ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the complex relations between queer theory and women’s film history through the lens of Japan’s first woman director, Sakane Tazuko. Despite a career that spanned prewar Japan, colonial Manchuria, and Communist China, Sakane has long been marginalized in the dominant narratives of Japanese film history. Taking the understudied queer aspect of Sakane’s life and career as a vantage point, the chapter aims to contextualize her cross-border filmic activities and theorize the mutual imbrications of colonialism, feminism, and her (in)visibility in film historiographies. Invoking queer theory’s reimagination of historical time, it argues Sakane’s queerness lies not only in her resisting and readdressing traditional gender roles through filmmaking, but also in her unsettling the normative assumptions of “historiographic knowability” that rendered her invisible in conventional historical narratives. Finally, it reconsiders how her queer indeterminacy may open up the possibility of an alternative film historiography, one that not only writes “her-stories” back into histories but also acknowledges the instability of historical knowledge.
