Author: Yung-Hang Bruce Lai
Source: Starring Asian Femininities: Subverting the Gaze, Reclaiming the Frame
Link: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/starring-asian-femininities-9781350434400/
Excerpt
This chapter focuses on Shum’s stardom in comedy films in the 1980s and early 1990s, using the It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad World (MMMW hereafter) series – which marks her most influential and successful screen performances – as the principal case study.
While a fuller intercultural comparison with Western cases would exceed the scope of this chapter, this analysis engages with Kathleen Rowe’s ‘unruly woman’ framework, developed to analyse representations of fat comediennes in the West, to demonstrate how Shum’s image as an amiable fat woman enriches that framework.
While Shum’s television career spanned from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, across variety and drama, a systematic study of her screen career or a comparative analysis of her film and television performance would exceed the scope of a single chapter, due to both the volume and inaccessibility of her television programmes. In the main analysis, I refer to Shum’s television work only where it clarifies her film performances.
Given the scarcity of English-language literature on Shum – a handful of studies on her films, and far less on her television career – this chapter is, to my knowledge, the first academic work focusing on Shum as a comedienne in English, and I hope the investigation of her films in this chapter will lay a foundation for future study of her television career.