Ulteriori informazioni
In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China's place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires-as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping-are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.
Sommario
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Mapping the Edgeless Landscape of Love
1. Love of the Zeitgeist: Temporalized Desire in the PRC's Sixtieth-Anniversary Ceremony 35
2. Only If You Are the One! The Expansive Neoliberal Universe through Love Competitors' Eyes 60
Part II. Tracing the Machinery That Both Integrates China into and Separates It From the World
3. The Woeful Landscape of Love: Work Hard, Dream Big, and Die Slowly 97
4. Lessons from the Polarizing Love: Mapping Contradictions for Social Change 127
5. Love with an Unspeakable Name: The Exceptional
Danmei World as the Escape Route 155
Conclusion. Envisioning a Love-Enabled Future 177
Notes 187
Bibliography 227
Index 255
Info autore
Charlie Yi Zhang is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky.
Riassunto
Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population in order to secure China’s place in the global economy.
