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Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime (Part Two)

East Asian Studies, McGill University, Thomas.Lamarre{at}mcgill.ca

Carrying on from part one published in the July 2006 issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, part two continues its exploration of the animated series Chobitswith an eye to how it reads problems of media and technology almost exclusively in terms of human desire, much as psychoanalytic theory reads technology in terms of the weird substance of enjoyment. Part two takes up an analysis of partial objects and perversion in order to show how the materiality of manga and anime as media do not entirely disappear but haunt the dynamics of sexual enjoyment. Materiality returns in an evocation of ‘full blankness’ associated with the white manga page or transparent celluloid sheet, which allows Chobits to pervert the logic of suture and the associated dynamics of the male gaze. 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.

Key Words: anime • gaze • manga • materiality • new media • new technologies • perversion • psychoanalysis • shôjo • suture

Animation, Vol. 2, No. 1, 9-25 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/1746847706068899


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