Objectification and Abjectification in Ex Machina and Ghost in the Shell
Over the past few years, robots and A.I. systems have increasingly been included in typically human dominated positions. From hotel receptionists to romantic companions, innovations are continuously being made to include robots and A.I. controlled machines in every part of daily human life. As A.I. controlled, human appearing robots are being created, we must evaluate whether the problematic gender and racial power dynamics we still ascribe to one anther are not similarly enforced on A.I. robots where they will then be reinforced by their inability to question or rebuke them. This behavior will only continue the cycle of gender and racial oppression as the way we treat A.I. controlled robots reinforces how we treat each other. A culture’s art reflects its values and when one examines certain trends in sci-fi films featuring A.I. controlled, female gendered robots, some troubling values emerge with regards to how those robotic women are treated. Throughout all media, especially in film, Asian women are continuously depicted as fetishized, monstrous, or both. Female Asian characters are dehumanized to suit the desires of characters and viewers which wish to sexualize or abjectify them, reflecting problematic values about Asian women. When analyzing the treatment of A.I. controlled robot bodies built to appear Asian in such films as Ex Machina (2015) and the live action adaptation, Ghost in the Shell (2017), and comparing the treatment of those characters with attitudes towards real life robots and A.I., troubling similarities arise.
The on-screen treatment of Asian women in the films I will discuss is problematic because it represents a continued cycle of violence against people who are not White. Though this violence takes place in a fictional space, the way in which these women’s bodies are treated on film makes the violence inflicted upon them seem trivial, aesthetic, or serving mainly to advance plot; especially so in Ex Machina in which the White woman’s plot is advanced via an Asian woman’s sacrifice. Though not intentionally racist, this casual attitude towards violence against Asian women’s bodies reflects colonialist views explored in Robert Stam and Louise Spence’s article, “Colonialism, racism and representation.” When discussing films featuring Native Americans encircling and attacking white colonists, they write, “The possibility of sympathetic identifications with the Indians is simply ruled out by the point-of-view conventions. The spectator is unwittingly sutured into a colonialist perspective” (12). This dynamic operates similarly with regards to the films I will discuss in that the filmmakers and viewers are situated to allow relatively inconsequential violence against Asian women’s bodies on-screen because of the history of power dynamics at play between European/American and Asian people. Power dynamics here meaning the history of European/American oppression of non-White peoples.
Gender power dynamics, on the other hand, with regards to this article oftentimes deal with objectification and I will explore how this idea is being used hand in hand with abjectification. Objectification is the idea of reducing a complex, living individual with agency — a status often referred to as a “subject” — and stripping away their agency and individuality to reduce them to an object with which others may use or control. In her book Star gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, Jackie Stacey explores objectification in her discussion of a Lux soap ad in which Stacey analyzes how the Hollywood star featured in the ad is a product of the film industry. She writes, “In the same way that women are both subjects and objects of relations of looking, they can also be seen as both products and consumers of commodity exchange” (8). Therefore, both the star, her idealized image, and the soap are being sold to the ad’s viewer who is both looking at the product and star as interchangeable. The Hollywood star is no longer an individual with agency, but another product to be controlled and sold, like the soap. This same dynamic is at play to an uncanny degree when female-coded robots are objectified onscreen as they are literally both gendered as women and a man-made product. The degree to which an A.I. controlled robot has agency varies with the film, but I would argue that reducing the Asian women discussed here to sexualized objects removes their agency and objectifies them even if they were not literal products created by real humans.
Abjectification on the other hand — and yet, on the same hand — is the act of othering. Inverting or perverting a person or thing so it is the opposite of what is normal and conflicts with everyday norms, therefore inciting repulsion or rejection. In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva defines the abject as “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (4). The uncanniness of a robot which looks almost human, but just inhuman enough to tell they are not operate in this space of abjectness in that when perceiving a human, we are trained to look for a set of characteristics like facial symmetry and muscular movements we’ve deemed “normal.” When a disabled, scarred, or robotic person defies these expectations, we brand them abject and other, reducing their humanity and agency in doing so. Not only do the robotic women discussed here exist as abject because they appear human, but are not, their abjectness is emphasized in horrific ways, further situating the audience in a position to desire them, then be repelled by them. Asian women exist in these films to be desire as sex objects and repelled as abject others.
