“machines could be haunted; there was always the spectre of the ghost in the machine.”

The collapsibility of gender and identity haunts the films chosen for this year’s NI Science Festival. The permeability of these boundaries can be seen in the warped creationist myth of Frankenhooker, the splintering dual-dream identities of Paprika, and Ghost in the Shell’s transhumanist potentialities. All three films are rich with complex and compelling representations of women within science fiction narratives. 

However, what I find most interesting is the challenge these films present to any essentialist reading of gender. In considering Ghost in the Shell alongside the concept of cyborg feminism, as coined by Donna Haraway in her seminal manifesto on the subject, we can come to new ways of thinking about subjectivity and our spectatorship.

Ghost in the Shell’s opening frames the film within a “near future” where “electrons and light flow freely”, though notably nation states survive. It is within this hyper-militarised technoscape that the films protagonist, Major Kusanagi, comes into consciousness. The Major is a purpose-built militarised weapon, with most of the film devoted to her growing awareness of her corporeal confines. Haraway explicitly defines the cyborg as “not born in a garden”, subverting narratives of original wholeness or innocence. Despite the cyborg being ostensibly divorced from any coherent concept of “gender" or indeed being “born” in any traditional sense, Ghost in the Shell presents us with a world that holds onto these essentialist concepts in the face of their obliteration. Ghost in the Shell’s visual language is inarguably hyper-focused on the Major’s “shell”, with the Major’s “birth” sequence being more reminiscent of Sailor Moon than the rest of the film’s steely cyberpunk aesthetic. One of the most radical conclusions to be drawn from the film is the synthesis of techno-authoritarianism and patriarchy. Oshii often frames The Major as a naked body floating through space, with even her fellow cyborgs seeing this nakedness as a point of shame or embarrassment. With heterosexist spectatorship resisting techno-digestion, the world of Ghost in the Shell presents a vision of the future absorbed in the nostalgia of reductivism. 

Haraway describes both feminisation and the cyborg as “disassembled and reassembled”, inherently unstable and collapsible. It is in this uncertainty that both Haraway and Ghost in the Shell see new modalities and possibilities. Ghost in the Shell imagines the future of consciousness as a network, a mutating and chameleon existence that will shake off any notion of the “self”. The film’s concluding lines, “the net is vast and infinite”, hang ominously. The conclusion is, however, not necessarily dystopian. Haraway saw the cyborg as allowing for coalition through “affinity, not identity”. The Major has achieved an existence and means of relating to the world outside of technocratic authoritarianism, which may be all we can hope for really.