Multiple Spirits is a bilingual queer feminist art zine based in and emerging from Japan. The term “queer” is used as a temporary umbrella, indicating a sense of discomfort with a society structured around heterosexual norms. This provisional usage reflects the aspiration to develop new languages and vocabularies capable of articulating spaces and possibilities that have not yet come into being but are nonetheless necessary.

The project situates itself within the historical continuum of feminisms and understands feminist thinking as a means of dismantling discrimination related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and class within society. This approach seeks to counter narrowed interpretations of feminism that have been historically distorted in Japan and internationally by gender essentialism. Feminist thinking is not treated as a fixed or prescriptive identity; rather, it is understood as a practice aimed at dismantling historically and socially constructed identity fictions and fostering political yet fluid subjectivities.

Multiple Spirits functions as a space for practicing these ideas and for developing new languages for artistic expression. “Queer feminism” is approached as a site of boundary-crossing—across nations and sexualities—evoking a state of suspension, akin to waiting in an airport before departure, while remaining grounded in the physical and social realities of embodied existence.