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Dreadful Desires

Dreadful Desires

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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. 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. Charlie Yi Zhang is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Kentucky. 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
 

“This fantastic book is an examination of the undoing of the Chinese worker under neoliberal reform through self-defeating acts of love in the name of family and sacrifice for the sake of children. With great critical insight, Zhang unpacks how the affective renunciations of disenfranchised workers shore up the interests of transnational capital and socialism with Chinese characteristics, resulting in a vertiginous race to the bottom.”
“Charlie Yi Zhang offers to do for love in China what Lauren Berlant, in Cruel Optimism, does for hope. He brilliantly shows how the idea of love has been sold as a means of reinforcing power dynamics that structure the lives of so many people, especially women, laborers, and rural people. Deploying a unique, interdisciplinary combination of ethnographic inquiry and media analysis, Zhang complicates the ways in which we take desire, affective worlds, and class aspirations for granted.”

Additional information

Weight 1 oz
Dimensions 1 × 6 × 9 in