Every morning, I put on my thinking cap and my smartiepants. Unfortunately, there is no shirt that properly proclaims my intellectual abilities, so I have to go tits out
ID: the bugs bunny "i wish all __ a very pleasant evening" meme that's edited to say "i wish everyone who has to work retail tomorrow a very good luck." /end ID
#016: CRITIQUE — Gender, Sex, Trans Reproduction, and the Male Gaze in Ghost in the Shell 30 Years Later
Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 film Ghost in the Shell has long been one of my favorite movies of all time. I’ve come back to it over and over again over about 10 years, and this year I started watching some of the spinoff series it spawned, including both seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex as well as Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, both directed by Kenji Kamiyama.
When I show it to my friends, I often give them the warning that “this film was definitely made for the male gaze.” The way the main character, Major Kusanagi, is drawn with huge boobs and butt, often in tight-fitting clothing or even naked for the sake of using thermoptic camouflage, is a classically sexualized and objectified feminine body for male arousal. It always struck me as gross, and I often felt guilty for it being one of my favorite movies.
As I grew older alongside the film, I started unpacking and reading more about my gender and sexuality. My personal growth complicated my appreciation of the movie by revealing potential themes of transgenderism within the film. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I knew there was something deeper going on that I couldn’t quite understand.
For those of you who still haven't seen it, there are spoilers ahead, so beware!
Oshii’s adaptation of the original manga created in the late 80s by Matsamune Shirow is a classic example of a director taking a text and writing their own story over it--a tale as old as opera, at least. Shirow’s original manga sees a much younger, cockier main character who's always looking for action, which poses a stark contrast to Oshii’s version of Mokoto Kusanagi, the Major, who is stoic, precise, lethal, and wise beyond her young cybernetic body.
After the initial assassination scene that opens the film, the title and opening credits come in amid scenes of (re?)construction and maintenance of the Major’s cybernetic body. As the mechanical parts assemble and are bathed in various viscous and milky fluids, it seems to me as though her body is being embalmed. This is contrasted with her naked body being dropped into a vat and curling up into the fetal position. Her body floats upwards, and the milky substance turns into flakes revealing new, white-pink skin, suggesting a rebirth. This initial cycle of death and resurrection hints at a broader theme of reproduction in the film, specifically reproduction as a defining characteristic of a living organism.
The recurring theme of reproduction as a defining characteristic of what it means to be alive can be found in the famous dream sequence where Kusanagi keeps seeing herself reflected in the various shop windows that form labyrinthian walls above the water. These reflections of her living other lives alludes to the copies that Project 2501 refers to when explaining the difference between mere replication and his vision of “merging”. The water, initially seen as polluted and dirty in the river, becomes rejuvenated by rain, which makes the city lights of advertisement screens seem like natural warnings, like poisonous plants signaling danger within their pigment.
The rain appears to make the world ripe, fecund, fertile, ready for new life to take root, like the tree of life that hominis sits atop as its sweetest fruit. The girls in matching raincoats and umbrellas suggest sprouting flowers. They always have for me. But now the image becomes clearer. The feminine fashion dummies at the end of this sequence signals sensuality and maternity, all bearing full breasts and posing with accentuated hips. The rain can be read as lubricating, a rush of passion that Kusanagi is unable to consciously explain.
There are other instances of Kusanagi’s sexual desire appearing in the film, such as the dive scene where she rises from the depths of the ocean to face her own reflection. Her mask permeates the surface, breaking the vision, but the unknown voice that calls to her from deep within her subconscious—her ghost—does not let her escape her longing.
Most of the female-presenting characters have no significant part to play in the film. There’s the minister’s interpreter, who is a victim of a cyberbrain hack that sets the backdrop for the introduction of our villain, The Puppetmaster, also known as Project 2501. Then there are the various technicians who work for Aramaki in the unspecified control room of Public Security Section 9, the shady agency that finds itself doing the dirty work of the Japanese government. As it becomes revealed that Project 2501 is essentially a sentient computer program, its sex and gender identity are essentially…nonexistent, perhaps?
