The Impotence Epidemic: Men's Medicine and Sexual Desire in Contemporary China (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography)
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (992 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0822358565 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-03-22 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
In this ethnography he shifts discussions of impotence as a purely neurovascular phenomenon to a social one. Zhang contextualizes impotence within the social changes brought by recent economic reform and through the production of various desires in post-Maoist China. Since the 1990s China has seen a dramatic increase in the number of men seeking treatment for impotence. Based on interviews with 350 men and their partners from Beijing and Chengdu, and concerned with de-mystifying and de-stigmatizing impotence, Zhang suggests that the impotence epidemic represents not just trauma and suffering, but also a contagion of individualized desire and an affirmation for living a full life. Everett Yuehong Zhang argues in The Impotence Epidemic that this trend represents changing public attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. For Zhang, studying male impotence in China is one way to comprehend the unique experience of Chinese modernity.
"Based on over 10 years of field research and writing by a greatly sensitive and skilled ethnographer who himself grew up in China, The Impotence Epidemic tells the story of contemporary China, from the Maoist era to the present, through the Chinese medicine conception of the lived body and popular Chinese understandings of how masculinity, sexual desire, and performance act as embodied metaphors of key cultural tensions and crises. Theoretically and ethnographically rich. A remarkable achievement!"
Getting It Up in China Etienne RP Everett Zhang was conducting fieldwork in two Chinese hospitals, documenting the reasons why men sought medical help for sexual impotence, when Viagra was first introduced into China's market in 2000. He therefore had a unique perspective on what the media often referred to as the "impotence epidemic", designating both the increased social visibility of male sexual dysfunction and the growing number of patients seeking treatment in nanke (men's medicine) or urological hospital departments. At the time of Viagra's release, Pfizer, its manufacturer, envisaged a market of more than 100 million men as potential users of "Weige"