Beauty's Copy

Mimi Thi Nguyen • University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

April 12 @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/98396636283

This talk addresses the promise of beauty in its most banal form—the young woman in a beautiful dress—while offering a departure from usual routes. In reflecting upon the status of the young woman in a beautiful dress as the most common and pervasive signifier of national love among a people, and as a manner of denoting “history” itself--in this case, through the ephemera of the Vietnamese ao dai pinup calendar—I am not concerned to trace a precise history of its cut, its details. Instead, I am interested in the demand for its copy, which gives shape to the drama that allows one to reencounter oneself (and others) and one’s desires, values, and histories in the face of their impending loss. I argue for the copy as a genre of historical narrativization, through which the dream-image of the dress and the beloved body who wears it signify contingency, vulnerability, and ephemerality, as the grounds to then secure them against the ravages of time.

Ephemera
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