Cas Sutherland

Cas Sutherland is an ESRC-funded PhD candidate in Social Anthropology. Cas has a BA English and Drama (Royal Holloway) and an MA Social Anthropology of Development Asia (SOAS). 

The four years Cas spent teaching at a university in Beijing enabled her to gain insights into Chinese social and political life. She was active in the queer and feminist communities in Beijing at historical moment when Chinese young women’s activism became the focus of global news. 

These experiences inspired Cas to undertake postgraduate study at SOAS. She has also lived in South Korea and Southern Africa. During her PhD, Cas spent one year studying Mandarin Chinese at ICLP, National Taiwan University with a MOFA Huayu Enrichment Scholarship. While conducting her PhD fieldwork among queer people in Taipei, Cas was hosted by Academia Sinica and received a research grant from the Centre for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library of Taiwan.a.

As a queer feminist researcher, Cas is passionate about challenging heteronormative, patriarchal systems that oppress women, LGBTQ+ people, racialised and marginalised groups. She is interested in gender studies, queer theory, feminist activism, and using photography and ethnographic filmmaking as research methods. 

Cas first employed ethnographic methodologies to research gender and agency in shamanic ritual practices in South Korea, for her undergraduate dissertation. Since then, gender has been a theme throughout her work, academic and otherwise. Cas returned to Beijing to research her master’s dissertation on the ways queer feminist activists in China evade state censorship online. 

Her PhD project is an intersectional ethnographic exploration of the relationship between feminist activism and the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) rights movement, analysing how sexual and gender identities influence individuals' desires to align with the feminist movement and vice versa. The Queer Feminist Kinship project revisits established anthropological questions about kinship and relatedness to examine the formation of community and intimate political alliances. This is, first and foremost, an ethnography of activism in an internationally marginalised space of feminism-queering. 

Additionally, 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.

Zhen De Gender