Vulgar Beauty

Vulgar Beauty offers a new theoretical framework for understanding the affective consumption of screen stardom. Mila Zuo examines mediated encounters with cinematized star beauty, particularly feminine beauty, in contemporary Chinese/American film-from film star Gong Li's performances in post-Mao films of the late 1980s and 90s to Ali Wong's recent stand-up comedy. Zuo proposes vulgarity as a critical methodology through which we can better understand beauty's materiality and the ways that our consumption of beauty has been shaped by dominant gendered, racialized, and colonial aesthetics. The book then uses the Chinese concept of weidao-which roughly translates to flavor-to think through the ways in which Chinese/American beauty is metaphorized as something edible, while at the same time its vulgarity, excessiveness, and materiality eludes or transgresses Western forms of knowing and seeing. Through her readings of salty, sweet, and bitter performances, Zuo shows how Chinese feminine beauty becomes a cinematic invention invested in forms of affective and racialized worldmaking--