M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions- Special Feature #02 / Hideaki Tazaki, “This Is My Body—Or, Time for Tachikomas” English version also available

A media project to speculate and discuss about GHOST IN THE SHELL “M.M.A. -Massive Mesh Ambitions-.”

 

The theme of ISSUE #02 is “Outlaw.”
Hideaki Tazaki, “This Is My Body—Or, Time for Tachikomas” is now available in English.

 

More than any other author, Hideaki Tazaki’s body of works are written so perfectly for the purpose of an oblique perspective on Ghost in the Shell that one might almost imagine they were written toward that end.

 

Yet in fact, Tazaki’s past works have made almost no direct mention of the series. Even so, Tazaki’s works as a scholar of gender and sexuality—which have stood at the crux of dualisms like sadism and masochism, action and inaction, violence and love, self and other, and individual and collective and mediate their polar opposites with profound ingenuity—also resonate deeply and lewdly with the most radical elements of the world of Ghost in the Shell.

 

In the past, Tazaki has said the following about his reasoning on the theoretical significance of sexuality. “Because it’s the real part of us that allows us to survive by converting pain into pleasure and hatred into love. To take it a step further, it’s where both individual and collective take form.”

 

And once again, as Tazaki dives back into exploration of the formation of the individual and collective, his choice of conspirator in this project is that same bizarrely cute, confused, and mascot-like presence from S.A.C. that brightens up the hard-boiled Public Security Section 9: the blue Tachikoma think tanks.