Kokoro Tomita
Kokoro Tomita (冨田こころ) is a Japanese researcher working at the intersection of narrative theory, critical philosophy of technology, trauma studies, and queer-feminist thought. Her recent work examines how literary, cinematic, and technological forms can cultivate one’s self-aduibility after trauma by developing concepts such as “compulsory articulation,” “self-audibility,” and “narrative assemblage.” More broadly, she examines how those tesxts expose the limits of dominant regimes of articulation, audibility, and agency, while theorizing alternative modes of relation, opacity, and listening.
B.A. in International Liberal Studies (SILS) at Waseda University; M.A. candidate in Literary Studies (DFLL) at National Taiwan Univeristy. She is currently preparing for doctoral studies beginning this fall. She welcomes inquiries about my research, potential collaborations, or speaking opportunities. Please feel free to reach out via email at r11122017@ntu.edu.tw (in English / Japanese / Chinese).
Drawing on Bernard Stiegler and Judith Butler’s theory, this article theorizes “compulsory autonomy” as a discursive regime that sustains the illusion of autonomous AI by obscuring the human labor, infrastructures, and maintenance practices—such as content moderation, RLHF, and data work—that make AI systems appear self-sufficient.
This article reframes Sciamma’s film not as a simple reversal of the male gaze, but as a study of how looking is materially arranged through bodies, canvases, light, sound, and cinematic form.
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.