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Animation, Vol. 1, No. 1, 45-59 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1746847706065841

Platonic Sex: Perversion and Shôjo Anime (Part One)

Thomas Lamarre

McGill University, 3434 McTavish Street, Montreal, PQ H3A 1X9, Canada.Thomas.Lamarre{at}mcgill.ca

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.

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


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