Cyborg, goddess, or magical girl/heavenly woman? Rethinking gender and technology in science education via <i>Ghost in the Shell</i>

Abstract

In her widely cited and influential “cyborg manifesto”, Donna Haraway argues that “cyborg imagery” can provide a way out of the maze of dualisms we have used to explain our bodies and our tools to ourselves and concludes by asserting that she would rather be a cyborg than a goddess. We depart from the cyborg/goddess distinction by invoking a widely recognised archetype in Japanese popular media, namely the mahou shoujo (magical girl), who holds a dual identity as an earthly being (usually an adolescent schoolgirl) and a heavenly being (a super-powered girl/woman on a mission against sinister beings). We demonstrate that the distinctively Japanese figurations of the “magical girl” and the “heavenly woman” can generate “lines of flight” that invite Anglophone science educators to move beyond the Anglosphere’s “maze of dualisms” and science education’s regulation by dominant systems of signification. Specifically, we invite science educators to rethink representations of gender and technology (e.g. artificial intelligence, robotics) in the light of Masumune Shirou’s manga (comic/graphic novel), The Ghost in the Shell, and its adaptation in Mamouri Oshii’s similarly titled anime (animated film).