Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Eleven: Chapter Seventeen: The Absence of Sex
Psychoanalytic theory has a particular take on the ‘girl who is not one.’ Saitô Tamaki, whose essay you read for today’s class, sees the girl who is not one in terms of the fundamental asymmetry of desire. For him, the artificiality of the ‘girl who is not one’ is an almost natural outcome of human sexuality.
Saitô argues that men and women have fundamentally different experiences of sexuality. There are ‘structural differences between male and female desire’ (233). The man ‘must establish [his] position firmly before he can desire an object’ (231). A male otaku, for instance, will organize his desire around an object, such as the character of Asuka in Evangelion. In contrast, the female otaku who reads yaoi or BL (boys love) manga organizes her desire around phases of romance and situations. Her world is in fact genderless and abstract in Saitô’s opinion. She isn’t so concerned about fixing her position or having an object of desire. She ‘immerses herself completely in the object’ (231).
Consequently, the man will want to possess the object (the girl) in order to complete himself, which brings him closer to ‘being one.’ The woman, however, will become the object for the man. As such, she ends up ‘being not one.’
On the positive side, Saitô succeeds in depathologizing the apparently weird and perverse scenarios common in manga and anime. No matter what people are reading, he assures us, even if it looks homosexual or pedophilic, it is utter normal and natural. Boys position themselves as boys, and girls position themselves as girls. Well, in fact, girls ‘un-position’ or ‘de-position’ themselves — but that’s to be expected, in his opinion.
On the negative side, Saitô thoroughly naturalizes and normalizes a classic heterosexual scenario in which the girl is fated to be not one. She remains inscrutable and incomprehensible even to herself. He asks, ‘Can one rationally explain women’s taste for jewelry?’ (233).
Also, on the negative side, for Saitô, because the fundamental asymmetry of human sexuality happens regardless of what kinds of materials people interact with, he has no way of talking about materiality, let alone the effects of technology. Boys turn into men, and girls turn into non-men (women), regardless of social conditions or technological transformations.
It is precisely this normalization of ‘gender dimorphism’ and the ‘heterosexual matrix’ in psychoanalytic theory that feminist media studies and then queer studies challenged. As we’ll see later, there are two basic responses. One is to say that there is in fact a genuine female position, that a woman can be one with or without the man. The other, which is more interesting in the context of manga and anime, is to say: ‘Everything and everyone is not one!’ We’re all girls now! Which also means that no one is.
But before we consider such twists, let’s look again at the animations that we have seen to see how Saitô’s argument plays out.
