Performing Inscrutability. A Relational Practice.

Vivian L. Huang (she, they) works on race, gender, and performance studies in the Department of Communication Studies at San Francisco State University. Vivian’s book, Surface Relations: Queer Forms of Asian American Inscrutability (Duke University Press, 2022), theorizes racial aesthetics and affects of impenetrability in contemporary performance, visual art, and literature. Vivian’s writing can be found in Women & Performance, Journal of Asian American Studies, Diacritics, Journal of Popular Culture, GLQ, Signs, Theatre Journal, Frieze Magazine, and elsewhere. Their essay, “Becoming Meat,” on dogmeat, US militarism, and queer intimacy can be found in Eating More Asian America: A Food Studies Reader (NYU Press, 2025). Vivian lives in Oakland with her dog Barnacle, and will be performing in The Fall Show at Shotgun Players in Berkeley this fall. .

Mamta Banu Dadlani (she/her) is a licensed Clinical Psychologist who engages in clinical practice, consultation, training, and scholarship through a lens of critical social inquiry and social justice at Samavaya Psychology in Berkeley, California. She supports clients, fellow clinicians, academics, and organizations in exploring how power is constitutive and continuously expresses itself through relations, shaping intrapsychic, interpersonal, and structural dynamics. Mamta’s published scholarship explores themes of coloniality, imperialism, violence, queerness, countertransference and reverie, and clinical theory. Across her professional endeavors and in the relationships that have emerged, Mamta has deep commitments to community, process, play, subversion, and dialogue. Mamta loves teaching and learning, live music, and a really great cup of coffee. 

Yin Jia Li, LMFT (they/them) is a clinician in private practice working with Asian and Asian American adults in CA and OR. They find that this focus, grounded in psychoanalytic theory and practice, allows for sociocultural informed depth and nuance in how they work with clients.  They are founder of The Asian American Center for Psychoanalysis (TAACP) and throughly enjoying teaching their first course on The "Asian American" Patient. Their writings, "The Asian White Romantic Pair: Confrontations and Potentialities" and "Deconstructing Asian American: As Disidentity, Racial Character Structures, and Polymorphous Becomings" have been published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality and the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (JAPA) respectively.