Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

Using my curation of the exhibition “Inside/Out” (Waseda University, 2020–21) as a case, I argue that queer reading can act as detonative curation: a cruising method that follows attraction in the archive to disrupt heteronormative, linear, canon-centered narratives of Japanese film history.

Paper long abstract

This paper proposes queer reading as a curatorial method for building a queer film archive and writing queer film history. Within the heteronormative frameworks of Japanese film studies, the imperative to excavate the presence of LGBTQ+ people—and their contributions to the industry, filmmaking, criticism, reception, and archiving—has long been sidelined. This tendency extends to the National Film Archive of Japan, which regularly presents overarching narratives of Japanese film history through collection-based exhibitions. How, then, can we build a queer film archive within—and against—such exhibitionary frameworks in practice? As a film scholar, I examine how queer reading can operate as a mode of curatorial intervention in archival spaces. I argue that queer reading enables curators to renegotiate the meanings and uses of archival materials through exhibition-making by activating the memories, desires, and spectral traces of queer lives that objects and paratexts can carry. The paper is grounded in my experience curating “Inside/Out—LGBTQ+ Representation in Film and Television” at the Tsubouchi Memorial Theatre Museum (Waseda University). Initiated in April 2018 and presented from September 28, 2020 to January 15, 2021, the exhibition traced the postwar history (1945–2020) of commercial and non-commercial queer film and television alongside their reception in Japan, and— to my knowledge—was the first museum exhibition in Japan to do so at this scale. My curatorial method begins by acknowledging my privileged positionality: the access it grants to archival spaces and the authority to select, frame, and display materials. This is not a celebration of archival authority; building on scholarship on queering museums (Sullivan and Middleton 2020), I treat it as a starting point for reading materials against the grain. Crucially, “against the grain” is not only interpretive but methodological: it concerns how one moves through archival space, follows attraction, and stages encounters. Drawing on Damiens (2020), I conceptualize cruising as an unexpectedly erotic curatorial method that disrupts heteronormative temporality in film-historical narration. I show how visceral pulls—through which objects, fragments, and paratexts call for contact across time—are indispensable to queer reading as detonative curation: a practice that ruptures linear, canon-centered narratives through selection, spatial design, and captioning.