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Vulgar Beauty
Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium
by Mila Zuo
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Book Presentation:
In Vulgar Beauty Mila Zuo offers a new theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by showing how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture stars produce feelings of Chineseness. To illustrate this, Zuo uses the vulgar as an analytic to trace how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and produced through affect. She frames the vulgar as a characteristic that is experienced through the Chinese concept of weidao, or flavor, in which bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour performances of beauty produce non-Western forms of sexualized and racialized femininity. Analyzing contemporary film and media ranging from actress Gong Li's post-Mao movies of the late 1980s and 1990s to Joan Chen's performance in Twin Peaks to Ali Wong's stand-up comedy specials, Zuo shows how vulgar beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar beauty, then, becomes the taste of difference. By demonstrating how Chinese feminine beauty becomes a cinematic invention invested in forms of affective racialization, Zuo makes a critical reconsideration of aesthetic theory.
About the Author:
Mila Zuo is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Press Reviews:
"In this gorgeously written book, Mila Zuo captures how Chinese female film stars perform beauty in ways that reflect their negotiation with the racial sexualization of their femininity. With a rigorous and lucid ferocity, Zuo boldly brings together critical theory, philosophy, aesthetics, women of color feminism, feminist film theory, and performance theory to help us understand Chinese women’s presences on screen. Fearless and powerful, Vulgar Beauty is a pleasure to read." - Celine Parreñas Shimizu, author of The Proximity of Other Skins: Ethical Intimacy in Global Cinema
"With thorough, eye-opening, and groundbreaking analyses, Mila Zuo brilliantly scrutinizes the meaning of East and Southeast Asian beauty, showing how it is a process that has been historically framed within complex colonial and postcolonial discourses that individual stars and films must conform, resist, or play with. Offering scholars and students a new method with which to rethink East Asian and Southeast Asian stardom, film texts, and popular cultures, Vulgar Beauty will make a splash." - Victor Fan, author of Extraterritoriality: Locating Hong Kong Cinema and Media
"[Zuo's] metaphoric language, mostly revolving around food, offers the reader not only an intellectual exploration of the power of vulgar beauty to destabilize racial and patriarchal power structures but also a flavorful and aesthetic journey in and of itself." - E. Nastacia Schmoll, Lateral
"Anyone interested in performance, in gender and sexuality, in race on an international stage, in Chinese politics and history in this century of suffering, needs to read this book. Anyone hungry, voracious perhaps, for interdisciplinary diasporic and transnational critique that engages not only with cultural but also intellectual traditions from China and Korea had better prepare to feast." - Vivian L. Huang, Film-Philosophy
"Mila Zuo offers a fresh, creative, and contextual interpretation of the formation of 'Chineseness' in the global sensorium. . . . [T]he book is an interesting read and could be assigned in a graduate or upper undergraduate class on film and cultural studies. It might also be of interest to anyone seeking a detailed and theoretically boisterous interpretation of modern Chinese film." - Erik T. Withers & Elle Lissick, Resources for Gender and Women’s Studies
"What distinguishes Vulgar Beauty is the way it constructs a fresh critical framework for understanding feminine beauty. With Zuo’s theoretical perspective and erudite analysis, Vulgar Beauty is a necessary addition to aesthetic theory and critical theories of gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity." - Fengyun Zhang, Film Quarterly
"Vulgar Beauty is an exciting intervention in Cinema and Media Studies." - Chris Berry, Pacific Affairs
See the publisher website: Duke University Press
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