), non-normative formsof reproduction,the hybridity of bodiesor subjectivities,and ambiguous or anomalousincarnations of gender/sex/sexuality.3I have writtenelsewhere aboutthe effects of theseculturally-specific concerns on thedevelopment of the figureof thecyborg/robot/android in Japanese popular culture from 1870 to the present.4Here I will confinemyself to discussionof two very recentJapanese cyborgnarratives and to a limitedset of questionsregarding cyborg subjectivity. The title of this essay incorporatestwo of the key terms I use in my explorationof cyborgsubjectivity: "sex" and "single."I beginby explaining why sexualityand singularity are so importantin thiscontext, and then discuss two recent anime narratives-Shinseiki Evangelion (1995-96, Neon Genesis Evangelion, 1996-97)and K6kaku kid6tai (1995, Ghost in the Shell, 1996)-in termsof the nexusof contemporaryfears or desiresregarding subjectivity that is beingnegotiated through those depictions. Sexualityand singularityare not unrelated,of course,since partneredsex andits variousconsequences present one of the mostcommon contexts within which the humanexperience of the singularityof the subjectis challenged -through intimacy,loss of self in orgasm,pregnancy, infection, and so on. Luce Irigarayhas writteneloquently (though in a differentcontext) about the experienceof sexuality/subjectivitythat is not singular:"within herself, she is SEX AND THESINGLE CYBORG 439 already two-but not divisible into one(s)...." (24).5 She eventually arrives at the useful term "not-two" for this doubled but coherent kind of subjectivity. In one highly interesting attempt to map the conceptual limits of human subjectivity, Elizabeth Grosz has invoked the examples of conjoined twins and intersexed people.6 A consideration of these naturally-occurringanomalous subjectivities can help in understandingthe conceptual challenges involved in cyborg subjectivity. Conjoinedtwins challenge the notion of the individual,autonomous identity housed in a singular body; they demonstrate the possibility of separate personalities and consciousnesses-separate subjectivities-in a single physical unit. Moreover, althoughconjoined twins have separateconsciousnesses, Grosz quotes first-personaccounts that underscore the fact thatthe "usualhard and fast distinction between the boundaries of one subject or another are continually blurred" (62) to a degree unimaginable to morphologically singular human beings, even including identical twins.7 In the case of intersexed or ambisexualpeople, the morphologicalbinaries of male and female-usually taken to be utterly natural and universal-are confounded. Again it may be difficult for the single-sexed individual to conceptualize the experience of subjectivity embodied in a way that is not sexually unitary or singular. But it is importantto stress that while conjoined twins and intersexed people cannot be considered and do not experience themselves as singular/unitary/one,neither can they be considered(nor do they experience themselves) as doubled/separate/two (Grosz 58-65). They are incarnationsof the aforementionednotion of the "not-two." In the case of some kinds of cyborgs, it is possible at least to sketch the boundaries, the interfacing surfaces, between one component (the biotic) and another(the techno-mechanical),but once the two are joined, those boundaries are meaningless in terms of determiningor experiencing subjectivity.8Some common examples of this would include people who have been inoculatedand those with transplantedorgans or prostheticdevices. We can separatethe parts, but once they are combined, they make one functionalunit. In premodem and modern(ist) conceptualizationsof subjectivity, naturally occurring anomalies ("monsters")such as conjoinedtwins and hermaphrodites functioned to mark the borders of the "normal"embodiment of the "normal" subject. In Judith Butler's terms, these "monsters" formed the constitutive "outside" that "secures and, hence, fails to secure the very borders of materiality" (Bodies that Matter 188). Cyborgs, which are by defimitionnot naturally occurring, serve in a new but equally significant way to mark the borders of modern(ist) subjectivityand simultaneouslyto reveal the ways those borders are breaking down and being redrawn in postmodern, posthuman paradigms. In the case of cultural production in Japan, cyborgs and other anomalous -hybrid, "not-two"-embodiments performthe same function:that of marking the abject borders that serve to define "normal" subjectivity. But in Japan, because of the "Frankensteinsyndrome," the bodies or subjectivitiesmarked as anomalous may simultaneously be identified as simply "Japanese," since 440 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002)

