Oriental Ornaments: Yellowface and Painful Object(ification)s in Sanders’s Ghost in the Shell

Abstract

Rupert Sanders’s live-action adaptation Ghost in the Shell (2017) is singular within the franchise for manifestly bringing into focus the sociocultural and political dimensions of subjectivation and interpellation through casting. This film crystalizes entanglements of race, gender, and sexuality in both narrative and production. This article argues that the red-robed geisha illuminates the méconnaissance of surface and embodiment, thereby providing a lens through which we can interrogate not just the re-presentation of race but also its spectrality and paradoxical dis/embodiment. Actor Rila Fukushima’s performance serves as a double projection: as a performer, her enactment is a projection on film; as the red-robed geisha, the film re-presents her as a “yellow” woman, literally masked as a “perfected” version of herself. Her Asianness is ornamental and made infinitely wearable, pinpointing her imbrication not only in objectification, but also in the convoluted symbiosis between ornamentation as racialization (and vice versa) and racial melancholia. By focusing on the film’s production and re-presentation of Fukushima, this article posits that her double projection shows how the shifting surfaces of racial formation and the pathology of racial melancholia are clearly intertwined.