The Major is the only female-presenting character in the film with any agency. Aside from Bato’s love of sports cars seen at the very end of the film, Kusanagi is the only character depicted as enjoying a hobby—scuba diving—in her spare time. She is the squad leader of Public Security Section 9, giving orders to Bato, Togusa, and Ishikawa on the ground throughout the film. More crucially, she is the only one who defies a direct order from Section Chief Aramaki to destroy the body hosting The Puppetmaster.
This scuba diving scene, with its themes of containment and boundaries on living, brings the trans allegory to light. The bodies of the Section 9 supersoldiers evoke a dystopian, hyper-imperialist transhumanism as they constitute lethal weapons created by the corporation Megatech as well as controlled and owned by the government. As the Major remarks on their bodies’ ability to immediately break down the alcohol in their systems so they can “toss ‘em back while we wait for orders”, her comrade Bato comments that if they ever wanted to resign, they’d have to return their cyborg bodies, and with all the augmentation they’ve received, “there wouldn’t be much left”.
The Major’s subsequent monologue about what defines the self, what makes her who she is, anchors her subjectivity to the forefront of this film, as she refuses to lose it among the various corporations and shadowy government entities she works for. When she ultimately laments that “I feel confined, only free to expand myself within boundaries,” it's no wonder that she feels this way. The Major isn’t just stuck in the wrong body—she’s in a body that fundamentally isn’t her own, biologically or legally. Worse than being unable to medically transition in a society like that of today, be that for financial or political reasons, she is forced to inhabit another body that isn’t hers, and has no access to her old one. This is true for most of the members of Section 9, and most likely true for significant sectors of the population of this society. But for the Major, it appears to be a source of a kind of transhumanist dysphoric anxiety, to which her monologue about her own identity stands in opposition. “Sure I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others, but my thoughts and memories are unique only to me, and I carry a sense of my own destiny.”
There is a degree of androgyny to The Major and Project 2501. As much as The Major can be read as a new generational interpretation of the femme fatale, her cold demeanor and often butch style of dress suggest a more complicated gender presentation, a more nuanced sense of self. The yellow jacket she is often seen wearing in public and the Section 9 lab, for instance, suggests functionality, but its color is not militaristic at all. It's big and bold, like a bird signaling its size to a potential predator with its feathers.
Despite the apparent sexlessness and genderlessness of Project 2501, it is referred to throughout the film with masculine gender pronouns. They describe their body as a vessel they entered for convenience and seem to have little regard for it, suggesting a degree of dysphoria in their relationship to their body. Not everyone who experiences dysphoria is trans, and not all trans people experience dysphoria, but the correlation between those experiences is significant.
While this reading is not self-evident within the logic of the film, Kusanagi’s interest in Project 2501 is irrefutable as an integral part of the story. She is drawn to them, not wanting anyone to dive into their ghost before she gets the chance to see what’s inside. Before this fatal attraction leads to the ultimate climax of this film, we even see the American Dr. Willis make the casual remark to Nakamura of Section 6 as to why the Puppet Master would run to Section 9: “maybe he’s got a girlfriend there he’s got the hots for.”
But the most striking evidence of this mutual attraction and interest comes near the end of the film when the broken bodies of the Major and Project 2501 turn to face each other during their dialogue. Two feminine bodies, naked and glistening in the rain, stare into each other’s ghosts, “mirror images of one another’s psyche”, searching for the outcome of their union that is uncertain to either of them. For the Major and Project 2501 to “merge” psyches—effectively intercourse producing a new, third being from the two of them—would that mean they would both cease to exist? Is the male gaze broken in this scene, between two feminine—yet ostensibly androgynous—characters who are about to embark upon the journey of sex? This is the question the Major wrestles with as the snipers train their weapons upon her.
