Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact, the podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time.

I'm Irene. I'm Alice. And I'm Eli. And today I'm going to be talking about the 19th century Japanese artist Okuhara Seiko.

I'd like to acknowledge the Boon Warang Boonorong people of the Kulin Nation on whose land we record this podcast

and pay my respects to their elders past and present. They're the custodians of an oral history

tradition far older than this podcast. I really only have one content warning for this episode in that we repeatedly have to

navigate a very sexist legal system. Otherwise, we're pretty much good to go. I do have a short

note about sources, although it's not very complicated. The majority of my biographical information

about Okuhara Seiko comes from essentially one source, which is a

1991 thesis, like a PhD thesis, written by Martha McClintock, and it was supplemented by a

handful of more recent papers that I read, but they all cited her heavily. Would you say that you

trust Martha McClintock? I think that generally speaking, I would.

She did travel to Japan.

She spoke and developed quite a close relationship with, like, Okahara's remaining family.

She had access to a lot of papers, like Okahara family's private collection.

And she was, I think, a 1991 historian's level of reticent about the possibility of queerness,

but she certainly didn't shut it out completely.

Okay.

When I started reading her, I was like, and the more I read, the more I was like,

no, I think you do actually believe this is an option, but you're frightened to say it in your PhD thesis.

Yeah, I think that makes sense, especially when we're not talking about, like, an established scholar frightened to say it in your PhD thesis. Yeah, I think that makes sense especially when we're not talking about an established scholar.

We're talking about a PhD student.

They're going to be much more scared to come out and say, oh, this artist was queer in this way,

...