Appetites

Drawing on a wide range of sources, Judith Farquhar examines how medicine and everyday popular culture shape the experience of modern China. Her material includes novels, clinical and medical writing, film and television, newspaper journalism, and fieldwork in the clinics and streets of Beijing.

Farquhar argues against the idea that the ordinary pleasures of the body are fixed by nature. Instead, she traces how present-day Chinese ways of thinking about embodied life, and the appetites that come with them, have been formed by political and historical forces.