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  • The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China by Everett Yuehong Zhang
  • Andrew Schonebaum
Everett Yuehong Zhang. The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015. xii + 288 pp. Ill. $25.95 (978-0-8223-5844-2).

In the past few decades in China, from the alarmist tone of the “China Ideal Sex Blue Book” study, to the introduction of Viagra to the Chinese market, to sex bloggers, and to reports of clinics, there has been a perception that Chinese men suffer from an epidemic of impotence. Everett Yuehong Zhang’s The Impotence Epidemic: Men’s Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China is about the many forces that contribute to that perception. He argues that there has been an increase in public discourse surrounding these issues and that increase reflects a change in [End Page 758] the public view of sexual desire. The “impotence epidemic” designates both the increased social visibility of male sexual dysfunction and the growing number of patients seeking treatment in nanke (men’s medicine) sections of TCM clinics or urological hospital departments. Zhang claims that this phenomenon is part of a positive, contemporary movement of “desiring production,” rather than one that focuses on shame and suffering (p. 13). Which is to say that the impotence epidemic is a story of change in China over the past thirty years.

Zhang’s primary disciplinary method is anthropology, and he culls evidence from a wide variety of sources, including a great deal of fieldwork. The Impotence Epidemic is ethnographically rich, but it is also theoretically elaborate. Zhang makes frequent use of critical tools (Deleuze’s “assemblage,” Bourdieu’s “habitus,” Foucault’s “biopower,” Merleau-Ponty’s “intercorporeality,” Heidegger’s “being-in-the-world,” etc.), but those ideas are usually employed to make an issue more expansive, to open up an evocative space, and act as useful heuristic.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One, which includes the first four chapters, deals with the social context of the impotence epidemic in post-Mao China as the revival of individual aspiration and desire. It also contextualizes impotence as a political, state, familial, and gendered issue. Part Two, consisting of three chapters, focuses on the unique cultural resources in China that serve to regulate the flow of sexual desire. Part One focuses on the liberation, production, and moral justification of sexual desire in China, while Part Two is concerned with how liberation and production are limited in ethically and culturally specific ways.

One of Zhang’s particularly compelling arguments is that male impotence often originates in the failure of one or more intercorporeal dimensions: lack of touching, as when the husband lies side by side to his wife, waiting to achieve an erection; ignorance of the most basic facts of life, due to the lack of sex education; and withdrawal from the sensory world that is symptomatic of a more serious loss of “potency” in life. He writes, “women’s involvement in managing impotence is not any less important than men’s, and, in fact, at times may be more important. Impotence, after all, is not only a neurovascular event affecting the individual male body. It is also a social, familial event and an intercorporeal, gendered event” (p. 131).

Ultimately, Zhang claims, the phenomenon of identifying, treating, and discussing the “impotence epidemic” is about China’s search for modernity. In Chinese history, yu (sexual desire) tended to have pejorative connotations, and sex was often expressed by terms like se (lust) and yin (lascivious), words that persist throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Sexual pleasure had been a function of sexual practices before, but satisfaction of sexual desire had not been so publicly justified and encouraged until the post-Mao era, particularly since the 1990s. Satisfying sexual desire in particular and satisfying individualized desire in general became increasingly important in the fashioning of modern Chinese identity.

In his conclusion, Zhang states that his goal in writing this book is to change our perspective of impotence. He writes, “I wish to contribute to a transformation in the historical, theoretical, and moral or ethical relationship we have with...

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