Consequently, the questions proposed below are the starting point to reassess the relationship between Japanese cinema, animation, and the cyborg. This thesis, therefore, intends to fill the gap by investigating the gendered cyborg through a feminist lens to understand the interplay between gender, the body and the cyborg within historical-social contexts. In regard to the academic research on Japanese cinema and animation, there is a serious gap in articulating concepts such as live-action film, animation, gender, and the cyborg. Whereas the figure of the cyborg is predominantly pervasive in cinematic science fiction, the Japanese popular imagination of cyborgs not only crosses cinematic genre boundaries between monster, disaster, horror, science fiction, and fantasy but also crosses over to the medium of animation. The thesis uses a feminist approach to explore the representation of the cyborg in Japanese film and animation in relation to gender, the body, and national identity. I conclude that the organisation of the episode – and of the series overall – around the notion that ‘if nothing we do matters, then all that matters is what we do’ (Angel 2.16) is undermined through the representations of gender and gendered violence that are central themes in this performance. I illustrate that legality and morality may be represented as unstable, but this radical potential is undermined by the representation of masculinised violence as inherently tied to material bodies.
I outline the theory of gender/ed violence that underpins my analysis, before investigating signifiers of legality and morality, drawing on wider themes from the series. Whereas the latter are represented as contextually specific, the performances of gender adhere to a binary logic in keeping with modernist notions of the subject. I argue that the dominant themes of the episode are gender, morality and legality.
In this episode, simply titled ‘Billy’, a young man is hunted down by Angel, who is both a private detective and a vampire with a soul, to prevent him from unleashing ‘primordial misogyny’ in the men he touches. This article explores the dynamics of morality, legality and gendered violence represented in one episode of the television series Angel.
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