Paper short abstract:

The paper opens a new historical trajectory of modernity by introducing what the author argues as "queer nature," a basis of truth for the meaning of civilisation. Queer nature emerged in the life and work of the naturalist Minakata Kumagusu who practised microbiology through Buddhist epistemology.

Paper long abstract:

In modernity, the nature of civilisation depended on how one understood human nature comparable to the nature of the universe discovered by modern science - e.g. gravity. Nature provided the indisputable basis of truth. This paper opens a new historical trajectory of modernity by introducing what the author conceptualises as "queer nature," an alternate basis of truth for what it means to be civilised. Queer nature emerged in the life and work of the independent naturalist and polymath Minakata Kumagusu (1867-1941) who practised microbiology through Buddhism-influenced epistemology.

Kumagusu immensely contributed to the knowledge-making of modernity. The evidence is his 51 articles in the Science journal Nature and approximately 400 English essays and 600 Japanese works in the field of Humanities. Even the Shōwa emperor of Japan requested Kumagusu to deliver him a lecture on microbiology (1929). Yet, he remained marginalised in history because historians rarely separated the meaning of civilisation from the making of modern nation-state inspired by the monolithic West and its modern science. Queer nature naturally illuminated experiences of modernity different from that of the normative nature envisioned by the state.

Queer nature served as the basis of truth for "a different kind of civilisation" that arose through cooperation, instead of competition, among nations and race. The present moment of modernity captured the mixture of life and death, instead of the Social Darwinian "survival of the fittest" triumph of life over death. Everyone possessed civilisational agency regardless of their sex, gender, and age. Indeed, the conceptualisation of queer nature sets out a new historical meaning of "queer" as a term not limited to the category of "gender" that emerged from identity politics caused by the normative nature. Kumagusu discerned queer nature that grounded these lived experiences of modernity in the unconventional truth-makers of history towards which he gravitated: jōsei (affective human nature) and microbial species. The history of queer nature challenges the dominant historical discourse on how modern scientific knowledge determined the meaning of civilisation at the turn of the 1880s to 1890s modern Japan when the civilizational discourse has been assumed to have settled.