Reviewed by:

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

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...

 审阅者：

• 
  表面关系：亚裔美国人的神秘性的酷儿形式作者：Vivian L. Huang
•  武雄·里维拉

在 Josephine Lee、Karen Shimakawa、Esther Kim Lee、Joshua Takano Chambers-Letson、Sean Metzger 等学者的基础上，亚裔美国表演研究已成为戏剧和表演研究中不可或缺的子领域。虽然很难声称亚裔美国人的主观“例外主义”表现，但情感的表现——或者感知到的情感缺乏——是持续存在的东方主义和黄祸的种族化和种族主义机构的一个关键方面。毕竟，冷酷无情、难以捉摸的亚洲人是去个体化的焦虑以及相应的卑鄙驱逐的寄托。以上述更受戏剧驱动的学术前辈为基础，黄维维安·黄 (Vivian L. Huang) 的《表面关系：亚裔美国人的酷儿形式的神秘性》一书正面解决了这一理论问题，将亚裔美国人的表演研究推向了新的高度，其对酷儿的研究 [完第 130 页]亚裔美国人的表演艺术和性别理论。

在这一点上，这篇评论不太可能为黄的专着处女作带来比已经产生的更多的兴奋——《表面关系》是 2023 年 LGBTQ+ 研究 Lambda 文学奖的提名者——但是，坦率地说，这种炒作是值得的。与它的名字相反，表面关系本身与其说是表面，不如说是一根绳子，由迄今为止最重要的表演、种族和酷儿研究的线索编织而成。这本书的重要贡献远远超出了表演研究和亚裔美国人研究之间的维恩图。黄在引言中明确表达了他们的意图，指出这本书“考虑了少数派审美和难以理解的情感模式，它们在形式可读性与社会政治可行性之间进行协商”，而这些模式反过来又是“在文化景观中创造世界的重要行为，该文化景观已经使非正常现象正常化”。 -亚裔美国文化的出现”（2）。黄并没有简单地将亚洲化的神秘性谴责为一种需要否认的有害刻板印象，而是将神秘性作为亚裔美国主题的酷儿表演策略进行探索。黄的例子提供了许多不同的战略效果，从产生温和的酷儿社会关系，或颠覆父权认识论，到破坏模范少数族裔劳动关系，这些效果各章节有所不同。神秘性很少会激发政治斗志，而是对主观和表演逻辑进行更微妙、几乎秘密的重新配置。 在这方面，《表面关系》与向阳的《音调智慧：漫长冷战期间亚洲不可思议的美学》（2020年）和姚鑫的《不满：十九世纪美国的无情文化政治》（2021年）一起，作为另一本最近的文本来考虑情感扁平化的种族化及其救赎性重读，尽管档案完全不同。

这一开垦赋权的关键举措已成为文化研究中常见的举措，文化研究的政治想象力很大程度上归功于何塞·埃斯特万·穆尼奥斯的《不认同》和《巡航乌托邦》。事实上，这种开头框架可能会诱使读者从表面上理解黄的论点，而停止阅读引言，以对他们的写作最有用的方式引用最直接的段落，就像人们在时间紧迫的情况下习惯做的那样。当代学术界。然而，我认为黄的正文章节在很大程度上超越了它的开场论点——厚颜无耻地，我坚持要深入阅读表面关系。虽然文本不可否认地围绕着神秘性的主题，但黄在《表面关系》中的大部分最佳内容主要是关于其相关主题的。

典型的例子是《表面关系》的第二章和第三章，它们提供了多年来关于亚裔美国人性别的一些最引人注目的理论。第 2 章的早期版本作为 2018 年《女性与表演》中颇具影响力的文章发表，对亚裔美国女性气质中的“寄生热情好客”提供了深思熟虑、丰富的理论，重点关注表演艺术家小野洋子、中馆月桂和艾玛·苏尔科维奇。黄巧妙地借鉴雅克·德里达（Jacques Derrida）和米歇尔·塞雷斯（Michel Serres）的经验，为亚裔美国女性气质提供了一个引人入胜的框架，该框架与过度决定的屈从叙事一起运作或反对，考虑到酷儿过度行为和对同意的表演干预所产生的颠覆和破坏……