Elizabeth Taylor

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.