Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema

Simultaneous Worlds: Global Science Fiction Cinema. Jennifer L. Feeley and Sarah Ann Wells, editors. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Reviewed by Zak Bronson, SFRA Review #321 (Summer 2017): pp. 28-29, our source here.[1]

Bronson notes J.P. Telotte's discussion of F.P.1 and closer to concerns of this wiki,

Multiple essays also consider the legacies of the cyborg [...]. In much of Western SF, the cyborg has been a figure for a disembodied, hyper-masculine conception of selfhood. However, essays by Sharalyn Orbaugh, Steve Choe, and Michelle Cho offer renewed attention to the cyborg as a means of resistance to the depersonalized transactions of global capital. Orbaugh, for example, reads Oshii Mamoru’s Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence (2004) against dominant Western trends in which the posthuman subject is synonymous with fully technologized selfhood. In Orbaugh’s reading, Innocence provides a cautionary tale of posthuman enhancement that simultaneously considers the body as a site of post-anthropocentric relationality. Such a figuration enables the film to effectively move away from disembodied conceptions of self and point towards the possibilities of embodied affect. Cho reads the cyborg as a nexus point for comprehending social relations within global capitalism. Examining the inflatable sex doll that sits at the center of Air Doll (2009) as a cyborg-like figure, Cho argues that the doll’s sexualized body becomes an ‘empty’ signifier of projected desire that exposes the superficiality of modern consumer culture. (Bronson, p. 29)

RDE, finishing, 7Oct21