Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture

摘要

Lisa Rofel, in this book, argues that "central to the meanings and practices of becoming a transnational citizen-subject in China is the historical and cultural constitution of 'desire'" (p. 6). In other words, Rofel aims to highlight the production of "desiring subjects" in post-socialist China. Her historical and ethnographic approach to the constitution of desire - aspirations, needs and longings - is ultimately meant to be theoretical. That is, she uses the "cultural practice" of desire in China (p. 3) to debunk the "totalizing" view of "neoliberalism" as a uniform experience of capitalism throughout the world and a universal set of principles, from which derives "a singular type of neoliberal subject" (p. 2). This assumption, as she argues, is disrupted, as China actively creates neoliberal subjects with multiple, uneven, and ambivalent desires as its "ongoing experimental project" (p. 2).