In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China by Everett Yuehong Zhang
  • Dongxin Zou (bio)
Everett Yuehong Zhang. The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. 288 pp. Paperback $25.95, isbn 978-0-8223-5856-5.

[End Page 317]

Growing up in the Cultural Revolution, a period fraught with political vicissitudes and life struggles, and witnessing first-hand the dramatic social changes that followed during the 1980s, anthropologist Everett Yuehong Zhang exhibits a strong moral imperative in his writing about these transformations. He aims to understand how individual Chinese bodies experienced joy and grievances during the oftentimes unsettling societal changes, and he expresses a deep concern for how these daily pressures affected the well-being of ordinary Chinese. In The Impotence Epidemic, Zhang interrogates Maoist socialism and its transformations through the angle of impotence, a very private matter and taboo topic that nevertheless offers a fruitful site for examining the individual bodily experience as it was shaped by larger historical, social, and cultural circumstances. In contrast to the significant decline in the population growth rate caused by the one-child policy of 1980, post-Mao China saw a rise in sexual desire. Zhang's argument for the growing desire is based on his interpretation of an interesting phenomenon that emerged during the 1980s: the number of patients who sought medical help for impotence largely increased. He is careful to note that no statistics are available to indicate whether the percentage of impotence patients actually increased; rather, it is the "increasing visibility of impotence" (p. 10) that suggests that during the post-Mao era a more open cultural and revamped medical understanding was favorable to the development of sexual desire. He therefore conceptualizes the impotence epidemic as "a positive event of 'desiring production'" (p. 13).

Rich in vivid individual accounts of life stories, this engaging ethnography is divided into two parts. The first (chapters 1–4) explores how the Maoist state's structural limits, social environment, parental power, and men's intercorporeal tensions with women intertwined with impotence. Chapter 1, the nexus of this part, ingeniously takes as its departure point the birth of nanke (men's medicine)—a new division in the traditional Chinese medicine (TCM)—to discuss a series of post-Mao transformations. These transformations include the shift of the disease category from yijing (nocturnal emission) to yangwei (impotence), the development of a new medical specialty (nanke) that encouraged and sanctioned impotence, and a shift in the focus of Chinese sexuality from reproduction towards the pursuit of desire.

Moving back in time, chapter 2 focuses on the institutional structures of Maoist China that stifled sexual desire. Zhang wisely opts for a move away from debates about whether or not the Maoist state intentionally repressed sexual desire. Instead, he contends that the two socialist cornerstone systems of danwei (work unit) and hukou (household registration) imposed a physical separation on married couples that in effect achieved sexual repression even within marriage. Chapters 3 and 4 sample four groups of urban patients—entrepreneurs ("winners"), laid-off workers ("losers"), the "old three classes," and migrant workers ("in between")—and analyze how they became, or [End Page 318] imagine themselves to have become (p. 102), impotent during the post-Mao transformation. The bodily experience of these patients varied because of their different circumstances, including business social routines (drinking and seeing prostitutes), financial burdens and the sense of insecurity from sudden unemployment, altered social status after the collapse of the Maoist political class system, and parental interference in the sexual lives of children. In these "one thousand bodies of impotence" (p. 74), men's "intercorporeal" (borrowed from Merleau-Ponty) relationship with their sexual partners was essential, yet it is still overlooked in scholarship (p. 117). Raising the issue, Zhang gives voice to wives. Although men's seeking medication "often reflected the urging of women" (p. 12), it is interesting to learn that in those delicately narrated life stories, all of the women chose to stay in the marriage with their impotent husbands. Some simply showed indifference to a sexual life; some accepted their circumstances on the grounds that their...

pdf