Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by Vivian L. Huang (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability by Vivian L. Huang
• Takeo Rivera

Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability. By Vivian L. Huang. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022; pp. 240.

From the foundations laid by scholars like Josephine Lee, Karen Shimakawa, Esther Kim Lee, Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson, Sean Metzger, and more, Asian American performance studies has become an indispensable subfield within theatre and performance studies. While it is difficult to claim any Asian American subjective “exceptionalism” to performance, the performance of affect—or the perceived lack thereof—is a key facet of ongoing racialized and racist apparatuses of orientalism and yellow peril. After all, the unfeeling, inscrutable Asiatic is the figure upon which the anxieties of deindividuation, and the corresponding abject expulsion, are deposited. Building on the more theatre-driven scholarly predecessors listed above, Vivian L. Huang’s Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability takes this theoretical concern head on, advancing Asian American performance studies to new heights in its study of [End Page 130] queer Asian American performance art and theorizations of gender.

At this point, this review is unlikely to spark more excitement for Huang’s monograph debut than has already been generated—Surface Relations was a nominee for the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ+ Studies—but, to put it bluntly, the hype is deserved. Contrary to its name, Surface Relations is itself less a surface than it is a cord, woven from the most vital threads of performance, ethnic, and queer studies to date. The book provides a vital contribution well beyond the Venn diagram sliver between performance studies and Asian American studies. Huang states their intentions clearly in the introduction, stating that the book “considers minoritarian aesthetic and affective modes of inscrutability that negotiate formal legibility with sociopolitical viability” that are in turn “vital acts of world-making in a cultural landscape that has normalized the non-appearance of Asian American culture” (2). Rather than simply condemning Asiaticized inscrutability as a kind of harmful stereotype to be disavowed, Huang explores inscrutability as queer performative strategy for Asian American subjects. Huang’s examples offer a number of diverse strategic effects that vary chapter to chapter, from the production of tenderly queer social relationalities, or the subversion of patriarchal epistemologies, to the disruption of model minority labor relations. Inscrutability rarely inspires political militancy, but rather a subtler, almost clandestine reconfiguration of subjective and performative logics. In this regard, Surface Relations joins Sunny Xiang’s Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability during the Long Cold War (2020) and Xine Yao’s Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America (2021) as another recent text to consider the racialization of affective flatness and its redemptive rereading, albeit with a completely different archive.

This critical move of reclamation empowerment has become a familiar one in cultural studies, which owes much of its political imagination to José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications and Cruising Utopia. In fact, this opening framing may tempt the reader to take Huang’s argument at its surface level and to stop reading at the introduction, quoting the most direct passages in a way most useful to their writing, as one is wont to do in time-crunched contemporary academia. However, I would argue that Huang’s body chapters considerably transcend its opening argument—cheekily, I insist that Surface Relations be read deeply. While the text undeniably coheres around the theme of inscrutability, much of Huang’s best content in Surface Relations is primarily about its related subjects.

Cases in point are Surface Relations’ second and third chapters, which offer some of the most compelling theorizations of Asian American gender written in years. Chapter 2—an earlier form of which was published as an influential essay in Women & Performance in 2018—provides a thoughtful, rich theorization of “parasitic hospitability” in Asian American femininity, focusing on performance artists Yoko Ono, Laurel Nakadate, and Emma Sulkowicz. Deftly drawing from Jacques Derrida and Michel Serres, Huang provides a fascinating framework for Asian American femininity that operates with and against overdetermined narratives of subservience, considering the subversions and disruptions that emerge from queer excesses and performative interventions into consent...