Kokoro Tomita | 冨田こころ
Kokoro Tomita is an interdisciplinary researcher from Japan based in Taiwan, working at the intersection of STS, technology-mediated care, and narrative studies. She takes a queer feminist approach, using new materialist theory, narratology, and continental philosophy in research. Her work is shaped by over seven years of queer community engagement in Japan, including LGBTQ+ youth support, safer-space building, and public-facing event facilitation on aro/ace experiences and gender/sexuality.
Currently enrolled in the International PhD Program in East Asia and the Making of the Modern World, Academia Sinica. B.A. in International Liberal Studies (SILS), Sociology and Gender Studies Certificates at Waseda University; M.A. in Literary Studies (DFLL) at National Taiwan University. She welcomes inquiries about her research and potential collaborations.
Compulsory Autonomy in AI: Unmasking Hidden Labor Through Queer Feminist Theory
This article theorizes compulsory autonomy as the discursive regime that sustains the cultural fantasy of autonomous Artificial Intelligence (AI) by converting structural dependence into fixable anomalies (foreclosure) and rendering constitutive supports unthinkable (erasure). Drawing on Bernard Stiegler and Judith Butler’s theory, the article shows how dominant AI narratives preempt the legibility of ongoing human and material labor.
Beyond the Female Gaze: Intra-action and Queer Optics in Portrait of a Lady on Fire
This article offers a Baradian reading of Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire, arguing that the film moves beyond the “female gaze” by showing how looking is materially arranged. It theorizes this arrangement as an intra-active queer optics, in which painter, model, image, and spectator are not fixed positions but emerge through the apparatuses that make queer desire visible across time.
Resisting Compulsory Articulation: Strategic Opacity and Narrative Assemblage in Rachel Cusk’s Outline
This thesis argues that Cusk’s Outline models an after-trauma narrative form that resists what Tomita terms “compulsory articulation”—the cultural logic equating subjecthood with linear, timely, and coherent self-narration. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s vital materialism and narratology, it theorizes a “dividual” narrator whose agency emerges through “narrative assemblage”: a patterned arrangement of borrowed voices, material actants, and strategic opacity.
Designed and facilitated a large-scale online public event on aromantic and asexual experiences, drawing approximately 450 participants. The program combined individual reflection, a researcher-led introduction, and a panel discussion with community speakers on self-identification, interpersonal difficulties and coping strategies, and the norms that produce those difficulties.