Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium

Mila Zuo's book "Vulgar Beauty" explores how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture stars produce feelings of Chineseness by tracing how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and produced through affect. She demonstrates how vulgar beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty by showing how it becomes the taste of difference.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 312 pages
Publication date: 08 April 2022
Publisher: Duke University Press

In her groundbreaking book "Vulgar Beauty," Mila Zuo delves into a novel theorization of cinematic feminine beauty by exploring how mediated encounters with Chinese film and popular culture icons generate profound feelings of Chineseness. To illustrate this compelling concept, Zuo employs the vulgar as an analytical lens, tracing how racial, gendered, and cultural identity is imagined and constructed through the powerful realm of affect. She frames the vulgar as a distinctive characteristic that is experienced through the Chinese concept of weidao, or flavor, which encompasses a range of bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour performances of beauty. These performances yield non-Western forms of sexualized and racialized femininity, challenging Western and colonial notions of beauty.

Through a comprehensive analysis of contemporary film and media, spanning from actress Gong Lis post-Mao movies of the late 1980s and 1990s to Joan Chen's mesmerizing performance in "Twin Peaks" and Ali Wong's comedic brilliance in his stand-up comedy specials, Zuo vividly showcases how vulgar beauty disrupts and subverts Western and colonial notions of beauty. Vulgar beauty, thus, emerges as a distinctive taste of difference, offering a critical reevaluation of aesthetic theory.

By demonstrating how Chinese feminine beauty becomes a cinematic invention deeply invested in processes of affective racialization, Zuo's work poses a profound challenge to prevailing notions of beauty and identity. "Vulgar Beauty" is a groundbreaking contribution to the field of film studies, offering a fresh perspective on the complex interplay between aesthetics, culture, and identity. It invites readers to reexamine their perceptions of beauty and to explore the ways in which cinematic representations shape our understanding of the world.

Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478018117