UBC Theatre and Film proudly shares that Dr. Mila Zuo, Associate Professor, Cinema and Media Studies, has received Outstanding Achievement, the top prize in the media, performance, and visual studies category of the 2024 Association for Asian American Studies Book Awards, for her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium.
Published in 2022, Vulgar Beauty is an exploration of the affective racialization of Chinese female film stars and how representations of beauty produce and reproduce feelings of “Chineseness”. Through the analysis of 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, Mila demonstrates how vulgar or “flavourful” beauty disrupts Western and colonial notions of beauty.
The Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) is the primary research and teaching hub for the field, encouraging the study of history, sociology, religion, culture, and policies relevant to Asian Americans. Each year, the association recognizes authors in its book awards in seven categories and recipients are celebrated at an annual conference. The jury shared this tribute to Vulgar Beauty:
Cover of Vulgar Beauty by Mila Zuo
“Offering a new analytic of Asian American media performance, Zuo’s theorization of vulgar beauty specifically offers a provocative, fresh way to theorize gender, race in the global which we believe will have contributions to Asian American Studies, Asian studies, diaspora studies and beyond. This evocative work enacts the idea of vulgarity and excess in a theoretically-rich and ground-breaking study. Fun, pleasurable, and potentially field changing for thinking through gender and race through diaspora. Mila’s writing style offers both a theorization and “how to”—she teaches us how to understand things that we don’t commonly put together. Poetically written and theoretically synesthetic, this book embodies its high-stakes theory by incorporating the five tastes/flavors with a global purview that challenges the boundaries of Asia and North America, addressing its audience’s doubled gazes, refracting circuits of desire and despair.”
Congratulations, Mila!