"monstrosity"is "normal"for those defined as Other by Western hegemonic discourse. This allows for an exploration of the hybrid, monstrous, cyborg subject from a sympathetic, interior point of view rarely found in North American cultural products. Another culturally specific aspect of Japanese narrative is the frequent appearance of "female" or ambiguously gendered cyborgs. This, too, relates back, I would argue, to Japan's experience of feminization by the dominantWestern powers of the nineteenthcentury.9 The Japanesepeople currentlyinvolved in scholarshipand cultural production around the figure of the cyborg are completely knowledgeable about Western science fiction and cyborg theory, and they consider themselves as participatingfully in an internationalconversation on the topic. Nonetheless, the history of Japan's modernizationhas produceda body of cyborg discourse thatdiffers in these and other importantrespects from that of North America. The questions most frequently asked about conjoined twins and intersexed people are echoed in contemporary Japanese narrative explorations of the cyborg. We might wonder of conjoined twins, which is really in control of the body, or to what extent do they have separatecontrol? How do they coordinate movement and agency? In the case of cyborgs we are temptedto ask the same question: what is the power relationship between the biotic and techno- mechanical components; which is "really" in control? These questions may be as meaningless for the cyborg itself as they are when posed to conjoined twins-but those of us who consider ourselves to be morphologicallysingular beings strain through such questions to understanddual subjects. Similarly, manyhave wonderedof bothconjoined twins andhermaphrodites: how and with whom do they have sex? (One of the most frequently reported facts about the original "Siamese twins," Chang and Eng Bunker, is that they marriedsisters and fatheredmore than twenty children.) This questiondoes not arise solely out of prurientcuriosity, but ratherout of our fundamentalbelief, "identifiedby Foucault as the sign of modernityitself, that sex 'harbourswhat is most true in ourselves"' (qtd in Clarkand Myser 347). It is no surprise, then, thatmany explorationsof the natureand potentialof cyborg subjectivityinvolve a focus on sexuality in some sense as well-even if the focus is on the impossibility or irrelevance of some form of sexual behavior. The two Japanese anime under consideration here are no exception. Evangelionexplores the aspects of humansexuality involving bodily conjoining, intimacy, and penetration/permeabilityplayed out through a cyborg subject. Ghost in the Shell examines and rejects old forms of species reproductionin favor of cyborgian and cybernetic alternatives. Evangelion, directed by ANNOHideaki, was broadcastevery Wednesday night from October 1995 to March 1996 on Tokyo TV Channel 12, a total of twenty-six episodes. It was immediately and hugely popular. The story is extremely complex, but for current purposes I will provide only a brief synopsis. The setting is 2015, fifteen years after the global disaster known as "Second Impact" when a meteor had hit Antarctica and the resulting shock waves, tidal waves, and melting ice cap had killed billions of people. This is the official story. Most people are not aware that what actually happenedwas an SEX AND THESINGLE CYBORG 441 attackby an unknownalien machine or creature,called a "shito"-a wordthat means"apostle" or "disciple,"but is alwaystranslated into English, at director Anno's insistence,as "angel."The creaturewas destroyed,and the resulting explosionis whatactually caused Second Impact. It is now fifteenyears later, and angels have begun appearingagain. The most powerfulof conventional weaponsare useless againstthem; the only effectiveweapon is a kindof huge "metal suit" robot, called an EVA, designedand deployedby a special internationalteam called "NERV." The EVAs look very much like the conventionalfighting robots of the metalsuit ("mecha")genre, but they have a few idiosyncraticcharacteristics: they can only be pilotedby fourteen-year- olds; andeach EVA andits designatedpilot must achieve a highdegree of bio- electrical synchronizationin order to function. Developingthis ability to biologicallyinterface and harmonizecan take months.When the narrative beginsthere are only two EVAsin existence,a prototypemodel, 00, pilotedby a mysteriousgirl namedRei, andthe firstTest Model, 01, for whoma pilothas yet to be found. In the first episode the fourteen-year-oldprotagonist, IKARI Shinji, is summonedto NERV headquartersby his estrangedfather, IKARIGendo. Thinkinghis fatherhas summonedhim out of affection,Shinji is shockedto learn that, on the contrary,his fatherwants him thereonly to pilot the new EVA. Sincean angelis at thatvery momentattacking headquarters, Shinji has no time to thinkabout taking on this task. At his continuedrefusals his father ordersthat Rei, the pilot of EVA 00, be broughtin to battlethe EVA, despite the fact thatshe is still badlywounded from an earliersortie. Rei is broughtin on a stretcher,shivering and moaning in pain. Whenthe angelattack shakes the buildingand she is thrownoff the stretcher,Shinji runs to pickher up fromthe floor. Whilecradling her bodyin his arms,he sees her fresh blood on his hand and changes his mind about piloting the EVA. Repeating,"I mustn'trun away, I mustn'trun away," he summonshis courage to tell his fatherthat he will do it. In the next scene we see a cylindricalcapsule, the "entryplug," being loweredinto an openingin the "neck"of the giantEVA suit. The scene shifts to Shinjiinside the plug as it beginsto fill with somekind of liquid.Terrified, Shinjitries to holdhis breath,but eventually has to breathein the liquidfilling the capsule,which he is told will deliveroxygen to his lungs. Followingthis, the supportcrew monitor his synchronizationrate with the EVA suit, astonished at his abilityto meshwith it on this first attempt.Soon after,the Shinji-EVA cyborgis launchedto fightthe angel. Inthe scene that follows, this one chronologically, we see Shinjisuccessfully moving the EVA, which is extraordinarygiven his lack of training. Nonetheless,the Shinji-EVAcyborg is badlybeaten by the angel;we see Shinji