Cas Sutherland

Cas Sutherland is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in the Social Anthropology at SOAS, studying identity, sexuality and gender in Taiwan and China. 

Cas holds an MA in Social Anthropology of Development from SOAS (2019) and a BA in English Literature and Drama/Theatre Studies from Royal Holloway (2013). She has studied Mandarin Chinese at SOAS, Peking University, and National Taiwan University. Cas won the 2019 Outstanding Student Award for her MA research on queer feminist activism in Beijing and in London. 

Cas spent one year of her doctorate undertaking intensive language study on NTU’s International Chinese Language Programme (ICLP) thanks to a Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. Her doctoral fieldwork was hosted by the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica with additional funding from the National Central Library of Taiwan. 

Before coming to SOAS, Cas studied and worked in Eswatini, Uganda, South Korea, and China. Cas spent four years teaching in Beijing, where she was active in queer and feminist circles. Cas is a graduate teaching assistant in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS.

• Academia 

Does my partner’s identity define who I am?: Intimacy and Identity in Contemporary Taiwan

Cas’s doctoral project is an ethnographic exploration of the relationships between sexuality and gender, labels and identity, community and the individual among the LGBTQ+ community in Taiwan. It analyses how sexual and gender identities influence intimate, community, and family relationships in Taiwan. 

This project complicates easy divisions between gender and sexuality labels, thinking about how individuals move between different labels in different contexts, how their sexuality impacts their gender identity and vice versa. Arising from interlocutors’ questions like “can I be a lesbian if I don’t identify as a woman?” and “can I be a feminist if I am non-binary?”, and through engaging with those who feel there is no appropriate label to describe them, at its core the project asks how useful identity labels really are. 

Cas’s PhD project uses primary data from interviews, participant observation, documentary photography, and participatory photo-elicitation conducted during her fieldwork in Taipei. Alongside the written thesis stands a body of photographic work suitable for exhibition. 

The doctoral project is primarily an ethnography of identity and intimate relationships in a marginalised space of feminism-queering. It aims to rethink the synergies of feminist and queer resistance, as well as the frictions between sex-sexuality-gender taxonomies, Taiwanese state policies and the everyday. 

As a queer feminist researcher, Cas is passionate about challenging heteronormative, patriarchal systems that oppress women, LGBTQ+ people, racialised and marginalised groups. Cas’s work explores the use of photography and filmmaking as collaborative and participatory research methods, particularly the power of visual methodologies to impact discussions of identity, sexuality and gender.

She first engaged with anthropology when researching gender and agency in shamanic ritual practices in South Korea, for her undergraduate dissertation. Cas conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing while researching her MA dissertation on the ways queer feminist activists evade state censorship online. 

• Zhen De Gender