Cas Sutherland

Cas Sutherland is an ESRC-funded PhD student in Social Anthropology. Cas has a BA English and Drama (Royal Holloway) and an MA Social Anthropology of Development (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 circles in Beijing at a historical moment when Chinese young women’s activism became the focus of global news. She also spent 6 months studying Mandarin at Peking University. 

These experiences inspired Cas to undertake postgraduate study at SOAS. Cas won the 2019 Outstanding Student Award for her work on the MA Social Anthropology of Development, during which she conducted research with queer feminist activists in Beijing and London, which proved foundational to her PhD project. During her PhD, Cas spent one year studying Mandarin 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 the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica and received a research grant from the Centre for Chinese Studies at the National Central Library of Taiwan. Before coming to SOAS, Cas studied and worked in Eswatini, Uganda, South Korea, and China.

• Academia 

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 filmmaking as research methods. 

Cas first engaged with anthropology when researching gender and agency in shamanic ritual practices in South Korea, for her undergraduate dissertation. Since then, gender has been a theme throughout her work. Cas conducted fieldwork in Beijing while researching her MA dissertation on the ways queer feminist activists in China evade state censorship online. 

Cas' 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 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