in painand terror inside the cockpitgripping his own armwhen the angelrips off the armof the EVA-suit.Eventually the Shinji-EVAcyborg is woundedin the head, so thatthose watchingback at headquartersare convincedthat the cyborgamalgam of Shinji-EVAis dead. But at this momentthe Shinji-EVA, 442 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002) disconnectedfrom its powersupply, goes berserkand, through some forcethe designershave neverseen, managesto destroythe angel. Thepoint to be notedfrom the sceneof the firstcreation of the Shinji-EVA cyborg is a process I would like to call inter-corporation-thatis, mutual incorporationof the other. The viewer sees Shinji, inside the very phallic- lookingentry plug, being inserted into the receiving orifice of theEVA-suit, and being incorporatedby it: structurallythis is completelyanalogous to the "normal"sexual incorporationof the penis by the body of the other. But immediatelythereafter we see the fluid insidethe EVA fillingthe entryplug, and filling Shinji, much to his terror. In this case, therefore,each of the cyborg's two components-themechanical EVA and the biotic Shinji-has penetratedinto andfilled the other;each has been incorporatedby the other. MaudEllman has written that "Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud, in spite of theirdivergences, agree that eating is the originof subjectivity.For it is by ingestingthe externalworld that the subjectestablishes his body as his own, distinguishingits insidefrom its outside"(30). Thebody ingests or incorporates materialsfrom "the outside"-food, oxygen, semen-changes them, and expels a differentkind of materialback to "theoutside"-feces, carbondioxide, baby. This conceptualizingof our bodiesis basicto the constructionof the unitary, boundedsubject, permeable only withincontrolled limits. Having control over what we take in and when and how we expel wastes/productsis partof the trainingand prerogative of the autonomousadult modern subject. It must be remarked,however, that sexual differencerenders bodies differentiallypermeable in these examples.While all humansingest food and oxygenand expel feces andcarbon dioxide, only femalesincorporate genetic informationfrom the sementheir bodies take in with sexualpenetration, and onlyfemales have their body boundaries forcefully breached by theact of giving birthto thebaby that is the productof thatoriginal incorporation. This "extra" permeabilityto genetic information,as well as the mysterious"leakage" of menstruation,and the possibilityof violenteruption from within of childbirth, areamong the primary reasons that women have never been considered to fully meet fully the criteriaof the autonomous,unitary, bounded, self-controlled modernsubject. How does this basic structurefor the constructionof subjectivityrelate to Evangelion'scyborgian example? In this case, we have no incorporationby a boundedself of a relativelyunimportant other, to be absorbed,transformed, and then ejected, but rather the intercorporationand interpenetrationof two relativelyequal components to producea third,hybrid product: the cyborg. Not unitary,but, at the sametime "not-two."(While space does not allow me to pursuethe pointhere, it is significantthat later in Evangelionwe learnthat a seriesof intercorporationshas already occurred: Shinji's mother has been fused withthe inorganicmaterial of the EVAsuit-as well as beingcloned to produce Rei-and Ritsuko'smother has beenfused with the MAGIcomputer system. It is noteworthythat, in every case, it is a womanwhose completeintercor- porationwith the inorganichas produced the weapons powerful enough to resist the angels.) SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG 443

If intercorporationis one of the characteristicstructural aspects of cyborg subjectivity,what kinds of fears and hopes does it engender?Indeed, the questionof sex/genderseems to be crucial here, as many contemporary narrativesdemonstrate that intercorporation is an especiallydisturbing concept for their male protagonists.The fact thatwe see Shinji'sterrified/terrifying experienceof initialintercorporation, but not thatof his girl colleagues,is no doubtmeant to play dramaticallyon the fearsof the male viewing audience. Anotherpopular anime, for example,Kyoshoku s6k6gaibaa (1989, Guyver, 1994-97),features a manbeing physically invaded by thebody armor-tentacles of it penetratehis skinand orifices-which then turns him into a benevolentand powerfulcyborg able to savehis friendsfrom certain death. Nonetheless, he is distraughtat the invasionof his body and his inabilityto expel the invading component,which retreats into a smallarea of his backmost of the time, but thentakes over his whole bodyagain when he is provokedto fight. A further examplecan be seen in the live-actioncult film Tetsuo,the IronMan (1988; withEnglish subtitles, 1992), which opens with a manintentionally "infecting" or "impregnating"himself by thrustinga metalbar into a slit in his thigh,which graduallyturns him into a monstrousamalgam of themachinic and the organic. He then goes on to "infect" or "impregnate"others. This model of intercorporation-similarto the invasive attack of aninfection or a parasite-can be found in many Japanese popular-culturenarratives featuring male protagonistswho are "feminized"by their bodies' penetrationby and permeabilityto "the outside." (At the same time, they continueto exhibit masculine/malecharacteristics, such as theability to "impregnate,"resulting in a radicallyambiguous gendering