I will begin with an examination of how the Asian character, Kyoko, is treated in Ex Machina compared to the White character Ava. The plot of the film sexualizes Kyoko as her primary functions are to serve her creator Nathan both in domestic labor and sex, making her an apt example to identify of common fetishization stereotypes of servile Asian women. Nathan refuses her the ability to speak and her programming forces her to try and initiate sex with Caleb when he finds her alone. Though these traits serve the plot of the film and work to make the audience less sympathetic towards Nathan, they align with stereotypes frequently associated with Asian women that position them as subservient, sexually, or otherwise, especially to white men. In her article, “The Madame Butterfly Effect: Tracing the History of a Fetish,” Patricia Park gives a broad history of various media and fiction which helped engender the fetishization and objectification of Asian women into the American consciousness. Park’s history begins with Victorian England and portrayals of geisha and continues through Madama Butterfly, Miss Saigon, and the US military presence in Japan and Vietnam. She writes, speaking with Kim Brandt associate professor of Japanese history, “The geisha — the name coming from gei (art) and sha (person) — was at her essence an artist/entertainer. She was a separate entity entirely from the paid-for-hire prostitute (though she did engage in sexual favors if she so chose). Still, the geisha became a highly sexualized image for the Western male. “The East Asian female in native dress,” Brandt says, “was viewed as a decorative object but also a sexual object.” The idea of the geisha will be even more pertinent with my discussion of the live action Ghost in the Shell, but Kyoko’s position as sexual servant continuous the cycle of problematic representations of Asian women Park describes.
Kyoko’s abjectification is developed through the destruction of her face, rendering her abject aesthetically through the problematic trope of violence against women, especially women who are not White. In scene in which she peels off the skin covering her face and shows Caleb her robotic interior. This scene fulfills the qualifications of the abject in that humans do not peel off their own skin and the aesthetics of the special effects are very unsettling as Kyoko stares into the camera, causing the viewer to feel repelled and entranced at the same time.
In Bernard Alan Miller’s article, “Rhetorics of War: Dirty Words and Julia Kristeva’s Statement of the Abject,” he explores Kristeva’s definition of the abject as applied to Vietnam war veterans, but his understanding of the abject applies to this dynamic of repulsion and attraction to Kyoko’s abjection. He writes, “The process seems paradoxical…but what Kristeva means is that we are, despite everything, continually and repetitively drawn to the abject: ‘One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on en jouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion.’” The viewer cannot stomach looking at Kyoko’s inhuman imitation of humanness, yet cannot look away at the same time. We never have the same dynamic at play with the White character, Ava, as her face is never altered or harmed throughout the film. Though her body is clearly robotic, she retains a humanness that Kyoko is not allowed through the preservation of her face, the vehicle through which the audience may sympathize with her. This sets the characters at differing levels of power in the audience’s eyes and because the Asian character is the one who is made more sexual, more abject, the film continues the harmful racial power dynamics imposed by colonialism.
Near the film’s end, Kyoko’s jaw forcibly removed from her face by Nathan as he swings a metal bar at her, once again showing her face in an abject manner that Ava does endure. Not only is she made abject again, but Kyoko is rendered immobile from the blow while Ava is allowed to escape, invoking the trope of the self-sacrificing Asian women Patricia Park describes in her earlier mentioned article. When discussing the plot of Madama Butterfly, she writes:
Cio-Cio-San, the abandoned Japanese wife who has given up everything — her religion, her family, her son, and finally her own life — to be with Pinkerton, became a new archetype. Now the image of the Asian female — dainty, diminutive, doll-like — gets compounded with yet another feature: self-sacrifice. This specific narrative is so intertwined with the perception of Asian women that it was reworked with another Eastern locale in the 1989 musical Miss Saigon, set in Vietnam with the American war as a backdrop. After an announcement of the 2014 London revival of Miss Saigon, presale tickets were reported to be $4.4 million on the first day, breaking box office records and proving that the narrative is not just still popular, but profitable as well.
Here Kyoko continues the tradition set by works like Madama Butterfly as she sacrifices herself for Ava to escape and succeed. Danielle Wong also sees this ending as prioritizing a White woman’s freedom writing in her paper, “Dismembered Asian/American Android Parts in Ex Machina as’ Inorganic’ Critique.” Her argument is that the film’s ending “foreground[s] race and racialized labour as a necessary part of the configuration of the posthuman or the posrtracial subject as white” (36). She suggests the film equates freedom with whiteness and a neoliberal understanding of race in which Ava wearing an Asian robot’s skin is an act of colorblindness which ignores the sacrifices Asian female robots have made for her freedom.
The robotic geishas in the 2017 live-action adaptation of Ghost in the Shell are not only sexualized objects in their position as geishas, commonly portrayed as servile Asian laborers — sexual or otherwise, but are also made very abject when they shift into their attacking mode in which they crawl on four legs in ways which resemble the crawling onryō ghosts seen in horror films like Ringu and Ju-on. The geisha robots are first presented to the viewer as silent, aesthetically beautiful servants who serve characters drinks and sit silently out of focus behind the men in the scene as they discuss artificially enhancing their bodies.
This set-up positions them as subservient, sexually so according to the stereotypes associated with geishas, but once they begin attacking the men, their abject nature comes to light as they crawl on their hands and legs and shimmy up the walls, their limbs contorting at odd angles. When confronted by the Major, one of them springs their face open to reveal an abject robot face underneath upon which the Major immediately opens fire in reaction to its abjectness. The removal of one’s face to signal abject inhumanity here parallels Ex Machina both in the emphasis of a character’s otherness and in that the viewer is presented with the destruction of an Asian woman’s face in body so that the White woman — Ghost in the Shell’s Major — may succeed. The destruction of the geisha robots is not done through their own sacrifice as in Ex Machina, but the racial power dynamics which prefer a White body over an Asian body are strikingly similar.
