Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium

Dr. Mila Zuo will be discussing her recent award-winning book, Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium  (Duke University Press, 2022) in which she proposes an analytic of vulgarity in order to consider the matter of (and with) Chineseness. Through a deconstructive mode rooted in promiscuous encounters between traditional Chinese epistemologies and post/continental philosophy, Zuo offers a new materialist theory of flavor aesthetic-affects grounded in the lower sense-making of taste, scent, and touch. In particular, she analyzes the sexual-racialized charisma of global Chinese women film stars through the medicinal flavors of bitter, sweet, pungent, salty, and sour. In this talk, Zuo will demonstrate how the vulgar has become a way for disobedient women to adopt oppositional stances against white supremacist racism, Chinese colonialism, gender and sexual normativities, and capitalist work.