of theseprotagonists.) The associationof this tropewith HIV since the early 1990s only serves to reinforcethe nexus of sexuality,singularity, and subjectivity that is bothexemplified and challenged by cyborgianintercorporation. Controlof the body andbody boundariesis clearlyan importantnode of anxietybeing playedout throughmany cyborg narratives. Certainly through techno-medicinewe arecontrolling the body more and more successfully-this is one reasonwe have so manyliteral cyborgs walking among us now. The classic roboticbodies that appearin traditionalscience fiction are perfect, completelycontrollable. They representan ideal version of the modernist conceptionof the body/self.But the conceptualprice that must be paidfor our increasingattempts to controlthe body is the recognitionthat the repressed alwaysreturns. As the imaginedsocial body has become increasinglymore perfectand controlled-more and more closely fittingthe modernistmodel of (male)autonomous subjectivity-the likelihood of the eruptionof therepressed body,in all its abject,excessive, imperfect, uncontrolled, boundary-challenged "female-ness,"increases. By the nineteenthepisode of Evangelion,Shinji has experiencedso many traumaticevents that he has fimallyquit as an EVApilot. Beforehe managesto leave the area,however, he is convincedto returnand fight an angelthat has takenon theunexpected form of anotherEVA, afterhe sees his friends,the two girlswho alsopilot EVAs, nearly destroyed by thisnew angel.The Shinji-EVA 444 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002) loses badly to the angel, with (again) one arm ripped off in the battle. Finally, the suit's power reserve is drainedand the Shinji-EVAcyborg is completely at the mercy of the angel. At this moment, however, Shinji, screaming with frustration,manages to "synchronize"so completely with the EVA suit that he disappears, simultaneously managing to activate some power in the cyborg amalgamof himself and the suit that allows him/it/her to rise up, regenerateits own arm (which is now flesh rather than metal), and defeat the angel. At the end of the scene the Shinji-EVA amalgam crawls like an animal to the dying angel and begins to eat it. Finally he/it/she rises up and roars in triumph,as the "mecha suit" armor is rent and destroyed from within. The stunnedwatchers from NERV are simultaneouslydelighted by the unexpectedvictory, mystified by the EVA's ability to move with no power source, and revoltedby the EVA's animalisticcannibalism. The chief scientist, Ritsuko, remarkswith fear thatthe EVA's "bindings"have been obliterated.In responseto a surprisedquery from a junior colleague, she explains: "That isn't armor. Those are restraintsthat allow us to control the EVA's power. But now the EVA is removing the web that binds it to our will. We can no longer control the EVA."10 KOTANI Mari has related this act of cannibalism on Shinji-EVA's part to "the explosion of the radically feminine, that is, to what Alice Jardine calls 'gynesis"' (3). Kotani describes the scene this way: The moment electric technology becomes unavailable(his power supply cords have been cut), Shinji strongly hopes for a miracle. Thus, with the ultimateaim to defeat the enemy, Shinji very naturally but miraculouslycomes to feminize himself. This sequence unveils Shinji's epiphany. The more strongly he desires a miraculousbreakthrough, the more deconstructivehis own sexualitybecomes. Hence the abrupt explosion of fearful femininity out of Shinji's own male subjectivity. (5) Despite the hyper-masculineoutlines of the EVA suit and the fact that the pilot of 01 is a boy, over the course of the series in scenes such as this one the Shinji-EVA cyborg amalgam is decisively gendered feminine: the uncontrollable, insufficiently bounded body/subjectivity that enlightened, rationalmodernity has sought to repress. And yet, it is in precisely these same scenes that the Shinji-EVA cyborg manages through some kind of hysterical crisis to overcome the limits of technology-the power cord and back-up battery-to defeat the attackingangel. This narrative, therefore, emplots both the male terror of being radically feminized through the excessive intimacy implied by the interpenetrationand intercorporationof the cyborg subject and the paradoxicalhope that the one power that can finally oppose the various forces of evil is precisely the eruption of the abjectfemininity-permeability/penetrability-that is repressedin techno- patriarchalsociety. That powerful eruptioncan only occur, however, when the interconnection of the various cyborg elements is at its maximum. In the nineteenthepisode Shinji's synchronizationrate with the suit is an inconceivable 400%, indicating that, despite the terror it provokes, the only hope for humankindis to move towardincreased intimacy-permeability/ penetrability- with the mechanical other. SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG 445