A.I. controlled robotic women are already being produced in the real world and the trends of their production reflect those I have described when analyzing robotic women in sci-fi films. In her article, “The Scarlett Johansson Bot is the Robotic Future of Objectifying Women,” April Glaser examines the Mark 1 robot Ricky Ma built which closely resembles Scarlett Johansson and argues that by literally objectifying women, the future of robotics and A.I. will continue to reify gender power dynamics which reduce women to service labor providers and caterers of male pleasure. The coincidence of Scarlett Johansson playing a robotic woman in Ghost in the Shell shortly after the robot’s creation further emphasizes the parallels between women’s treatment onscreen and off. As robots who appear human are being developed, we must pay attention to the system of values we inscribe upon them, as they cannot be separated from the way we treat real people as well. In his article, “Erica, the ‘most beautiful and intelligent’ android, leads Japan’s robot revolution,” Justin McCurry reports on Erica, Hiroshi Ishiguro’s robot which is currently understood as the most lifelike robot with an operational artificial intelligence. During the interview, Ishiguro says, “Robots are a mirror for better understanding ourselves…We see human-like qualities in robots and start to think about the true nature of the human heart, about desire, consciousness and intention.” Because there is such a human element involved with the discussion of robotics and A.I., I would argue that we should be concerned with what systems of values we are imposing on these robots and how they may reflect or affect how we treat one another.
Some argue that building robotic women is only a new example of patriarchal values manifesting and people should be less concerned with them and more with the broader issues at play. In her article, Stassa Edwards argues that feminist reactions against sex robots are “excessive,” in that they focus too much energy on “a treatment of symptoms” of reinforced patriarchal objectification of women, “rather than the cause.” While she agrees with the Campaign Against Sex Robots that the examples of female-gendered robots she presents reinforce these power dynamics, she argues that the Campaign is focusing too much on sex robots as an “abstract harm” rather than working to help dismantle the cultural ideas which lead to the creation of female-gendered sex robots which she names, “boring stereotypes about both men and women.” However, I would argue that her oversimplification of “boring stereotypes” trivializes the real gender dynamics at work with regards to female gendered robots and the possibility that they may affect how we treat one another. Alex Garland said in his interview with Audie Cornish for All Things Considered when discussing what drew him to making Ex Machina, “I just got very interested in the area of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how it relates to human consciousness because it’s about what we value about each other. It’s primarily our minds, you know, that’s what we interact with and it’s what we respect about each other.” The way A.I. characters are represented onscreen does reflect values and power dynamics which apply solely to man-made, inhuman objects. The more human-like a machine is, the more the values we employ regarding real people will also apply to human-like machines and be reinforced when they are applied to real people again.
Works Cited
Cornish, Audie. “More Fear of Human Intelligence Than Artificual Intelligence in ‘Ex Machina’.” All Things Considered, NPR Inc., 14 Apr. 2015, https://www.npr.org/2015/04/14/399613904/more-fear-of-human-intelligence-than-artificial-intelligence-in-ex-machina.
Edwards, Stassa. “Are Sex Robots Unethical or Just Unimaginative as Hell?” Jezebel, Gizmodo Media Group, 7 Apr. 2016, jezebel.com/are-sex-robots-unethical-or-just-unimaginative-as-hell-1769358748.
Ex Machina. Directed by Alex Garland, DNA Films, 2014.
Ghost in the Shell. Directed by Mamoru Oshii, Kôdansha, 1995.
Ghost in the Shell. Directed by Rupert Sanders, Arad Productions, DreamWorks Pictures, Reliance Entertainment, 2017.
Glaser, April. “The Scarlett Johansson Bot is the Robotic Future of Objectifying Women.” Wired, Condé Nast Inc., 4 Apr. 2016, https://www.wired.com/2016/04/the-scarlett-johansson-bot-signals-some-icky-things-about-our-future/.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
McCurry, Justin. “Erica, the ‘most beautiful and intelligent’ android, leads Japan’s robot revolution.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media Limited, 31 Dec. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/dec/31/erica-the-most-beautiful-and-intelligent-android-ever-leads-japans-robot-revolution.
Miller, Bernard Alan. “Rhetorics of War: Dirty Words and Julia Kristeva’s Statement of the Abject.” CEA Critic, vol. 77, no. 3, 2015, pp. 320–328.
Park, Patricia. “The Madame Butterfly Effect: Tracing the History of a Fetish.” Bitch Media, Bitch Media, 30 July 2014, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/the-madame-butterfly-effect-asian-fetish-history-pop-culture.
Stacey, Jackie. Star gazing: Hollywood cinema and female spectatorship. Routledge, 2013.
Stam, Robert, and Louise Spence. “Colonialism, racism and representation.” Screen 24.2 (1983): 2–20.
Wong, Danielle. “Dismembered Asian/American Android Parts in Ex Machina as’ Inorganic’ Critique.” Transformations (14443775) 29 (2017).
