Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China / Judith Farquhar.
Farquhar, Judith.
2002
GT497.C6 F37 2002 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection

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Title Appetites : food and sex in postsocialist China / Judith Farquhar.
Author Farquhar, Judith.
ISBN 0822329069 (cloth ; alk. paper)
9780822329060 (cloth ; alk. paper)
0822329212 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
9780822329213 (pbk. ; alk. paper)
Imprint Durham, NC : Duke University Press, 2002.
Language English
Description xii, 341 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm.
Call Number GT497.C6 F37 2002
Dewey Decimal Classification 394.1/0951
Summary 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 famine in the late 1950s, 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. -- Back cover.
Bibliography, etc. Note Includes bibliographical references (pages 323-336) and index.
Series Body, commodity, text.
Available in Other Form Appetites.
Record Appears in On-Campus Resources > Books
All Resources
pt. I. Eating: A Politics of the Senses
Preamble to Part 1 / Lei Feng. 1. Medicinal Meals. 2. A Feast for the Mind. 3. Excess and Deficiency
pt. II. Desiring: An Ethics of Embodiment
Preamble to Part II / Du Wanxiang. 4. Writing the Self: The Romance of the Personal. 5. Sexual Science: The Representation of Behavior. 6. Ars Erotica. Conclusion: Hailing Historical Bodies.

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