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.
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