Desiring China

Through window displays, newspapers, gay bars, and other public culture venues, Chinese citizens are negotiating what it means to be cosmopolitan citizens of the world, individuals with 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, neo-liberal-dominated world. In a study at once ethnographic, historical, and theoretical, she contends that neo-liberal 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 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 a