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121 4 Biopolitics Fox Stench, gender boundaries, and the Moral Economy of Postsocialism One day a beautiful taxi driver disappeared. Rumors soon circulated about what had happened to her. It was assumed she had been murdered and dismembered, because no body was ever found. The crime remains unsolved . A young man from a prominent Lijiang family fell in love with a beautiful taxi driver. They courted and planned to marry. His mother, however, thought the young woman had body odor, literally, “fox stench” (huchou; fuchou in Lijiang pronunciation). She refused to allow the marriage without an investigation. The man therefore enlisted a young woman, a friend of the family, to get to know his girlfriend well enough to stay overnight at her house. When they shared a bed, a practice common among close friends, the family friend would be able to discover whether the taxi driver suffered from any “abnormalities .” The friend spent the night with the driver, verified the odor, and reported back to the man’s family. The man broke off the relationship, and gossip about the taxi driver began spreading around Lijiang Town. I heard these two accounts in 1995 and 1997, when friends and acquaintances were eager to tell me about changes in the local landscape since the early 1990s. Stories about female taxi drivers were conspicuous in gossip and in the news. In 1992, there were no taxis in Lijiang, and most people traveled 122 : : : c h a p t e r f o u r by bicycle or on foot. By 1997, more than seven hundred taxis were operating in this town of only about three square miles. The large number of taxis, one of the most conspicuous changes, was touted as evidence of “modernization ” in Lijiang. In particular, the large number of women drivers, rare in other parts of China, drew the attention of national and international tourists. At the same time, numerous stories about female taxi drivers’ violent deaths revealed widespread local ambivalence about the women driving taxis. Less common, but more intriguing, were stories that focused on their bodies, which were identified with danger, immorality, ambiguous sex organs, and pollution. Such stories allegorized how capitalist privatization was straining the social fabric of Lijiang. As tourism and the number of private businesses increased, state-sector workers and established Lijiang residents lost considerable economic and social standing, and Lijiang’s social hierarchy was thrown into flux. Discussions over suitable marriage partners reflected these upheavals. Some residents disparaged old distinctions, now blurred, while others sought to reassert them. Parents debated the sort of daughters-in-law they wanted with an eye to maintaining family reputations in Lijiang; young people seeking marriage partners were giving serious consideration to moral character, material wealth, and physical appearance. Young women, especially those perceived as attempting to use marriage as a way of crossing social boundaries, were closely scrutinized for signs of bodily difference. Imaginings of bodily abnormality reassert hierarchical distinctions through stigmatizing stories of essential difference—that is, by accusing female taxi drivers of bodily pollution, some town residents attempted to reinforce difference (between rural and urban origins, private- and state-sector employment, immorality and morality, backwardness and modernity, and divergent constructions of the feminine). Global flows and capitalist privatization in Lijiang had brought upheaval, dislocation, and danger to downwardly mobile town residents, experiences they conveyed in the taxi driver narratives. In particular, for the state-sector workers and intellectuals who told such stories , female taxi drivers embodied the negative aspects of Lijiang’s economic transformation. The drivers became a convenient surrogate for the otherwise complex and impersonal forces of capitalist privatization, which brought the sensibilities of outsiders to bear on local forms of hierarchy and marginality. Scrutiny of female drivers’ bodily abnormalities followed state campaigns targeting body and population quality (suzhi). In these campaigns, improving Biopolitics and the Moral Economy of Postsocialism : : : 123 reproductive female bodies and public hygiene was presented as a catalyst for national modernity. But bodily improvement required economic means that downwardly mobile state-sector workers and intellectuals did not have. Stories about smelly taxi drivers, which warned listeners against falling prey to deceptive appearances, asserted that bodies are not alterable but are characterized by essential difference—here, fox stench, understood as an incurable medical condition (bromhidrosis) (see Cowie and Evison 1988, 181). Although the connection with medicine is relatively recent, throughout history such accusations sought to enforce boundaries at times of social transformation . Taxi driver stories were intriguing because they voiced a counternarrative...

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