This moment seems to recall Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) and her notion that the female sex is marked within society as other. Whereas the other important characters in the film double down on the masculinity of their bodies, the bodies of the major and Project 2501 are marked as feminine through their exposed breasts, long hair, their large eyes and lips. Their femininity indicates their readiness to reproduce and bear children, or “offspring,” according to Project 2501’s wording. Here the transhumanism of the film, the transcendence of human subjectivity into something beyond, takes on a whole other dimension.
In our current historical epoch, biological reproduction and medical technology limit the options for people to have their children. When people undergo medical gender transition, their opportunities for bearing biological children often shrink even further. While it's not impossible, transition often makes the opportunities for reproduction more and more inviable for a variety of factors.
But here, we see two trans bodies—transgender and transhuman—uniting to create new life. Something that, 30 years after the release of Ghost in the Shell, we rarely see portrayed in the media. If anything, it is merely alluded to as a plot device in films like Pedro Almodovar’s All About My Mother (1997) and novels like Detransition, Baby (2021) by Torrey Peters. The fraughtness of discussions of reproductive trans sex cannot be overstated, but it suffices to say the significance and weight the being born from the union of Motoko Kusanagi and Project 2501 carries when read through this lens isn’t merely a mindfuck: it’s pure magic. The possibilities of trans reproduction embodied in this “newborn” are as “vast and infinite” as the net.
Acknowledging the possibilities of trans reproduction in this offspring emphasizes the significance of the material link between medical transition and contemporary technology. The science behind medical transition has come a long way since the days when the Institute for Sexual Research in Germany was destroyed by the Nazis in 1933. While it would be ridiculous and chauvinistic for various reasons to suggest that bearing children would somehow make medically transitioning people fully alive, this reading allows for an imagined future where trans people are able to more easily have children as they desire. There are untold implications on the formation of families and the gender roles within them wrapped up within the possibilities this reading suggests.
As exciting as it is to reconsider the film in this light, we must still address the sexualization of the Major and Project 2501. Was this film not made with the male gaze, but rather using its sexualizing imagery to comment on the nature of life itself?
Let’s be real, this movie was made in Japan in the mid 90s by an entirely male team of writers, animators, directors, etc. Both can certainly be true. A character can be conveyed as attractive without being portrayed as conventionally attractive, or even sexually appealing. A woman or gender diverse director may have also embraced nudity in this film, engendering a similar reading; however I imagine they may not have done so in a way that would have fallen so in line with the objectifying patriarchal ideal of a woman’s body.
Moreover, not only is Japanese society today one of a uniquely misogynistic and patriarchal character, but a hypothetical futuristic Japanese society that has developed even further within imperialist globalism would surely exhibit deeper instances of institutionalized patriarchy, to the point of strongly influencing the gendered design of cyborgs, particularly those developed as weapons of the state. Oshii and his team were just as much a product of their time when working on this film in the 90s as the designers at Megatech would be in a fictional future. None of this, however, is mutually exclusive with trans people having gay cyborg sex, even while under the gun. And perhaps because of this, the male gaze in this film does not diminish the power it has held on me and millions of others all these years (although I bet for many of you freaks, it should).
I think it’s important to think critically about why we consume the media we consume, and what compels us to revisit it. For me, Ghost in the Shell is an important piece to do that with not only because of its broader impact on sci-fi, dystopian, and anime, but because it made me uncomfortable even as I enjoyed it and I couldn’t fully express why. It felt embarrassing to say this was one of my favorite movies for that reason.
Taking a deep dive into the dystopian, transhumanist, imperialist future it describes revealed some of the complications I’ve had over the years in appreciating this film. Underneath the layers of imperialist, patriarchal dystopia and the dispossession of bodies, we can see the potential for new trans subjectivities to take form in a future visible on the horizon.
March 2025
It turns out that actually standing by "men and women are not inherently very different" is a reliable way to bother absolutely everyone. Left or right, cis or trans, feminist or misogynist, all cling to the binary for dear life.
people are always like "Oh a vampire wouldn't get horny while drinking someone's blood, that's like getting horny while eating a sandwich" and like man have you never had a really good fucking sandwich?
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