Description
Book SynopsisIn
Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China’s place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires—as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show
If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping—are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront o
Trade Review“This fantastic book is an examination of the undoing of the Chinese worker under neoliberal reform through self-defeating acts of love in the name of family and sacrifice for the sake of children. With great critical insight, Zhang unpacks how the affective renunciations of disenfranchised workers shore up the interests of transnational capital and socialism with Chinese characteristics, resulting in a vertiginous race to the bottom.” -- David L. Eng, coauthor of * Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation: On the Social and Psychic Lives of Asian Americans *
“Charlie Yi Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in
Cruel Optimism, does for hope. He brilliantly shows how the idea of love has been sold as a means of reinforcing power dynamics that structure the lives of so many people, especially women, laborers, and rural people. Deploying a unique, interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic inquiry and media analysis, Zhang complicates the ways in which we take desire, affective worlds, and class aspirations for granted.” -- Ari Larissa Heinrich, author of * Chinese Surplus: Biopolitical Aesthetics and the Medically Commodified Body *
"... this book with the author’s rich, interesting recounting of China’s political–economic traumas and ironies and his piercing critique of the party-state’s neoliberal mentality and capitalist exploitation, is of great significance and can spark further critical inspections of discourses on love and intimacy in post-2020 neoliberal China." -- William JanKowiak * China Quarterly *
"
Dreadful Desires paints a grim picture. After reading, one feels immersed in an atmosphere of scarred landscapes, ruined bodies, aspirations cynically manipulated and carelessly crushed by the machinery of a corrupted power. It is an immensely important book for our times." -- Fran Martin * Cultural Studies *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Mapping the Edgeless Landscape of Love
1. Love of the Zeitgeist: Temporalized Desire in the PRC's Sixtieth-Anniversary Ceremony 35
2. Only If You Are the One! The Expansive Neoliberal Universe through Love Competitors' Eyes 60
Part II. Tracing the Machinery That Both Integrates China into and Separates It From the World
3. The Woeful Landscape of Love: Work Hard, Dream Big, and Die Slowly 97
4. Lessons from the Polarizing Love: Mapping Contradictions for Social Change 127
5. Love with an Unspeakable Name: The Exceptional
Danmei World as the Escape Route 155
Conclusion. Envisioning a Love-Enabled Future 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 227
Index 255
