| Based on fieldwork in clinics and communities in Beijing and Chengdu, Sichuan Province from 1998 to 2001, this dissertation explores how the social transformation from socialism to postsocialism in China over the past two decades can be understood through the body of impotence. Narratives of patients as well as their spouses or sexual partners demonstrate that larger social transformations such as the re-stratification of society took an embodied form in the breakdown of intercorporeality, the state of physical and mental closeness between two bodies in sex. Their impotence reveals the continuous experience of trauma from the tight sovereign control of the body in the Maoist period to the failures of managing desire in consumer society.; The birth and flourishing of a new department of Chinese medicine, nanke (men's medicine), in the 1980s and 1990s indicate a shift of desire from being an enemy to socialist collectivism to being a quality central to postsocialist subjectivity. This shift accounts for the significant increase of impotent patient visits to male clinics. Chinese medicine contributed to two contradictory trends: in breaking away from the Maoist ethos of sacrificial collectivism it promoted the revival of a traditional ethos of "the cultivation of life" on the one hand; in legitimating sexual desire it compromised the principle of "preserving jing (seminal essence)" on the other hand. This contradiction can be seen in impotence patients' switching back and forth between Chinese herbal medicine and biomedical Viagra from the U.S., and between the ethics of the cultivation of life and the ethics of enjoying sexual pleasure.; The common feeling about the inadequacy of the Chinese male body compared to the Western white male body, and the common perception of China's lower status in development compared to the West reinforce each other to form the "complex of impotence." This complex can be traced back to the discontented encounters between China and Western industrial countries in the early 20th century. This complex was reinforced by the linear and teleological logic of modernity in both socialism and postsocialism, and became symptomatic of Chinese modernity. |
