In the penultimate scene of Ghost in The Shell (GITS), protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi leaps on the back of a spider tank and attempts to rip off the door on the tank\u2019s control panel. As she struggles to tear the door from its hinges, the artificial muscles in her fully cybernetic body strain and swell. Her body is constructed as female, with wide hips and a distinctive bosom, but as her muscles swell under the tension her physique momentarily becomes masculine. The contours of muscles and tendons become visible under her skin. She looks like a body builder. However, the strain is too much and her skin rips and reveals the machinery underneath.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In\n just a few seconds, GITS shows us how the Major\u2019s body transcends \nbeyond the usual archetypes of gender and humanity. She is woman, then \nman, then machine (1). Like Donna Haraway states in A Cyborg Manifesto, \n\u2018The cyborg is a creature in a postgender world\u2019 (Haraway, 1985). The \nMajor\u2019s body encompasses all gendered body archetypes, and thus is blind\n to those archetypes. The profound transformation of the body in GITS \nhas significant implications for our contemporary conceptions of gender \nand identity. In this essay, I propose that GITS reveals that this \ntransformation of the body initially manifests as a sense of the erasure\n and deconstruction of self, but ultimately, it is a form of \nself-empowerment and diversification of the myriad possibilities of \nexpressions (including gender expression) of the self (2). We will \nexplore how GITS states this thesis and how it depicts gender in this \nessay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GITS\n is a 1995 Japanese anime film directed by Mamoru Oshii. We follow Major\n Motoko Kusanagi and her team at Public Safety Section 9, as they pursue\n a mysterious hacker known as the Puppet Master. GITS is a highly \ninfluential work of cyberpunk, and like many cyberpunk works depicts a \nnear-future society in which technology and late-stage capitalism have \ninfluenced all aspects of society. In GITS, cybernetic augmentations of \nthe human body are commonplace. The vast majority of people have \ncyberbrains, brains which have been cybernetically augmented with \nelectronics that allow for seamless interfacing with the internet. Some,\n like the Major, have mechanical body augmentations that either improve \nor outright replace parts of the human body, allowing said parts to \nperform even better physically. The Major, however, goes one step \nfurther. Her entire body is fully cybernetic. The only organic matter \nthat she has left is in her brain, which itself is fully enclosed in a \nreinforced metal shell. This transcendence of the physical is an \nimportant theme in the film, and one we will explore throughout this \nessay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The\n film begins with the Major perched on a skyscraper rooftop in heart of \nthe city. She\u2019s electronically eavesdropping onto a conversation several\n floors below regarding a mysterious Project 2501. Her partner Batou \nobserves that her cyberbrain has a lot of noise. She jokes that it\u2019s her\n \u2018time of the month\u2019. Irony drips from this line of dialogue. As a full \nbody cyborg, she does not menstruate or give birth, and thus would not \nhave a \u2018time of the month\u2019. Her womanhood, embodied in the physical \nstructure and gender expression of her cyborg body, is divorced from her\n capacity, or lack thereof, for reproduction. As Sharalyn Orbaugh \nstates, \u2018the sexed body as reproductive body has no meaning in her \ncyborg state\u2019 (Orbaugh, 2002).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite\n the erasure of the capacity for reproduction, her body does not become \ngenderless by default. Her body was constructed with the purpose of \nbeing physically strong and dexterous and being capable of causing and \ntolerating a large amount of damage. This physical empowerment, often \nperceived in society as being masculine, thus causes her body to embody \n\u2018masculinity\u2019, at least in the way society perceives masculinity. To \nquote Orbaugh, \u2018These bodies perfectly incarnate the modernist idea of \nautonomous subjectivity; in this sense, they are all coded \u201cmale,\u201d \ndespite the strong visual dimorphism\u2019 (Orbaugh, 2002). Thus, her quip is\n not merely a joke, but a reassertion of her womanhood despite her \ndisembodiment, despite the erasure of her capacity for reproduction. \nFurthermore, the organization she is a part of, Section 9, is \nexclusively male with her being the sole exception. The men, like her, \nare trained and cybernetically enhanced. Thus, in the context of Section\n 9, empowerment becomes even more strongly associated with masculinity. \nFor the Major to assert her womanhood is to disentangle those two \nnotions and to assert her individuality. Her strong assertions of self \nare important for her, for within her own mind, she is wracked with \ndoubt about her sense of self (which we will explore in detail later).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Shortly\n after this quip, she stands up and removes her overcoat, revealing her \nskin-tight flesh-toned thermo-optic camouflage suit. Her physique and \nbody are revealed. The silhouette of her hips, nipples, and groin are \nvisible, but the male gaze seems almost absent. The shot of her \nalmost-nude self is visible for barely a second before we cut away to a \ndifferent shot. The Major fills the frame. There is no focus on any \nparticular part of her body. The Major herself undresses casually. She \nlooks almost bored.