Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China
(Body, commodity, text)
Duke University Press, 2002
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at 12 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
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  France
  Belgium
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  United States of America
Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [323]-336) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 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
by "Nielsen BookData"