Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture (Perverse Modernities) by Lisa Rofel

Author:Lisa Rofel [Rofel, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2007-04-18T16:00:00+00:00

WORLDING CHINA

How is China’s position reconfigured in this newly imagined world? The contradiction of transcending China to become a cosmopolitan self and domesticating cosmopolitanism within China rests, as I have been arguing, in the bodies of young women. Gay men, by contrast, cannot fully domesticate cosmopolitanism because of the ambivalence with which non-gay citizens view the extent to which gay men themselves can be domesticated. Young women literally embody Chineseness, both reproductively and as objects of desire. They thus provide the site for figuring out how to domesticate cosmopolitanism. But Chinese women, as consumers and subjects of desire, also represent the potential to transcend Chineseness. I turn to three different moments that highlight this contradiction in the bodies of young women. These moments are prescient; they are veritable histories of the present. They speak back to contemporary barbarisms and provide a warning to those who might envision cosmopolitanism as a universalism uncontaminated by alterity.

The first moment is a 1995 Chinese television movie, Sunset at Long Chao Li. The film tells the story of a young Chinese man who returns from studying architecture in America. He brings with him his new Caucasian American wife and her son from a previous marriage. The movie focuses on his attempts to negotiate between remaining a filial son to his father, an architect renowned in the past, and becoming accomplished in ways that the West (embodied by his wife’s father, who owns a construction company) will recognize and acknowledge. Kathleen Erwin, an American anthropologist who happened to star in the movie and argued with the producers along the way about the story, concludes that Sunset constitutes an effort by elite men to contest images of China in the international arena. The film’s producers highlighted an alternative representation that emphasizes China’s global dominance, one that Erwin concludes “depends in part on reimagining the nation as masculine and (sexually) desirable” (1999, 2.38). This reimagining entails representing white women rather than Chinese women as the object of Chinese male desire. Erwin argues that such a representation “eclipses Chinese women… as symbols of the Chinese family/nation, as agents in the pursuit… of a transnational Chinese modernity, and as legitimate subjects in the constitution of their own sexuality and desire” (238).

The masculine cosmopolitanism Irwin emphasizes and that seems to prevail in China today provides a countervailing allegory to the ones that served as warning tales in women’s engendering of cosmopolitanism. These warning tales provide the second moment. In the midst of my discussion with Tao Ming, for example, I asked her if she had spent time with foreigners. She replied very firmly, “No, I haven’t had any contact with foreigners. Chinese children are really tragic (beican). Because poverty chills ambition [she used an ancient scholarly phrase: renqiong-zhiduan]. I have another friend who found a laowai husband [ laowai is a derogatory term for “foreigner”]. These are friends who study foreign languages. They are tragic (bei’ai); maybe because they are poor they want to marry laowai. I think they are like prostitutes.

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