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

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.

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).

Farquhar prefaces the two chapters on sex with one of her main conceits about Chinese modernization: that the "creation" of individual subjectivity was prerequisite for modern sexual practice. "Love and sex were constructions, laboriously formed as a reaction against the regime that had made such a success of collective love" (p. 171). She observes that in socialist China, Maoism subordinated individual identity to the collective, privacy was virtually nonexistent, marriage was regulated, and "any direct sexual activity was hard to arrange and consequently rare" (p. 173). During the 1980s, "public commitment to collectivism changed rapidly" (p. 171), spawning a new sense of individuality. Farquhar analyzes several texts that trace the formation of individual subjectivity and demonstrate the necessity of an autonomous I--one capable of making choices based on self interest--to the new sexual paradigm.

Farquhar finally turns her attention to sex with a description of its explosion across China in the mid-1980s. Book markets no longer under state control began offering pornography, self-help books, sexual hygiene manuals, and sexology classics ranging from Havlock Ellis to Alfred Kinsey. Movies included explicit sex scenes. Stores sold condoms, birth control, "sexual aids," and fetish clothing. Prostitution's visibility and presence enlarged dramatically. Sexual images permeated advertising. Rates of sexually transmitted diseases soared. Clinics specializing in sexual medicine opened in urban and rural locations. Sexologists began conducting sex research and sex education campaigns gathered momentum. In other words, sex in contemporary China became "precisely that recognizable entity with which we in the Euro-American West have lived for the part hundred years or so" (p. 215).

Correspondingly, Farquhar points out, this new sexual paradigm privileges reproductive sexuality. "Masturbation occasions a large amount of concerned discussion, most of which concludes that this asocial practice is natural but not very wholesome" (p. 214). The Chinese version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders removed homosexuality from its list of disorders in 2001, but "the sexology literature takes up homosexuality as a topic with varying degrees of disapproval" (p. 214).

The observations noted here, however, encompass almost the entirety of Farquhar's discussion about sexual "bodies and appetites" in China; she proceeds to launch a social constructionist attack on sexology, empirically-based sex research, and sex education. She suggests that "certain reifications and reductions typical of the scientific method" (p. 219) and embraced by sexologists normalize a misrepresentative, incomplete definition of sexual behavior and, thereby, "colonize" Chinese bodies. She decries the "verbose habits and indiscreet interests of a modern scientia sexualis" (p. 241) that, she asserts, direct a sexual discourse that elides traditional sexual paradigms. And she denounces "classic sexology" because it assumes "the mysteries of sex have been there all along, waiting behind the bed curtains for popular and scientific discovery" (p. 239).

Farquhar goes on to censure survey research and "enlightened, modern" sex education for their political ideologies, and condemns their imposition onto Chinese culture. Farquhar perceives survey research and sex education as tools in a modernizing national pedagogy. She suggests that surveys, like fictional texts, possess the power to both reflect and create experience, and that survey research has forced an erotically diffuse Chinese sexuality into a narrow range of modern Western concepts. Chinese sex education, Farquhar argues, transmits nationalist propaganda because "national progress and development are and always were [its] goal" (p. 227). However, because Western concepts of sexual health also inform Chinese sex education, Farquhar criticizes it as "cultural imperialism" (p. 232).

In her last chapter, Farquhar examines Chinese "bedchamber arts" and finds sex education's nationalist political ideology reflected in popular sexual literature. By reinterpreting ancient Chinese sex manuals and medical treatises, contemporary sexual texts establish historical precedents for modernized sexual practice and emphasize its unique Chinese heritage. Unfortunately, as Farquhar points out, these texts also normalize androcentrism. Modern images rework and popularize the classic personage of a "hypermasculine" sensualist "with special expertise in techniques and disciplines that both express and increase 'Chinese' superiority" (p. 269). "The female remains in the shade, unarticulated as such, accorded little agency ..." (p. 281).

Somewhat predictably, this renewed emphasis on masculine performance has spawned increasing concern with male sexual dysfunction. Farquhar notes that "impotence has become an 'epidemic of signification' in China in recent years" (p. 268). Chinese men have enthusiastically embraced Viagra, and prior to its release eagerly sought other treatments ranging from surgical implants to mechanical stimulators and aphrodisiacs. Farquhar analyzes two texts that focus on the metaphorical potential of male sexual performance, suggesting that impotence serves as a trope for the collective disenfranchisement of "Maoist asceticism" and virility as a trope for the individual empowerment inherent in capitalistic hedonism. Farquhar displays her unfamiliarity with sexual dysfunction by referring to the "disease of impotence" several times throughout her discussion.

Appetites may delight cultural theorists, China scholars, anthropologists, literary critics, and sociologists. Farquhar's textual analyses delve deeply into a variety of sources spanning 50 years of Chinese social transformation. She outlines the book's contents concisely and clearly, and avoids gratuitous social science jargon. Her personal experiences provide entertaining anecdotes while contributing to her arguments.

Sexologists, sex researchers, and sex educators may be less enamored with Appetites. The book is only marginally about sex, and takes a dour view of sexology, survey research, and Western-influenced sex education. Farquhar's concern with Western hegemonic trampling of indigenous sexual culture is valid; the current debates over clitorectomies and "dry sex" practices in Africa, for example, reflect the difficulty of balancing cultural custom and Western ideals of sexual health. However, given her own citation of skyrocketing STD rates in China, her focus on sex education's political ideology may prove frustrating to those involved with sex on a more practical, public-health level.

At times Farquhar romanticizes both the past and present, writing of the "delightful flavors" of famine (p. 136) and omitting any mention of contemporary repression. She conveys the complexity of China's journey from communism to "post-socialism" but ultimately prioritizes theory over the gritty reality of the "bodies and appetites" she claims to interrogate.

Reviewed by Kathy Sisson, M.A., 710 Mariners Island Blvd. #207, San Mateo, CA 94404; e-mail: [e-mail].