Tasting Vulgar Beauty -- Bitter Medicine, Racial Flavor: Gong Li -- Salty-Cool: Maggie Cheung and Joan Chen -- : Pungent Atmospheres: Bai Ling and Tang Wei -- Sweet and Soft Coupling: Vivian Hsu and Shu Qi -- Sour Laughter: Charlyne Yi and Ali Wong.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher. "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 Chinese-ness. 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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.