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Abstract
With interest in queer socialities, the author considers Jacques Derrida’s provocation in Of Hospitality to “say yes” as hospitable gesture in order to challenge the gendered and racialized demands of this charge. If Orientalist conflations of the East with femininity have in turn sexualized Asian women as simultaneously hypersexual and submissive, then how can we as viewers and readers performatively read Asian femininity in a different, and not anti-relational, orientation to hospitality? Building upon Anna Watkins Fisher’s concept of parasitic performance, this article posits inscrutability as a feminist methodology by considering Yoko Ono’s performances of Cut Piece and Laurel Nakadate’s video Happy Birthday for their interesting solicitations to audience-participants, costars, and viewers.
Notes on contributor
Vivian L. Huang is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. Huang writes and teaches in the intersections of Asian Americanist critique, performance studies, and queer of color critique. She is completing a book, Inscrutably Other: Asian American Aesthetics and Queer Feminist Critique, on contemporary Asian American performances of inscrutability.
Notes
† The author gives special thanks to Karen Shimakawa for her mentorship and feedback on early versions of this article. Thanks also to J.M. de Leon; Iván Ramos, Leon Hilton, and the Avant-Gardes, Otherwise working group at ASTR 2014; Tina Post and the Performance Studies Working Group at Yale; Laurel Nakadate and Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects; members of the Unforming Feeling stream at ACLA 2016; the editing services of Anitra Grisales and support from the Gaius Charles Bolin Fellowship from Williams College; Susanne Fuchs; E. Hella Tsaconas, Olivia Michiko Gagnon, the board of Women & Performance, and especially the peer reviewers at Women & Performance whose comments greatly facilitated the revision process.
1 Here I allude to the generative discourse around relational aesthetics and participatory art, particularly Claire Bishop’s formulation of “relational antagonism” following Nicolas Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics (2006).
2 For more here on the first Chinese and Japanese immigrants to the United States, as well as early spectacular performances of Asian femininity under the genre of freak show, see Laura Hyun Yi Kang’s Compositional Subjects (Citation1995). For more on Asian female labor in nineteenth-century U.S. immigration, see Sonia Shah’s introduction to Dragon Ladies: Asian American Feminists Breathe Fire (Citation1997) where she notes that “Asian women shouldered much of the cost of subsidizing Asian men’s labor” (Citation1997, xv) as well as Edna Bonacich and Lucie Cheng’s Labor Immigration Under Capitalism (Citation1984, 5–34).
3 I thank Karen Shimakawa for helping me to articulate this idea on being held hostage to racializing discourses.
4 Into Performance, Midori Yoshimoto’s comparative historical study of Japanese female artists in New York, critiques this bias and allows for multiple and heterogeneous Japanese/American femininities that recalls Karen Shimakawa’s comparative analysis of female characters in Velina Hasu Houston’s play, Tea.
5 We may note how Nakadate echoes the words of Elena Tajima Creef when she writes that “In spite of the current tendency to celebrate and even romanticize multiculturalism, there is a genuine dilemma of where one may place a hybrid body that does not fit into any one simple place on a white American map” in Imaging Japanese America (Citation2004, 177).
6 Scholarship in Asian American and critical mixed race studies informs my thinking here of racialized performances of inscrutability, in particular Jennifer Ann Ho’s Racial Ambiguity in Asian American Culture (Citation2015), and Colleen Kim Daniher’s work on the racial ambiguity act (“Performing the Racial Ambiguity Act: Settler Colonialism, Imperialism, and Performance” [Citation2015]).
7 I think here of the vital work of Christina León, Iván Ramos, Hentyle Yapp, Katie Brewer Ball, Rachel Ellis Neyra, Roy Pérez, and Summer Kim Lee at the panels on racialized negativity at the annual meeting of the American Studies Association in 2015. I am inspired by León’s formulation of opacity, as “an aesthetic and ethico-political response to the demands for transparency” within Latinx studies, in “Forms of Opacity: Roaches, Blood, and Being Stuck in Xandra Ibarra’s Corpus” (Citation2017, 378). Certainly I am indebted to the work of many scholars, including Gayatri Gopinath’s theory of impossibility and queer female diasporic subjectivity, and Martin Manalansan’s formulation of disaffection as a temporary affective mode of survival in “Servicing the World: Flexible Filipinos and the Unsecured Life” (Citation2010, 215–228).
8 For more on racial aesthetics of silence, see Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet (Citation2012), which elegantly theorizes quiet as an expressive mode of critical resistance in black culture. My thoughts on silence engage, too, with Mari Ruti’s concluding dialogue with Jordan Mulder in The Ethics of Opting Out (Citation2017), and “the role that silence plays in the fetishistic production of the exotic other who, by virtue of its unwillingness (or incapacity) to participate in the vocal world of neoliberal agency, functions both as an object of desire and as a site of tremendous anxiety for the urban Western subject” (220).