The Return of the Illegitimate Offspring

The 2017 live-action remake of Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 anime Ghost in the Shell offers an interesting case study in the shifting conceptualization of posthuman identity through its re-characterization of the cyborg figure Major Kusanagi. The film’s purposeful revisioning of the Japanese anime is not only the superimposing of Hollywood sensibilities onto other cultures, but also serves to negotiate the human-machine interaction in the context of posthumanism. This essay offers a contextual reading of both films, and argues that cyborg representations have the potential to both challenge and reinforce current belief systems. Cyborgs epitomize the tension between the blurring of traditional boundaries and the techno-capitalist restructuring of global power relations. Oshii’s anime speculates on the transcendence of humanist limitations in an optimistic vision of human-machine symbiosis, while Sanders’s remake establishes Mira’s (Kusanagi’s) humanity through her gender identity and her family origin. Such a narrative closure signals the “coming home” of the “illegitimate” cyborg/human, and betrays a neoliberalist market logic. In this way, the issue of posthuman identity in Sanders’s film is displaced by a quest for authenticity and social belonging.