Description
Book SynopsisShows how new forms of desire, pleasure, anxiety and curiosity emerged as capitalist reforms advanced in post-Maoist China.
Trade Review“Evolving from her fascinating previous work concerning hands-on diagnosis in Chinese medicine, Judith Farquhar engages cultural artifacts of all kinds to probe the release of the passions in post-Maoist China. This is by far the most successful application to ethnography of the often confused and overly abstract discussions of the body as a central trope and object of recent culture theory.”—George Marcus, Rice University
“Judith Farquhar has done an exquisite job of clarifying why it makes sense to write a text that ranges across Chinese medicine, food, and sex, and how they are intimately linked through the specificities of appetites, desires, and anxieties about the body. Farquhar beautifully delineates how embodiment is historically and politically produced, how it forms the nexus of numerous enactments, some allegorical, some very concrete in terms of the body’s well being, but all linked to post-socialist Chinese life.”—Lisa Rofel, University of California, Santa Cruz
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Eating: A Politics of the Senses
Preamble to Part I / Lei Feng, Tireless Servant of the People 37
1. Medicinal Meals 47
2. A Feast for the Mind 79
3. Excess and Deficiency 121
Part II. Desiring: An Ethics of Embodiment
Preamble to Part II / Du Wanxiang, The Rosy Glow of the Good Communist 167
4. Writing the Self: The Romance of the Personal 175
5. Sexual Science: The Representation of Behavior 211
6. Ars Erotica 243
Conclusion / Hailing Historical Bodies 285
Notes 293
References 323
Index 337
