Queer Social Histories and the Wartime Incarceration of Japanese Americans, Tina Takemoto

Tina Takemoto is an artist and professor of visual studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco whose work examines issues of race, queer identity, memory, and grief. Takemoto’s current research explores the hidden dimensions of same-sex intimacy and queer sexuality for Japanese Americans incarcerated by the U.S. government during World War II. Takemoto will give a performative lecture at the Spencer Museum of Art that includes some of their experimental films that explore Japanese American women who cleaned the tuna, worked the assembly line, and found same-sex intimacy amid sake and fish guts while the men were at sea. Takemoto’s work in social histories often begins with deep archival research into little-known individual lives, and results in film and performance.