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Shine: On Race, Glamour, and the Modern

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Anne Anlin Cheng
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Abstract

Is the fetish the only way to understand glamour, especially when it comes to the glamour of racialized women? How do we talk about agency and embodiment for a mediated figure? How does celebrity affect a subject whose body has been overembodied yet depersonalized? This essay suggests that the unlikely conjunction among celebrity, glamour, and racial difference may be the place where we are compelled to confront the intimacy, rather than opposition, between person-hood and objectification. Turning to Anna May Wong, an iconic “race beauty” in the early twentieth century, this essay argues that Wong's glamour is achieved neither through her apparently racialized performances nor through her uncomplicated assumption of female agency but rather through a paradoxical staging and erasure of her own body and skin. By asking how a celebrated body might operate subjunctively rather than materially, we can begin to question the imperatives of personhood that drive both celebrity and race studies.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 126 , Issue 4: Special Topic: Celebrity, Fame, Notoriety , October 2011 , pp. 1022 - 1041
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2011

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