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,…