I will turn now to Ghost in the Shell (1995), a film directed by OSHII Mamoru,based on the popularmanga by SHIROMasamune. This is a much shorternarrative, and deals with one basic issue: species reproductionin a cyborgsociety. How does it occur, whatgets reproduced,and in whatsense does a cyborgspecies have historical continuity into the future? The film opens with a very short scene, a joke, in which the first problematicof cyborgreproduction is raised.Special security forces officer MajorKUSANAGI Motoko, our protagonist, is hookedinto the Net throughfour interfacesockets in the back of her neck. A colleaguetalking to her over the Net remarksthat there is a lot of staticin herhead today. "Yeah," she mutters, "I'mhaving my period.""This immediatereference to menstruation-oneof those odd breachingsof body boundariesthat make the femalebody unfit for modernsubjectivity-alerts the viewerto the factthat reproductive sexuality is at theheart of thisfilm. Thereference to menstruationis particularlysignificant because,as we learnimmediately thereafter, Major Kusanagi has a bodythat is completelymechanical, and certainly does not bleed. After this brief introductoryscene, we see, interspersedwith the openingcredits, Kusanagi beingcreated/re-created/replicated (it is impossibleto tell which)in thelab. As we learnfrom this sequence, her body is entirelyartificial. Therefore, this body is underperfect control: nothing goes intoor out of it exceptwhat/when/how she wishes. One assumesthat this body is also incapableof impregnation, gestation,or parturition-whatwould be the need for such functionsin a security officer? Her postmodern,reconstructed body is not enhancedto maximize her preferencesor pleasures, we learn, but to maximizeher usefulnessto the state.Although she is extravagantlyfemale in termsof external morphology(and spends several scenes of the film naked),and although she is presumablyfemale in termsof originalidentity, the sexedbody as reproductive body'2has no meaningin her cyborgstate. Thejuxtaposition, in the first five minutesof the film, of her referenceto menstruationwith the scenes of her cyborgianreplication, immediately underscores the fact thatthis film's theme is the problematicof reproductivesexuality in a posthumansubject. Kusanagi'sonly biotic componentis her brain,which provides her with a "ghost"-that is, memories, consciousness, and self-identity. The un- cyborgized,natural-body humans all possessa "ghost"as a matterof course. Butfor radicallyaltered humans like Kusanagiand most of the othermembers of hersecurity force, theoriginal "ghost" is theonly thing that distinguishes the cyborg-humanfrom the pureandroid.13 Why,then, does she mentionmenstruation? Why, going back to Evangelion for a moment,is it the sightof Rei'sblood on his handthat makes Shinji change his mind aboutpiloting the EVA?'4In both cases, this early intrusionof the uncontrollable,messy, leakingfeminine body serves, amongother things, to underscorethe absenceof such bodies at the surfacelevel of the narrative. Everyonelooks perfect,appears under complete physical control-but whose andwhat kind of control?These bodies perfectly incarnate the modernistidea of autonomoussubjectivity; in thissense, they are all coded"male," despite the strongvisual dimorphism.Where is the "female"in this perfectlycontrolled 446 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002) universe? How does reproductionoccur in a de-sexed universe? These are the questionsraised by the simultaneouspresence/absence of female(menstrual) bWoodin thesecyborg narratives. As the film progresses,we learn that MajorKusanagi heads a special d fense team:Division Nine of the SecurityBranch of the Departmentof the Interior.She is broughtin to dealwith the problemof someoneknown only as "the Puppet Master," who carries out terroristacts by hackinghis way into the "ghosts"of chosenpeople through their implanted prosthetic links to the Net, reprogrammingtheir ghosts and causingthem to performterrorism. It is revealedthat "the Puppet Master" began as a computerprogram that somehow becamesentient and was thenforced by its makersto abandonthe Net andto entera completelymanufactured body. Now, however,the PuppetMaster has es;caped,and its whereaboutsare unknown. In thecourse of thehunt for the PuppetMaster, Kusanagi watches as people aretold that the memories they have of spouses,children, jobs-everything they hold dear, everythingthat organizes the sense of self-have been artificially implantedby the PuppetMaster who had hacked into their ghosts. She wonders whetherher own ghost is realand original, or whethereverything she thinks she knowsabout herself is, like her body, completelyartificial. Inthe final sequence we witnessa mostunusual reproductive act, performed by two naked,voluptuous female torsos, minusarms and legs, lying side by side. Kusanagi'sbody was reducedto this statewhen she battledto rescuethe "female"android body into which the Puppet Master had fled. Throughthe help of herfriend and partner, Batou, Kusanagi is linkedthrough technology to the PuppetMaster and they somehowmerge into a single entity, capableof travellingthe Net as the PuppetMaster does, but still retainingsome element of Kusanagi'ssubjectivity (through her organicbrain, it is assumed). Ghost attemptsto describea completelynew formof reproduction,for the new kindsof beingsthat will emergefrom the increasedcyborgization of the world.Replication is the reproductiveprocess of the cyborg,as we see in the openingcreation sequence, where Kusanagi's brain is encasedin an entirely manufacturedbody. This reminds the viewer that she is infintelyreparable-as long as her brainis intact,her bodycan be reconstructed,in wholeor in part, as often as necessary,and she will still be KUSANAGIMotoko. Once again, therefore,this narrativeexplores the ramificationsof the possibilityof perfect controlover the body. In this case, however,the interestis not focusedon the infinitereplicability of cyborgs,but rather the limits imposedon subjectivityby suchperfect control and how these limits may be transcended,moving