Japanese Animation and New Media
Week Twelve: Chapter Twenty: The Spiral Dance of Symptom and Specter
The positioning of men as the subject of vision and action in the manga Voyeur raises two important questions about technology.
First, if women took over the voyeuristic optical device, would gender asymmetry cease to matter? Would everyone become a subject of technology, an agent of her destiny? These questions are basically ones about the social uses of technology. Does social use so thoroughly transform the technology that its material configuration no longer matters?
The general stance of this account has been that a technology or technologies cannot determine any situation in a deterministic way. But technologies do matter. They do affect a situation. But they do not structure all relations. This is why I use the terms such as ‘machine’ (in a non-mechanistic way) and ‘technics’ (between technology and technique).
A second question then follows. If technologies matter — as machines or technics — then if we shift from one technology to another, does everything change? In other words, if we shift from devices that seem to abet voyeurism and cinematism, do gender relations also change?
The answer to these questions is again both yes and no.
Shifts in technologies potentially affect gender relations but they do not make for a resolute break. To explore these questions more concretely, I will provide some more examples from manga. In order to address the first set of questions, I will look at Shutter Love (Okazaki Mari, Shattaa rabu, 1998), in which female photographers grapple for control of the camera. In order to address the second set of questions, I will look at screen technologies related to the VCR in the context of Video Girl Ai (Katsura Masakazu, Den’ei shôjo, 1989-92). And I will look at PC and cellphone technologies in the context of Chobits and Cellphone Girl Heaven (Kuroda bb, Keikai shôjoshi Heaven, 2009).
