In Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, Mila Zuo examines how female Chinese actors perform “vulgar beauty” as a way of “worlding” to create community and belonging through affective shocks, and specifically, to produce feelings of Chineseness. By using the sense of taste, and specifically the flavors bitter, salty, pungent, sweet, and sour, as a framework, Zuo delves into close readings of television and cinematic case studies to look at the different ways vulgar beauty is deployed by these actors. In its analysis, this book offers a reconceptualization of feminine beauty outside of white western dictates and suggests that (vulgar) beauty can be utilized as a potentially disruptive and transformative force, specifically in destabilizing racial and patriarchal power structures.
Articles by E. Nastacia Schmoll
Nastacia Schmoll is a PhD candidate in the English Seminar at the University of Zürich, Switzerland. Her past research utilized economic criticism in tandem with gender studies to examine female beauty as a form of capital. Her current research project uses spatial studies alongside ecocritical, postcolonial, and queer studies to explore how depictions of “othering spaces” in science fiction create room to interrogate and problematize people’s relationships with the environment, the other, and the self.