Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eleven: Chapter Seventeen: The Absence of Sex
Last week we talked about how the lineages of ‘mecha’ and ‘magical girl’ (mahô-shôjo) become intertwined in the figure of the mecha-shojo. The mecha lineage is ostensibly for boys (shonen market), and the magic girl lineage ostensibly for girls (shojo market). I say ‘ostensibly,’ because boys and girls both read mecha and magic girl manga. As such, mecha-shojo is a figure that works across different lineages and genres. CLAMP’s Chobits adds a wrinkle to this situation, because it is ostensibly for young men (seinen), supposedly an 18+ male market. Yet CLAMP is very aware of girl readers. The four-women manga team assures that their first foray in seinen manga also addresses the shojo market. And again the figure that allows for this intersection of audiences, genres, and modes of address is the mecha-shojo or the ‘girl who is not one’ — the gynoid PC named Chii.
I chose to focus this unit on Chobits not simply to introduce female artists into the course but primarily because, in this manga, CLAMP really pushes the logic of the girl who is not one to its limits. At one level it presents a parody of a kind of otaku that today is frequently called ‘male moe otaku’ or ‘male moe culture’ — which is commonly characterized in terms of guys who are really into cute little girls, sometimes also referred to as rori-con or ‘Lolita complex.’ Interestingly enough, this moe lineage is said to begin with guys who became intense fans of the shojo manga being produced by women dôjin artists (‘amateur’ artists) and being sold primarily at the large amateur comic market scene (especially Comiket). CLAMP got their start (initially as a larger team) within the dôjin scene, and so they are surely aware of the appeal that their girl characters had for male fans. In fact, they have something of a reputation for successfully folding different genres into their works, thus addressing different audiences within them. As we will see, some of these effects are diminished in the anime version of their manga, but enough of them persist in the anime, pushing basic questions about gender, sexuality, and technology.
Chobits has elements in common with other anime that we have seen. There is a ‘girl who is not one’ and her magical power (jewel) is the key to the destruction or salvation of our world — depending on who gets their hands on it. But in Chobits the metaphor of the ‘girl’s jewel’ is made disturbingly concrete. It does not hang from a necklace around her neck. Rather it is between her legs. It is her on/off switch, her reset button. As such, sexuality can't be ignored. At the same time, sexuality is entirely de-naturalized, entirely artificial. After all, the girl is a PC. There is no underlying natural sex to ground the reality of gender. There is quite literally an absence of sex at two levels. Not only is Chii not a girl but the boy cannot have sex with her. The manga is more explicit about this fact than the anime: Motosuwa Hideki cannot have sex with Chii because having genital intercourse would reset her. Chobits thus potentially sets up an understanding of sexuality very close that of psychoanalytic theory: there is no sex because there is no such thing as a ‘natural woman.’ Saitô Tamaki writes, ‘love is nothing more than an exchange of illusions’ (233).
Thus the mecha-shojo is not the exception to the rule of sexuality. The ‘girl who is not one’ is the very ground of sexuality, at least in the psychoanalytic understanding of sexuality. ‘Woman’ does not exist outside of social relations or symbolization in some natural a priori way. Nor for that matter does man exist, nor does sexuality. There are only symbolically generated woman effects, girl effects, man effects, boy effects.
To understand some of the implications of this ‘absence of sex,’ let’s return to some of the girl figures in the prior animations and consider how they are instances of the girl who is not one.
