Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (Body, Commodity, Text) (Paperback)

~ (Author, Series Editor)
Key Phrases: bedchamber arts, bedchamber texts, medicinal meals, Zhong Yu, Lei Feng, Zhu Ziye (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Appetites, with its innovative approach, addresses a large readership and stands as a valuable work for specialists and non-specialists alike." - IIAS Newsletter, March 2004

Product 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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 360 pages
• Publisher: Duke University Press (June 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822329212
• ISBN-13: 978-0822329213
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #235,429 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars What does China taste like?, November 21, 2002

By	Quickhappy "quickhappy" (Big city, big country) - See all my reviews

Farquhar has written a very good book in Appetites. Drawing from conversations, anecdotes, advertising, and--above all--novels, Farquhar is somehow able to convincingly trace a changing subjectivity in China. Never grandiose in her claims, Farquahar addresses this fact: China is changing rapidly, and with its political and economic realignments Chinese personhood is changing too. Careful never to construct a unified "Chinese" experience, the author instead describes mere footprints of an untrapable beast.

She finds in China a subjectivity moving away from, but never forgetting, its histories of socialism and famine. Indeed, eating is a practice through which such histories are thought about, reproduced, and critiqued. Habits, memories, nostalgia, and modernity jostle for positions on contemporary Chinese platters.

At times, the reader may long for more sustained evidence and thicker ethnography. And yet such irritation is inevitably calmed by the author's soothing prose and gentle claims. Unlike some of the medicine ads appearing in Appetites, the author never claims to be providing all of the answers to the body of China.

Farquhar's reading of the changing personage of Lei Feng is striking. She shows that this hero of the revolution has (at least partly) transformed from an image of self-sacrifice, duty, and community, to one now capable of hailing an individual consumer, who can define one's self-centered spending on health as ultimately beneficial to the group. Indeed, the production of such individuality, Farquhar shows, has been necessary to make the segue into new sexual discourses.

Farquhar shows that food, medicine, and sex can never be fully teased apart in China-indeed, they are often blended together so as to whet the appetites.