Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime (Part One)

摘要

Anime abounds in images of ‘nonhuman women’, that is, goddesses, female robots, gynoids, alien women, animal girls, female cyborgs, and many others. This article provides an introduction to problems of gender and genre in relation to the nonhuman woman, followed by an extended discussion of the animated television series Chobits, based on a manga series by the four-woman team CLAMP. In a manner eerily consonant with psychoanalytic theory, Chobits reads problems of media and technology almost exclusively in terms of human desire, in terms of the weird substance of enjoyment. Yet, because the nonhuman woman remains nonhuman, structures of desire are subject to perverse material twists, and Chobits offers a very unusual logic of suture. The nonhuman woman becomes the catalyst for ways of looking that appear to bypass relations with Others altogether, promising the production of entirely new worlds at some elemental level of perception.