to the next step of evolution. Humanspecies reproductionas we know it is structuredaround several salient features. One of these is the interplayof repetition/samenesswith diversity.While a parent'sgenetic material is replicatedin thechild, the mixing of geneticmaterial from the fatherwith thatof the motherproduces diversity in theoffspring; and this is repeatedfrom generation to generation.For cyborgs such as Kusanagithere is no suchcombination of continuityand change. The mechanicalbody-or body part-is replicable,but what is (re)producedis a SEX AND THESINGLE CYBORG 447 facsimileof the previousone, andhas no referenceto an organic"original." Nor is there any intermixingof geneticinformation, and thus qualities, from another body/subject.There is continuityin the sense that Kusanagi's brain/ghostremain the same.But in a worldwhere "ghosts" can be hackedand identitiesimplanted, how is she to be surethat her brainis indeedoriginal and her sense of self unadulterated? Anotherfeature of organicreproduction as we knowit is the importanceof place-the spaceof embodiment.One is bornfrom a specificplace, the body of the mother,into a specificplace. Thishappens only once, in thattime and thatplace. The materialityand spatial specificity of the pointof originand the surroundingsof one'sjourney through life areintegral to a senseof subjectivity. As we see in the openingcredits of Ghost,Kusanagi as cyborgis deniedthe specificityof time and place of birth.She emergestime and againfrom the sameprocess; the fact thatit is impossibleto tell fromthe scenewhether this is the first creationof her cyborg body or the thousandthunderscores the distancefrom organicbirth. In the case of many cyborgs, ratherthan two physicalbodies coming together to (re)producea new body/subjectivity-limited and constitutedby place, circumstance,time-it is the corporationand the government,figured in many anime as disembodied,transnational, and threatening,that produce and reproduce the cyborgas species. In Ghostphysicality does retainone very importantfunction. As UENO Toshiyaexplains it: "Ratherthan the mind(seishin), a 'ghost'is more like a person'sspirit (tamashii), and logically it is also unconscious;in generalit is madeup of pastexperiences and memories. It's somethinglike waterin a cup, premisedupon the existenceof some kindof shape(such as a metalsuit or a shell)"(104). Possessionof a "ghost,"rather than a particularkind of body, is whatdetermines the legal andsocial status of a beingas "human"-thenature of the body is irrelevantin determiningontology. But since a "ghost" (evidently)cannot exist withouta container,the bodyis not (yet) a disposable elementof selfhood. Kusanagiis clearlyconcerned with these questions of cyborgontology and reproduction,and the Puppet Master offers her a uniquechance to overcomethe limitationsof her cyborgnature. By reproducing,she, like the PuppetMaster, will have carriedout one of the definingcharacteristics of a life form, thus provingthat she is morethan an automaton. Thatthis is a wholenew stagein evolutionis signaledin a Biblicalpassage quotedby the PuppetMaster as he urgesKusanagi to mergewith him/it: "When I was a child, I spakeas a child, I understoodas a child, I thoughtas a child: butwhen I becamea man,I putaway childish things.// For now we see through a glass, darkly;but then face to face;now I knowin part;but then I shallknow [fully] even as I am [fully] known"(I Corinthians13: 11 and 12). To know fully even as she is fully known is the possibilityawaiting Kusanagi-as simultaneouslyherself and her offspring-in her new, unlimitedexistence in the Net. She will have left the "childhood"of her cyborgsubjectivity behind, and achievedfull subjectivityin the next stageof evolution. 448 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002)

In narrativesof cybernetic reproductionsuch as this one, what becomes of subjectivity?How can we-not even yet fully transformedfrom modernhumans to postmodern cyborgs-be expected to feel any connection with Kusanagi's dilemma and the Puppet Master's solution? It is no doubt significant that even here reproduction("merging") is the resultof individualdesire and will, carried out only with great contrivance and sacrifice. In that sense, the subjectivities even of the cyborg Kusanagi and the new life-form Puppet Master are recognizable to those of us still strugglingwith our modernistpreconceptions of personhood. Conclusion. Donna Haraway has proclaimed that "the cyborg is a creature in a post-genderworld" (150). That may be true of Haraway's idealized vision of cyborgs themselves, but, as we have seen, contemporary Japanese cyborg narrativesare still very much concernedwith the binary oppositionsof sex and gender, and the sexuality presumed to accompanythem. Nonetheless, I would argue that these narratives relate a breakdownin what Fuchs, quoting Judith Butler, calls the "'heterosexual matrix,' [in which] gendered identity and the construction of stable body contours rely upon fixed sites of corporeal permeabilityand impermeability"(283). As we have seen, thatpermeability is no longer differentiatedby sex/gender in cyborg narrative. Harawayputs the same point a little differently: "communicationssciences and modernbiologies are constructedby a common move-the translationof the world into a problem of coding," resulting in a "world [that] is subdividedby boundaries differentially permeable to information" (164). Permeability to informationis not a gendered phenomenon,particularly in the