Browsing by Subject "female body"

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    “Fixing” Female Bodies through Reproductive Medicine and Assisted Reproduction: An Ideological Critique
    (University of North Bengal, 2019-03) Roy, Pinaki
    An ideological critique of reproductive medicine and assisted reproduction’s disavowed socio-cultural complicity in the reiteration of the ideology of heterosexism necessitates a radical interrogation of the presupposed unmediated materiality of the sexed body. This ideological critique, which foregrounds the discursively and ideologically constructed materiality of the sexed body, refrains from fictionalizing the sexed body. On the contrary, this critique attempts to show that the sexed body is a “reified” entity, (re)produced as unmediated through mediations of different technologies of power and the ideological processes immanent in these technologies. These mediations render possible thinking of the sexed body as an entity, yet these mediations which are constitutive of the body are categorically disavowed by the so-called decontextualized medical knowledge and practice in search of objectivity and universality.
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    Superflat and Post-Gender: A Case Study of female bodies in Ghost in the Shell and Paprika
    (University of North Bengal, 2022-12) Dewan, Arghyadip
    This article studies the representation of female bodies in two anime films: Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) and Satoshi Kon’s Paprika (2006) to study how the post apocalyptic cyborg and the dream realm’s alter ego both subvert the gender oriented paradigms by becoming Superflat bodies in a postgender space. Takashi Murakami’s Superflat manifesto talks about the bricolage of multiple flattened layers superimposed onto one another to create a composite surface of multiple focal points where meaning exists on the surface itself rather than the interior. In both Ghost in the Shell and Paprika we see the melting of the outside into the inside. The post apocalyptic Niihama City and the unstable kaleidoscopic dream realm both are examples of what Susan J Napier terms “fantasyscapes” where the body goes through the Guattarian “a-signifying semiotic” process to create unlimited intersections of signs, identities, images and self-images. This contributes to the Superflat “delimiting” (Looser, 2006: 108) of the body where its symbiosis with both technology and the cybernetically created alter ego takes place. It also blurs the boundaries between body and commodity. Thus the bodies of Major Mokoto Kusanagi/The Puppet Master in Ghost in the Shell and Dr.Chiba Atsuko/Paprika in Paprika become examples of Superflat bodies in a post-gender future.