Continuously Leaving the Closet: A Queer/Crip Approximation to Kondō Ginga’s Artworks

Abstract This essay examines the intermedial practice of Japanese artist Kondō Ginga, situating her work within the historical and theoretical contexts of postwar disability activism, queer/crip discourse, and feminist interventions in Japan. Through close readings of her works The Notifications (2021), Queer Street (2021), Separated (2022), Continuously Leaving the Closet (2022), and Prides in Streets (2024), the essay proposes that Kondō’ oeuvre renegotiates the intersections of digital and physical space, public and private visibility, and queer and disabled subjectivities. Kondō’s practice is analyzed along three dimensions: (a) the dissolution of the digital-physical divide; (b) small-scale, affective forms of reworlding and activism; and (c) sustained self-articulation across mediated and relational contexts. Historical case studies, from Ueno Park’ 1948 queer resistance to figures such as Yokota Hiroshi, Yonezu Tomoko, Asaka Yūho, and Hanada Minoru, contextualize her interventions, revealing continuities in gendered/queer and disabled visibility, exclusion, and resistance. The essay argues that Kondō transforms embodied limitation, chronic illness, and digital mediation into a politics of intimacy and care, redefining activism beyond public protest. Her work enacts “crip world-building,” demonstrating that survival, relationality, and aesthetic intervention constitute simultaneous, iterative forms of queer/disabled presence, challenging conventional notions of liberation, pride, and collective identities.