Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

Perverse Modernities

by Lisa Rofel

Through window displays, newspapers, soap operas, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, with appropriate needs, aspirations, and longings. Lisa Rofel argues that the creation of such “desiring subjects” is at the core of China’s contingent, piece-by-piece reconfiguration of its relationship to a post-socialist world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neoliberal subjectivities are created through the production of various desires—material, sexual, and affective—and that it is largely through their engagements with public culture that people in China are imagining and practicing appropriate desires for the post-Mao era. Drawing on her research over the past two decades among urban residents and rural migrants in Hangzhou and Beijing, Rofel analyzes the meanings that individuals attach to various public cultural phenomena and what their interpretations say about their understandings of post-socialist China and their roles within it. She locates the first broad-based public debate about post-Mao social changes in the passionate dialogues about the popular 1991 television soap opera Yearnings . She describes how the emergence of gay identities and practices in China reveals connections to a transnational network of lesbians and gay men at the same time that it brings urban/rural and class divisions to the fore. The 1999–2001 negotiations over China’s entry into the World Trade Organization; a controversial women’s museum; the ways that young single women portray their longings in relation to the privations they imagine their mothers experienced; adjudications of the limits of self-interest in court cases related to homoerotic desire, intellectual property, and consumer fraud—Rofel reveals all of these as sites where desiring subjects come into being.

Genres: China, Nonfiction, Anthropology, Queer, Sociology, Gender, Theory

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[aerialxav · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good!

[Jennie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mmmmmmm mmmmmm I’m desiring china 👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅👅

[风花 · Rating 4 out of 5]

罗丽莎：反东方主义的东方主义

于Lisa Rofel来说，中国与其说是无数鲜活生命经验的存在之地，不如说是其理论装置的生产资料，女性、酷儿、新穷人都是用于反照新自由主义脆弱幻想的支点，而非其存在自身。虽然她一再声称自己的“反东方主义”的左派立场，但这样一种反东方主义实际上只不过生产了另一种东方主义，东方作为一种用于解构西方的新奇体验，而非东方自身。 不过话虽这么说，我们依然要承认其理论的精妙之处，而非“一棍子打翻”。

罗丽莎的方法论，粗而论之大概就是“新自由主义可以一再解构，但毛主义是解构不得的，非不能，实不愿也。” 与Rofel来说，中国与“全球新自由主义的幻象”是一种双重运动的关系，新自由主义的全球化幻象需要中国作为生产资料，一个“desiring subject”，中国以及生活于其中的都市“色情男女”需要全球化的新自由主义幻象来重塑自己的“desiring subject”。 而最后一章关于中国加入wto，若与秦晖的关于中国入世的几章对照来读，更是饶有趣味。

倒带回十年前，这种论述自有其“真实之力”，不过在“新时代的梦之中国”，历史似乎完成了其倒转，全球性的未来渺茫之处绝非“新自由主义”可以一力解释，此时reexamine罗丽莎之著述，亦有其考古学意义，当过去的未来成为现在，过去对于未来的推测如何与“现在”成为反义词？ 究竟是新自由主义需要它的批判者？还是批判者需要新自由主义？

[Jessica Zu · Rating 5 out of 5]

Totally love this book, the triangulation of repression, interest, and passion, for Rofel, underpins the Chinese project of becoming modern. "Between repression and passion lies socialism, between passion and interests lies capitalism"--right to the point.
Legal cases are also fascinating.

[Thatan · Rating 2 out of 5]

The topic of the book is extremely interesting and once you get past the first couple of chapters the book starts reflecting this. It is essentially about how Western culture is impacting the people of China. It discusses the homosexual culture as well as a new kind of feminism and public culture while giving the reader a hint at the author's positionality.

On the down side, I think the author struggled to fit the "desiring" in Desiring China into too much of the book to the point where it became tired. The first chapter also fails to lure the reader into reading more about the topic and I would say that it even deters them. It is filled with academic writing that is perhaps just too dense for the casual reader or even for most of the undergraduate anthropology students in my class.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a number of moments when this book did a very good job of evoking interest and presenting a compelling argument about the process of creating a "modern" and desiring ethos in China post-Mao. However, the tendency to foreground theoretical discussion over the interpretation of evidence is a trend in scholarship that I generally don't find appealing and one that crept into this book over and over again.

[Josie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Previous book I just added? Good stuff. This is even better. Really gets at ETHNOGRAPHY and cultural practices from the ground-up rather than from theory-down. There's a chapter on a women's museum, too, which makes me happy.

Plus, Dr. Rofel visited our class this morning and was very nice, accessible, and thoughtful in talking to us grad students about all sorts of topics.