Dr. Mila Zuo wasn’t always going to study film — but after taking a pornography course at UC Berkeley, she was hooked. She credits the course’s professor, Dr. Linda Williams, as being one of the first people to open up her mind to the possibilities of film analysis as a discipline.
“She taught it really rigorously. We read Foucault and watched really graphic films and we were able to bring together conversations, and I was amazed that this was a form of academic study,” Zuo said.
Infatuated with critical analysis of film, Zuo went on to UCLA to pursue a master’s and a PhD — and eventually found herself on the other side of the classroom.
Zuo now teaches in UBC’s theatre and film department, She also makes her own films that embrace scandal and sexuality. They’re far from the level of intensity of the hardcore porn she first studied as an undergrad, but they’re definitely not afraid to get a bit weird.
Zuo’s academic interests culminate in her book Vulgar Beauty: Acting Chinese in the Global Sensorium, which has received significant acclaim, including the Association for Asian American Studies’ 2024 Outstanding Achievement award in the media, performance, and visual studies category.
The book, according to Zuo, draws on her attraction to “unsolvable, unanswerable questions.” For her, these inquiries manifest while thinking about how the concept of beauty influences film aesthetics, particularly within the realm of Chinese cinema.
Vulgar Beauty centres the experiences of Chinese women in contemporary media, from film to stand-up comedy, and how they challenge Western beauty ideals. That’s why she thinks the word “vulgar” best represents the work: it captures the shock that comes with being attracted to something — or someone — that falls outside the norm.
“The experience of [beauty] is ephemeral, but beauty is rooted and anchored in an object life, which is not only the way a physical body looks or presents itself, but it's also the clothing and the environment that surrounds a person … It's not just the individual human subject, but it's the vulgar setting around them,” Zuo said.
“When I'm thinking about Chinese stars or racialized stars, for me, [vulgarity] has a particular meaning in the sense that there's something that is disruptive about … beauty that doesn't adhere to conventional standards, whether that's white supremacist criteria [or] ableist criteria. It's a shock to the system.”
Alongside her written work, Zuo is also a filmmaker who has produced works like Carnal Orient, her first horror short which provided a bold critique of Asian fetishization by featuring white male diners at a stereotypically Asian restaurant where things slowly start to get bloody.
Sticking with shorts but transitioning in genre, Zuo’s most recent film, Kin, delves into the racial tension and white supremacy she observed while teaching at a university in the United States during the beginning of Donald Trump’s first term as president.
Rey Chow’s 1995 essay “The Fascist Longings in Our Midst” was “crucial inspiration for what the film became,” Zuo said.
“In this essay, she makes this really provocative claim … Fascists don't think that what they're engaged in is a project of hate. They think [it’s] a higher ideal of love. So actually, in their minds, they're about purity. They're about love for the nation [and] detoxification of all the contaminating figures that pose a threat to this idea of purity.”
Currently, Zuo is embarking on her most ambitious project yet. Mongoloids, her first feature-length film, combines elements of documentary and fiction, exploring her own family’s trauma stemming from China’s Cultural Revolution. The process is daunting yet exhilarating.
“As a child, I didn't hear much about my family's history. But the older I got and the more questions I asked, little tidbits of information came out,” Zuo said. “I know that this topic can be seen as still quite controversial, especially in China, so we do have to be really careful.”
Zuo was awarded this year’s Killam Research Fellowship to work on the project, so she’ll be taking time off from teaching to shoot scenes in China. She plans to have her parents physically re-enact their own memories — there can be a thin line between finding closure and falling back into trauma, but she hopes she’ll be able to help them find a sense of catharsis in doing so.
“It's a very tender subject, but both sides of my family were persecuted in different ways, and so [I’m] getting my parents to give testimonials,” she said.
“But the other aspect of this is my own questions around trauma … to query whether I have inherited some of these traumatic experiences or memories, and if so, how? As a mother too, this question of intergenerational trauma spans multiple generations now.”
Venturing into the world of documentaries is uncharted territory for Zuo — she’s terrified, excited and unsure of how this whole plan will pan out. But the filmmaking philosophy that she sticks by is to embrace the unknown or uncomfortable.
“There is truism in some of these cliché-d pieces of advice … To share something — I hate the word 'authentic,' but you know what I mean — you really need to figure out who you are and [what] makes you different from other people,” she said.
“I don't want to see the thing that makes you like everybody else. I want to see the weird in you.”
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