Desiring China

Rofel Lisa Rofel

Description

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.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies
• Biological anthropology
• China

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 10 mai 2007
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822389903
• Langue: English

Extrait

Desiring china

perverse modernities

A series edited byjudith halberstamandlisa lowe

Desiring china

Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality,

and Public Culture

lisa rofel

duke university press ✴ Durham and London 2007

∫2007 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper$

Designed by Katy Clove

Typeset in Sabon

by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

appear on the last printed page of this book.

To Graciela,

in thanks for her love and imagination

∞.

≤.

≥.

∂.

∑.

∏.

Acknowledgments Introduction 1

ix

Yearnings Televisual Love and Melodramatic Politics

Museum as Women’s Space Displays of Gender 65

Qualities of Desire Imagining Gay Identities

85

contents

31

From Sacrifice to Desire Cosmopolitanism with Chinese Characteristics Legislating Desire Homosexuality, Intellectual Property Rights, and Consumer Fraud 135 Desiring China China’s Entry into thewto 157

Coda 197 Notes 205 Works Cited Index 247

229

111

acknowledgments ntellectual endeavors are pleasurable to the extent they are I who always pushed my thinking beyond where I expected it engagements in collective conversations. I would not have been able to write this book without a group of interlocutors to go: Jacqueline Brown, Gail Hershatter, Dorinne Kondo, Neferti Tadiar, Anna Tsing, Sylvia Yanagisako, and Mei Zhan. My colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz, offered numerous creative suggestions when I presented sev- eral of the chapters as lectures and have helped to make intel- lectual work meaningful: Anjali Aarondekar, Mark Anderson, James Clifford, Gina Dent, Carla Freccero, Jennifer Gonza- lez, Jody Greene, Donna Haraway, David Hoy, Jocelyn Hoy, David Marriott, Rhadika Mongia, Helene Moglen, Hugh Raf- fles, Vanita Seth, Neferti Tadiar, Anna Tsing. Other colleagues gave generously of their moral and intellectual support: Ann Anagnost, Tani Barlow, Chris Berry, Kathleen Biddick, Steven Caton, Lawrence Cohen, Donald Donham, Judith Halber- stam, Bruce Knauft, Lydia Liu, and Gayle Rubin. Many of the graduate students I have worked with atucsc read and commented on my work and sustained my intellectual passions. They are remarkable interlocutors: Jon Anjaria, An- gelina Chin, Timothy Choy, Cathryn Clayton, Ulrika Dahl, Lieba Faier, Gillian Goslinga, Anna Higgins, Wenqing Kang, Lyn Jeffery, Hiro Matsubara, Megan Moodie, Shiho Satsuka, Bettina Stoetzer, Yen-ling Tsai, Sasha Welland, and Robin Whitaker. I thank colleagues in China who have given me an intellectual home there: Cui Zi’en, Dai Jinhua, Tan Shen, and Wang Hui. Louisa Schein and Angela Zito went above and beyond with their careful reviews of the entire manuscript. I