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Her\n emotional detachment from her body makes sense given its mechanical \nnature. The title sequence shortly after this scene depicts the \nmanufacturing of her body. The chronology is unclear. Is this a \nflashback to the manufacturing of her current body, or the manufacturing\n of a new one? The inability to distinguish between the two is \nemblematic of the commonality of bodies and thus the detachment of the \nbody from the self. Bodies are now endlessly swappable (3). The body is \ncommodified and objectified by the film, but not in a sexual sense or as\n a form of titillation, for the nature of objectification has changed. \nHaraway states that \u2018the result of sexual objectification is illusion \nand abstraction. However, a woman\u2026 does not exist as a subject, \u2026 since \nshe owes her existence as a woman to sexual appropriation\u2019 (Haraway, \n1985). This dynamic is different for the Major. Her existence is not \ntied to her body, given it is swappable, so to objectify the body is not<\/strong> to objectify the individual. She no longer owes her \u2018existence as a woman\u2019 to \u2018sexual appropriation\u2019 (4).<\/p>\n\n\n\n While\n her body is not sexually commodified, it has become a consumer \ncommodity. During an iconic montage in the film, the Major spots another\n person with the exact same physical likeness as her. In the TV Series \nGITS: SAC, it is explained that her physical likeness is modeled on \ncommercially available cyborg bodies, allowing her to more easily blend \ninto public spaces. Interspersed with this montage are shots of store \nmannequins; a visual metaphor for the consumeristic commodification of \nthe Major\u2019s body. Her bodily expression is out of her control. A \ncorporation somewhere designed and built a cyborg body and made it \navailable for purchase, and through this business decision, societal \nnotions of feminine aesthetics (and the Major\u2019s body as a physical \nmanifestation of these notions) have been shaped. Her body is the very \nexpression of consumer desires.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n transformation and deconstruction of the self in the film is not \nlimited to the physical body. Later in the film, Section 9 encounters a \ngarbage collector whose cyberbrain has been hacked and used by a hacker \nto enact their plans. In the process of this hack, the garbage collector\n has had his memories wiped and replaced with fictitious ones. He \nbelieves himself a married father, though he is neither.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This\n encounter causes the Major to reflect on her own sense of self. Her \nheavily weaponized body is a property of the government and thus to \nresign from her job entails a returning of said body (5). This body, \nincluding the augmented brain, is what allows her to perceive the world \nand to form memories of what she perceives. In a cyborg world where the \nbody can be owned by a government and corporation, what is considered \nself, separate from society, grows tenuous (6).<\/p>\n\n\n\n As\n seen here, the implications of technology do not end at the physical, \nbut also encompasses parts of consciousness. Memories can be falsehoods,\n albeit still claiming to be real. In the framework proposed in \nBaudrillard\u2019s Simulacra and Simulation, this could be seen as a \nsecond-order simulacra, where the delineation between real and artifice \nis fading (Baudrillard, 1991). The Major might doubt her memories here, \nbut she is still ostensibly human. The full implications are not yet \nobvious. For now, identity (and thus gender) is not fully deconstructed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n implications become clear when we encounter the film\u2019s third-order \nsimulacra, where the \u2018real\u2019 is a meaningless concept: Project 2501 aka \nthe Puppet Master. Section 9 discovers Project 2501 as a broken female \nandroid body on a highway. Upon running diagnostics on it, the body \nawakens. They ask for political asylum. They identify not as an AI, but \nas a \u2018living, thinking entity created in the sea of information\u2019 (Oshii,\n 1995), the hivemind of society made manifest. Their voice is masculine,\n but their body is feminine. The film explains that they hacked a \nmanufacturing plant to manufacture that specific android body for them \nto inhabit. As a being made from information, their gender expression is\n not bounded by the physical or biological. They can choose whatever \nthey desire. They state, \u2018so man is an individual memory system only \nbecause of his intangible memory and a memory cannot be defined, but it \ndefines mankind\u2019 (Oshii, 1995). According to Project 2501, memories \nshape the self and thus, with the digitization and externalization of \nmemories now possible in this cybernetic world, the memories that shape \nthe self and the identity of the self are blurred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n self, however, is not erased. After all, Project 2501 identifies as a \nsentient life-form and explicitly asks for asylum. They believe \nthemselves to be a distinct living being, even if they were birthed from\n the collective volume of information from society, with no lineage or \npoint of origin. GITS does not erase the line between self and society. \nIt attempts to redraw it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How\n the line is redrawn is not immediately shown in this act of the film \nbut left to the final act. Mid-conversation, Project 2501\u2019s body is \nstolen by a rogue government agency. Section 9 proceeds to attempt to \nreclaim it, leading to the penultimate scene described in the \nintroduction to this essay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n aforementioned spider tank guarding Project 2501\u2019s body is successfully\n disabled (though not without enormous damage to the Major\u2019s body), and \nProject 2501\u2019s body is successfully recovered by Section 9. Motivated by\n her own self-questioning and the uniqueness of Project 2501\u2019s identity,\n she \u2018ghostdives\u2019 into them, digitally connecting their consciousnesses \ntogether. Project 2501 makes an offer to the Major: merge their \nconsciousnesses permanently and be reborn as a new being. As a purely \ndigital entity, Project 2501 can only make copies of themselves, devoid \nof mutations that give rise to genetic diversity needed for life to \nflourish. The Major, as a human, possesses this capacity. Though she no \nlonger reproduces physically\/biologically, through merger with Project \n2501 she can birth diverse digital offspring that can spread through the\n net. Through this merger and hybridization, they will transcend the \nboundaries and limits of both physical and digital