world of Ghost, where humans are altered by techno-medicineto link directly to the Net, or a world such as that of Evangelion, where male and female EVA pilots alike undergo involuntary intercorporation: Shinji cannot prevent himself from interfacing/synchronizingwith the machine. Nor is permeabilityto information and technology in general a gendered phenomenonin our contemporarylived experience, and it may well be anxiety not just over that fact in itself, but also anxiety over the breakdown of the "heterosexualmatrix" determinedby sex- differentiatedpermeability, that motivates the stronglygendered aspects of many cyborg narratives. Haraway echoes this anxiety, warning against the increasing and undifferentiatedpermeability of the body, which she sees as a situationwhere "all resistance to instrumentalcontrol disappears,and all heterogeneitycan be submitted to disassembly, reassembly, investment, and exchange" (164). In contrast, Judith Butler describes what sounds like a utopian vision of the potential of cyborg sexuality/subjectivity: Foucault held out the possibility that we might cease to think of sexuality as a specific attributeof sexed persons, that it could not be reducibleto the question of his or her "desire," and that overcoming the epistemic constraint that mandatedthinking of sexuality as emanatingfrom sexed persons in the form of desire might constitute an emancipation,as it were, beyond emancipation.The phrase, "bodies and pleasures" held out the possibility of unmarkedbodies, bodies that were no longer thoughtor experiencedin terms of sexual difference, SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG 449

and pleasures that were diffuse, possibly nameless, intense and intensifying, pleasures that took the entire body as the surface and depth of its operation. The turn from "sex-desire" to "bodies and pleasures" promised for some a turn away ... from the insistence that sexuality be thoughtof in terms of sexual difference, and that sexual difference be thought of as a function of oedipally induced differentiations, and that desire be understoodas structuredby lack in relation to a sexually differentiatedOther. ("Revisiting" 6) I have yet to see an anime narrativethat explicitlyapproaches cyborg sexualityin this pleasurable,fully post-gendered way, butI thinkthis vision is suggestedin the reluctanceof cyborg narrativeto depict sexualityin the modernistterms of the meetingof sexualorgans attached to sexed/gendered bodies. The scene in Ghost in which two limblessfemale torsos somehow perform "reproductive sex" is one example of this. Also suggestive is the radical-one might almost say Frankensteinian-dismembermentand resuturing of the oedipalfamily romance in Evangelion, whereShinji's literal, absolute merging with his mother's body is engineeredby the otherwise rejectingfather. What kind of sexual/sex/gender identity would result from these examples of emancipationfrom traditional conceptualizations of subjectivity? InEvangelion theradical intercorporations of difference through bodies that cannotresist is a situationthat is exploredwith fear and hope. Despite the celebrationof the machinicin some senses, the humanbody and will-when linked to the machinic-are ultimatelyreinscribed as fmallythe mosthopeful, only truly effective force for resistance-even if that resistanceis only temporarilysuccessful. In Ghost, on the other hand, the alreadyachieved compulsorypermeability of the populaceto informationand surveillancecan only be resistedby abandoningthe bodyaltogether, moving it to the nextlevel of evolution.Neither of thesescenarios is very optimistic,but both are useful in the processof thinkingthrough the possibilitiesof subjectivityin a rapidly changingworld. NOTES: 1. Haraway's "cyborg" is actually an idealized eco-socialist-feminist relationship between women and technology ratherthan the "literal"cyborg-an embodiedamalgam of the organic and the machinic-that I discuss in this essay. Many of her ideas about the future model of subjectivity that she calls "cyborg" are, however, pertinent to my argument. 2. It could be argued that the great majority of the "cyborgs" (including also androids and technologically-enhanced humans) well-known to North American audiences are emphatically male in appearance,and often portrayedas threatening,or at times pitiable, monsters: Darth Vader and the Empire's soldiers (the clone warriors) in the Star Warsfilms (1977, 1980, 1983, 1999, 2002); Data, and all the Borg except the Queen, in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94); RoboCop (1987); Terminator (1984); Total Recall (1990). When female cyborgs do appear they are often '"afterthoughts"to the original narrativecorpus: Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001), and the female police officer in Robocop 2 (1990). Pris and Rachael, in Blade Runner (1982) are the unusual exceptions to this rule. 3. Although I will not take the time to repeatthe argumentshere, critics from Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar(especially 213-47) to Peter Brook (199-220) have identifiedthe 450 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 29 (2002) multiple ways thatFrankenstein's monster, althoughpossessing malegenitalia, is actually gendered "female" throughout the novel. This gender ambiguity/hybridity,and the problematicsof monstrousreproduction/sexuality in Frankenstein,are very much a part of what I am calling the "Frankensteinsyndrome." 