Rue O’Reilly

I am an interdisciplinary anthropologist and artist who specialises in queer expressions of gender and sexuality in Japan, with an emphasis on alternative modes of community and identity construction. My MSc thesis was titled ‘(Gender)queer identity in Japan, the articulation of non-binary and non-bainarī gender: Ways of doing and being kuia in Tokyo’.

My doctoral research focuses on queer communal expression in Tokyo, understanding ‘queer’ to be non-normative spatial and temporal articulations beyond being simply a set of self-applied labels. ‘Queer’ is lived. Queer identities are co-constructive, self-expressive, and innovative. They develop within, in opposition to, and alongside heteronormative cisgendered constructions of society. They navigate social dogma and reified understandings of what ‘should’ and ‘shouldn’t’ be. For this reason, explorations of (gender)queer identity can offer us insight into larger worlds of shifting norms.

My art practice is primarily in the form of auto-ethnographic explorations, film photography, and semi-fictional, speculatively fabulative writings that explore memory, sex, gender, community, and violence in my lives across Japan and England.

Developing a self-reflexive approach to epistemological models is a preoccupation of my work, with a focus on alternative approaches to traditional historical analysis and participant observation. Too often we forget that many forms of knowledge are overlooked due to unconventional presentation and/or apparent contradictions with dominant power/knowledge discourses. For this reason I am interested in engaging with short-term ethnography, digital ethnography (insofar as deconstructing digital/physical ethnographic distinctions), participant interventionism, observant participation, auto-ethnography, human-non-human actor-networks, transnational and intra-communal field sites, refamiliarising the de-familiar, and photo-elicitation. Institutional forms of knowledge production are not politically neutral and objective, so we must be cognisant of the pasts, presents, and futures that our ontological and epistemological frameworks construct. Alongside my focus on nonmodern nonwests, I am are an active member of groups interested in decolonising anthropological and historical work.