Lexington Books
Pages: 200
Trim: 6¼ x 9½
978-1-66690-747-6 • Hardback • February 2023 • $95.00 • (£73.00)
978-1-66690-748-3 • eBook • December 2022 • $45.00 • (£35.00)
Gloria Shin is full-time instructor in film, television, and media studies in the School of Film and Television at Loyola Marymount University. She is a media consultant whose work has been featured on NPR and in the Los Angeles Times.
Chapter 1: Beauty is a Rare Thing: Pulchritude, Performance and Elizabeth Taylor’s Body
Chapter 2: Taylor Made: Race, Gender and Discipline in the Plantation Films of Elizabeth Taylor
Chapter 3: ‘If it be Love Indeed, Tell Me How Much’: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton and White Pleasure After Empire
Chapter 4: The Most Beautiful Woman Saves the World: Capitalism, the Maternal Melodrama and the Meaning of Elizabeth Taylor’s AIDS Activism
Yes, there is more to say about Elizabeth Taylor, and Gloria Shin proves it with her unique look at the late icon as the model of postcolonial whiteness. Of particular interest is Shin’s focus on Taylor’s AIDS activism, and how Taylor served 'as an effective agent of positive social change.'
— The Film Stage: Your Spotlight on Cinema
Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire offers a meticulously researched, rigorous, and insightful new perspective about the titular Hollywood star. Gloria Shin explores Taylor’s iconicity as a symbol of postcolonial whiteness, revealing how the actress’s film roles, glamorous extra-cinematic image, and late-career political activism collectively frame her as appealing model of American imperialist power and consumption.
— Olympia Kiriakou, independent scholar and author of Becoming Carole Lombard