4. See "The Genealogy of the Cyborg in Japanese Popular Culture"; see also Napier's The Fantastic in ModernJapanese Literature. 5. Note that Irigarayis contrastingthe singularityof male/masculinesubjectivity, as symbolized by the singular penis, with the two-in-oneness representedby the female genitalia and reflected, she argues, in female/feminine subjectivity. I do not intend to bring Irigaray's argumentsabout sex and gender into this essay, but merely to borrow her short-handterminology for this kind of two-in-one subjectivity. 6. Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto" also explicitly cites "monsters" such as conjoined twins and hermaphroditesas importantin the establishmentof concepts of subjectivity, identity, legal autonomy, and so on (180). 7. She reportsthat Changand Eng Bunker, the "original""Siamese twins," used the pronoun "I" when they wrote lettersjointly (when a "we" might have been expected), and jointly signed as ChangEng (62). 8. Clark and Myser write powerfully about the ways that new medical technologies of vision are serving the modernisthuman compulsion to delineate the boundariesthat invisibly "separate"conjoined twins, in order to allow their physical separationinto "acceptable"singular units. 9. A point I have argued in "The Genealogy of the Cyborg in Japanese Popular Culture." 10. This is a transcriptionof the English subtitles from Neon Genesis Evangelion, videotape #10 (episode 19), released by A.D.V. films in 1997. Please note that in the original Japanese the pronouns used carry no indication of gender whatsoever: it is impossible to tell whether the speakersthink of the Shinji-EVAcyborg as "he," "she," or "it." 11. In the English-dubbedversion of the film, this is sanitizedas "Yeah, I must have a wire loose"! (Ghost in the Shell, dubbedversion, released by Manga Video in 1996.) 12. Although in this essay, I am not discussing the manga versions (which often differ considerablyfrom the anime versions), I shouldpoint out that in Shiro's mangaof Ghost in the Shell, Kusanagi is shown enjoying explicit (albeit virtual) sexual activity with a group of female cyborg security officers like herself (a scene that was deleted from the English translationof the manga). In the manga it is clear that sexual pleasure is allowed, but not reproduction,provoking Kusanagi's dilemma. 13. The problemof creatingproper ontological divisions between variousposthuman creatures is addressed in many anime films. In the TV series AD Police (1990), for example, which is largely concerned with the sexuality of female cyborgs, a person is considered human (with all the rights and privileges pertainingthereto) so long as no more than 70% of his/her body has been replaced with mechanicalparts. Those more than 70% mechanical are called Voomers and are liable to immediate arrest and/or destructionby the special AD Police (ratherlike the replicantsin Blade Runner). 14. A related, though not identical, example is Gally in Gunmu(1993, Battle Angel 1993), whose fighting persona is activated any time she sees or smells blood. As a complete android she neither menstruatesnor bleeds when damaged. Yet she retains traces of old values based on a culture of organic bodies: love, reproduction,loyalty, integrity. SEX AND THE SINGLE CYBORG 451

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-- . K6kakukid6tai. Tokyo: Kodansha, 1991. Trans. FrederickSchodt and Toren Smith as Ghost in the Shell. Milwaukee: Dark Horse Comics, 1995. Springer, Claudia. "The Pleasure of the Interface." Screen 32:3 (1991): 303-323. TAKAHASHIAkihiko and NISHIMORIAkira, dirs. AD Police. Video. Artmic, Bandai Entertainment.1990. A.D. Police Files. SubtitledVHS. 3 tapes. Animeigo, 1995. TSUKAMOTOShin'ya, dir. Tetsuo, the Iron Man. Video. Kaijyu Theatre, 1988. UENOToshiya. Kurenaino metaarusutsu: anime to iu senjo (Metal Suits, TheRed: Wars in Animation). Tokyo: Kinokuniyashoten, 1998. SubtitledVHS. Fox/Lorber, 1995. Williams, Sarah, with Marjan Lousberg and Mark McGuire. "'PerhapsImages at One with the World are already Lost Forever': Visions of Cyborg Anthropologyin Post- CulturalWorlds." The Cyborg Handbook. Ed. Chris Hables Gray. New York and London: Routledge, 1995. 379-90. ABSTRACT This paper examines two aspects of subjectivity-sexuality and singularity-that are consideredfundamental to a modernistnotion of the person. These aspectsof subjectivity are undersiege as new technologies of reproductionchallenge our understandingof sexed bodies and as, simultaneously,a postmodernworld-view brings forwardthe multiplicity of sexual subject positions and embodied hybridity that modernist thinking sought to control or dismiss. In this time of conceptual crisis regarding subjectivity and embodiment, the popular culture media of many advanced countries have produced increasingnumbers of narrativesabout cyborgs, those embodiedamalgams of the organic and the machinic. I begin by explaining why the concepts "sexuality"and "singularity" are so important in this context, and why Japanese popular culture is a particularly fruitful groundfor explorationof cyborg subjectivities. Then I discuss two recent anime narratives-ShinseikiEvangelion (1995-96, Neon GenesisEvangelion) and K6kaku kid6tai (1995, Ghost in the Shelf)-in terms of their depictionsof specific aspects of sexuality and as the nexus of contemporary fears or desires regarding subjectivity that is being negotiated through those depictions. I conclude with observations about what these narrativesreveal about new, postmodernconceptions of subjectivity.