Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China

Body, Commodity, Text

by Judith Farquhar

Judith Farquhar’s innovative study of medicine and popular culture in modern China reveals the thoroughly political and historical character of pleasure. Ranging over a variety of cultural terrains--fiction, medical texts, film and television, journalism, and observations of clinics and urban daily life in Beijing— Appetites challenges the assumption that the mundane enjoyments of bodily life are natural and unvarying. Farquhar analyzes modern Chinese reflections on embodied existence to show how contemporary appetites are grounded in history.
From eating well in improving economic times to memories of the late 1950s famine, from the flavors of traditional Chinese medicine to modernity’s private sexual passions, this book argues that embodiment in all its forms must be invented and sustained in public reflections about personal and national life. As much at home in science studies and social theory as in the details of life in Beijing, this account uses anthropology, cultural studies, and literary criticism to read contemporary Chinese life in a materialist and reflexive mode. For both Maoist and market reform periods, this is a story of high culture in appetites, desire in collective life, and politics in the body and its dispositions.

Genres: China, Anthropology, Food, Sociology, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 2002

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 3 out of 5]

I can see how this book would be an incredibly good class--even sexy, in a nerdy want-to-know way--. But as a book to read on purpose, it falls short by taking a highly interesting topic and weighing it down with mashed-potato writing. Too much prefacing with Foucauldian doctrine and telling when it could be showing. I'm prone to Foucauldian reading myself, but you have to show how it works, not just name-check and concept-check. It takes about 50pp to describe how it feels good to get drunk with the city fathers in small-town China. The niceties and cattiness of the slightly-sauced will be no surprise to anyone who has ever attended an office party, or a cocktail party of any sort. I was, however, floored to learn that TCM--traditional Chinese medicine--is in fact a Maoist system, like simplified characters (the writing system). I would have liked to know more in this vein. Or, perhaps, I wish she had been a literary critic, rather than an anthropologist!