realms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout\n the film the Major questions what has become of her identity through \nthe technological transformation of her physical self. What has been \ngained? What has been lost? Has she truly transcended her human \nlimitations? In this moment, we see an answer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This\n merger of \u2018cyberspace\u2019 and \u2018meatspace\u2019 (i.e the real world) allows one \nto free the other of its limitations and constraints. The self is not \nerased. Instead, it is understood as part of the ebb and flow of \ninformation in society. As the self absorbs information and is \ntransformed by it, it too outputs information, either by itself or in \nthe aforementioned digital offspring, and gently alters that ebb and \nflow. Through the merger, the Major transcends the physical self. She is\n free of the constraints of bodies, whether those constraints are ones \ncreated by laws from authoritarian governments or digital permissioned \nsystems controlled by corporations. She can operate as an entity of pure\n information, free of gender connotations for without the physical body,\n there is no performance of gender, and thus, in Judith Butler\u2019s \nframework, no gender (Butler, 1990). She is free to transform herself \nand to be rebirthed in whatever form and identity she pleases (she can \nalso choose to move between bodies, as seen in the final scene, that \nallows her to perform as different identities).<\/p>\n\n\n\n This\n ability to choose is not disregarded by the film. Project 2501 does not\n merge with the Major without her consent. She is asked if this is what \nshe desires. The self is not erased, because the self can choose. \nWhether it is the ability to choose that gives rise to the conception of\n self or the conception of self that imbues the right to choose, the \nfilm does not answer. With the deconstruction of all other conceptions \nof the self as seen throughout the film, it seems to imply they are one \nand the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The\n Major agrees to the merger, and in the final scene we see her \ntransplanted into a new body (7), that of a young girl, signifying her \nrebirth. She walks out, gazes over the city and remarks, \u2018the net is \nvast and infinite\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\n GITS, technology is fundamentally a positive transformation of the self\n and society. It perceives and depicts technology not just at the level \nof the digital systems that we have created from said technology. As \nseen in the case of the garbage collector, these systems are means of \nexploitation and control and are symptomatic of the pervasive nature of \ntechnology. However, that is not technology\u2019s fundamental implication. \nInstead, the fundamental implication is the transformation of society so\n that it is not composed of systems of class, gender, or ethnicity, but \nas pure flows of information to and from individuals. Through this flow,\n individuals learn, grow, transform and birth new entities through which\n the cycle repeats. Boundaries of identities, prescribed as they are, \nare transcended. We become free, like the Major, to choose for ourselves\n what we are and what we will become. The diverse possibilities of what \nour identities and ourselves can be are very much like the net: vast and\n infinite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 1 \u2014 We will explore the other implications of the scene later in the essay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2\n \u2014 The self here we are considering is the self-perception of the \nindividual, which should not be confused with an \u2018objective\u2019 self, which\n the film does deconstruct.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3\n \u2014 In the spinoff TV series GITS: SAC an episode features the Major \nundergoing a body swap routine. She goes through the process casually, \nclearly used to the procedure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4\n \u2014 This obviously has various social implications, but as this film \nfocuses on self-perception, it does not delve deeper into this. The \nspinoff TV series GITS: SAC has a more sociological focus, and thus does\n delve into these implications.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 5 \u2014 \u201cTrue we can quit, but we\u2019d have to give back our cyborg parts and augmented brains to the government.\u201d \u2014 The Major<\/p>\n\n\n\n 6\n \u2014 Again, there are a myriad of social implications (control and \ncensorship, the means of production vis a vis the means of reproduction \nas controlled by a corporation) of this that this film does not explore \nin detail. One example of a work that does explore this is the cyberpunk\n videogame Deus Ex: Human Revolution. One sidequest involves rescuing \nvictims of sex trafficking who are chosen specifically because they have\n been cybernetically augmented. The capitalistic consumeristic \ncommodification of the body becomes fetishized, and thus the sexual \ncommodification becomes even more exploitative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 7\n \u2014 It is worth noting that from this point in the film, till the end of \nthe sequel to this film, the Major is never depicted in her old body.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Bibliography<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Oshii, M. (Director). (1995). Ghost in the Shell<\/em> [Motion picture]. Japan: Production IG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Oshii, M. (Director). (2004). Ghost in the Shell<\/em> [Motion picture]. Japan: Production IG.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kamiyama, K. (Director). (2002, October 1). Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex<\/em> [Television series]. Japan: Nippon TV.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Haraway, D. J. (1985). A Cyborg Manifesto. Socialist Review. <\/em>doi:10.5749\/minnesota\/9780816650477.003.0001<\/p>\n\n\n\n Baudrillard, Jean. \u201cSimulacra and Simulation.\u201d 1995, doi:10.3998\/mpub.9904.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Butler, J. (1990). Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. London: Routledge.<\/p>\n\n\n\n