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From Mao to Viagra: what a long, strange trip it's been

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2003 by Kathy Sisson

Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China. By Judith Farquhar. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002, 341 pages. Paper, $18.95.

Capitalism's triumph over Eastern European socialist regimes in 1989 created a microcosm of the modernization processes that transformed 19th- and 20th-century Western society. This rapid transformation provided unique opportunities for researching effects of modernization on behavior and culture. Of particular salience to sex researchers, emerging sexual attitudes and practices offered fertile ground for exploring the effects of increasingly available pornography, a liberalized sexual discourse, increased promotion of sex as a commodity, and greater personal privacy. Judith Farquhar, an anthropologist at the University of North Carolina, includes China on the list of former socialist countries ripe for such analysis, and has spent the last 20 years researching social changes wrought by China's gradual journey toward a market economy. In Appetites, she scrutinizes the effects of both historical socialism and nascent capitalism on some aspects of modern Chinese daily life.

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Farquhar sets two goals for her book: (a) to "capture a certain historical moment at the level of bodies and their appetites;" and (b) to employ "methodological creativity, uniting an anthropology of the body and anthropology of discourses and practices" (p. 5). Refining her first objective, Farquhar describes the historical moment she wishes to capture as "not quite the present but not yet entirely the past" (p. 28)--a time of "capitalist boom," "bourgeois modernity" and "new hedonism"--and contrasts this with "Maoist asceticism."

Farquhar adopts Bourdieu's concept of habitus to define the "bodies and appetites" she intends to interrogate. "Habitus is made up of the mundane conditions of daily life and the practices of (broadly construed) bodies," and "is always generated in collective social practice" (p. 9). Appetites focuses on the gustatory, medical, and sexual aspects of contemporary Chinese habitus.

To satisfy her second objective, "methodological creativity," Farquhar blends literary criticism, textual analysis, and ethnography. Defining ethnographic observation somewhat creatively as well, Farquhar's observations in Appetites are not based on systematic field notes, but rather on her interpretations and memories from field research in a Chinese medical college from 1982 to 1984, and on subsequent visits every 2 to 4 years. She affirms that "bodies and the everyday life of which they are made up do not offer themselves directly to anthropological interpretation; they must somehow become legible through words and images" (p. 17), hence her predominant reliance on literary criticism and textual analysis. "Popular fiction and film, advertising, technical medical works, popular health advice, critical essays and other media products" comprise the majority of Appetites' source material (p. 5). Farquhar argues for her methodological approach by invoking the reflexivity of texts and media as both representative and constitutive of everyday experience.

Farquhar suggests that "the power to produce experience is a kind of politics" (p. 55), and therefore, by directly effecting embodied experience, food, medical, and sexual discourse becomes political ideology. Although the title describes Appetites as a book about food and sex, Farquhar gives short shrift to sex and devotes most of the book to food and medicine; only 71 out of 292 pages deal directly with sexual material. The first three chapters examine the ethics and politics of food and Chinese medical practice, while the last two analyze sexual discourse in modern China.

According to Farquhar, food and politics became inseparable in China with the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949. Maoism "took food to be a central political problem" (p. 154) and "all food was the property of the people as a collective" (p. 40). Communist propaganda used food-related fables and metaphors to illustrate collectivist ideology. After Mao's death in 1976, Chinese leadership initiated economic reform, privatization, and "capitalist-style participation in the world market" (p. 13), which drastically altered practices of food production and consumption. Today, Farquhar observes, China enjoys a "rapidly expanding restaurant culture" (p. 42) and varied, abundant food products available for private consumption. However, she suggests that memories of past scarcity inform contemporary eating patterns. She identifies a "transgressive thrill" in contemporary Chinese food practices that stems directly from Maoist food politics and sustains food's politicization in China.

Farquhar sees Chinese food politics as oriented around "excess and deficiency" and analogizes them to core Chinese medical concepts. "The pleasures and dangers of ... excess and deficiency are figured in a medical language of depletion (xu) and repletion (shi)" (p. 136), somewhere between which lies optimal health. By offering both preventative and curative strategies, Chinese medicine advocates a certain vision of health and bodily experience--one based on the "management of an economy of bodily substances" (p. 267). Farquhar asserts that political ideology inheres in this vision. She notes, for example, how modern Chinese sexual discourse grounds its prescriptions for moderation as a path to sexual health in this medical model: "An appeal to self-regulation as a means of increasing gratification runs deep in the Chinese medical canon" (p. 267).

Health Care Industry

From Mao to Viagra: what a long, strange trip it's been

Journal of Sex Research, May, 2003 by Kathy Sisson

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