Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Ten: Chapter Sixteen: A Face on the Train
Because Evangelion invites us to see the dispersion of the maternal body as the ground and limit for its multiplication of frames of reference, we can also ask: Does this ‘gendering’ of the open system of exploded projection ‘position’ men and women in fundamentally different ways, both within the series (characters) and vis-à-vis the series (we viewers or users or co-producers)? And, if men and women are indeed positioned differently, are there normative implications to such positioning that we need to challenge?
These are the basic questions that psychoanalytic theory has contributed to media studies. And so, in this unit, we’ll first look at psychoanalytic theories that see a fundamental structural asymmetry in how men and women are positioned. Subsequently, we’ll look at how these theories have played out in media studies. But I should probably make my bias clear at the outset.
On the one hand, by posing the question of the ‘girl who is not one,’ I am tipping the scales toward gender asymmetry. As I mentioned in class, we might see transformations in the mecha lineage of anime in terms of the emergence of a ‘boy who is not one.’ The mecha lineage is very diverse and complex, but there has been a identifiable shift. Initially, in Gigantor for instance, the boy controlled the giant robot via a remote control. Subsequently, boys became mecha pilots, sitting within the bipedal robots to direct them. Gradually, the boy-mecha interface became more and more complicated. Rather than steering and pushing buttons as in a car or plane, boys had to rely on psionic powers. They started to direct the robot with the power of thought and emotion, and often the robot seemed on the verge of going out of control. Also, as controlling the mecha became less a matter of ‘guy skills’ and a matter of emotion, reaction time, and affective response, there are as many girl pilots as boy pilots, often even more of them. Evangelion takes this trajectory to a new extreme: not only are there lots of girl pilots who seem better at the mecha interface than our boy Shinji, but also the interface is biological and somehow maternal. Now boys have to get in touch with their feelings for mother (and father) to achieve their goals! Shinji is looking more and more like a ‘boy who is not one.’
If I am nonetheless placing the emphasis on the girl who is not one, it is not only to acknowledge the contributions of feminist psychoanalytic theory to media studies, but also to signal that questions of the ‘boy who is not one’ would have to posed in terms of the ‘girl or woman who is not one’ anyway. In Evangelion, for instance, the shift is in boy Shinji is related to, and seems to derive from, a shift in what a mother is. We have to consider the ‘mother who is not one.’
On the other hand, I should add that I find psychoanalytic theory very narrow and totalizing, especially in terms of how it poses questions about technology and media. Given the importance of its legacy, however, it doesn’t strike me as useful to adopt an anti-psychoanalytic stance. Rather I am working toward a counter-psychoanalytic approach, trying to work through and beyond it. In fact, what interests me about Chobits is that it is truly post-Lacanian in the sense that the series both acknowledges and counters the psychoanalytic mechanisms associated with Jacques Lacan and with Saitô Tamaki in Japan.
Finally, I wish to add that, to some extent, pop culture products like anime and manga are inherently subversive. They have to introduce difference into familiar paradigms and received conventions. They have to evoke genuine anxieties, affections, and antinomies. This is especially true of gender. Manga and anime are known for gender bending, gender swapping, cross-dressing, etc. Such subversion is not inherently valuable, however. It can even be normative. In this respect, the question of mecha-shojo is not one of whether it is subversive but one of how it might serve as the catalyst for the transformation of values.
