A01=Perry Johansson Vig
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Asian Studies
Author_Perry Johansson Vig
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Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=JBSF1
Category=JFSJ1
Category=JHMC
China
Consumer Culture
COP=United States
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
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eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
Language_English
Nationalism
PA=Available
Price_€50 to €100
PS=Active
Sexuality
softlaunch
Women's Studies
Product details
- ISBN 9780739192627
- Weight: 345g
- Dimensions: 157 x 239mm
- Publication Date: 29 Oct 2015
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
- Language: English
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This study of postsocialist China explores the development of a Chinese consumer culture in the 1990s with a special focus on advertising and shifting ideals on female beauty. On an analytical level it is an investigation into Chinese nationalism that demonstrates how the desire for recognition as a powerful nation is linked to anxieties about Chinese femininity. The book is also, on a theoretical level, about the libidinal economy of an imaginary “China.” In other words it attempts to unravel the sexuality of geopolitics by describing the association between femininity and China in popular culture and nationalist discourse. In addition to advertisements, political writings, plays, and films, the archive for this inquiry consists of fieldwork observations and interviews. The Libidinal Economy of China engages a range of post-colonial and psychoanalytically informed thinkers in a truly cross disciplinary study. Lacanian theories on hysteria, femininity, and narcissism are applied in the international domain of geopolitics to formulate a general theory on China’s relationship to the West. David Eng and Homi Bhabha are employed for discussing racial fetishism in contemporary China, while Slavoj Žižek’s ideas on violence and the Other are engaged in explaining the emotional dimension of national identification. The study concludes that China and the New Chinese Nationalism is firmly under the gaze of a Western Other analogous to a male gaze. That Other rules the libidinal economy of consumer culture, which explains China’s recurring history of wanting to emulate and catch up with the West while simultaneously reacting to such an attained intimacy with castration anxiety and aggressive hysteria.
Perry Johansson is professor at the David C. Lam Institute for East-West Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University.
