Inscrutable Sociality and Queer Forms of Asian America

In this talk, scholar Vivian Huang engages the historic American construction of Asianness as unknowable and perpetually foreign by studying the work of contemporary Asian/American writers and artists who employ what she calls "minoritarian aesthetics of obfuscation." Rather than refute or lament the persistent racial formation of Asian as Inscrutable Other, Huang considers the strategic ways that artists of color have reworked these forms of appearance to critique liberal modes of appearance altogether. Rather, Huang articulates modes of inscrutable performance through racial aesthetics of invisibility, silence, impenetrability, flatness, distance, and with-holding. By focusing on these artistic strategies, Huang reveals that what might first appear as alienating might also be critiquing conventional modes of relating. These surface relations make glimpsable queer forms of sociality that challenge national narratives of multicultural warmth and model minority cheer.

Bio

Vivian L. Huang specializes in race and performance in the Department of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Vivian's recent book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability, theorizes racial aesthetics and affects of obfuscation in contemporary performance, visual art, and literature. Surface Relations was awarded the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Prize and was a finalist for the LGBTQ+ Studies Lambda Literary Award and Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present/ASAP Book Prize. Vivian's writing can be found in the Journal of Asian American Studies, Diacritics, Women & Performance, the Journal of Popular Culture, Theatre Journal, GLQ, Brooklyn Rail, and Frieze Magazine.