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Body & Society
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Rethinking Sexual Repression in Maoist China: Ideology, Structure and the Ownership of the Body

Everett Yuehong Zhang

US

Through an example of the prohibition against dating in a technical school in southwest China in 1978, this article analyzes how three intersecting forces - the ideology of socialist collectivism, the structure of the work unit system and the socialist sovereign ownership of the body - account for sexual repression in the Maoist period in China. Rather than being an ahistorical, essential component of Maoist socialism, sexual repression (psychic and social) was a historically specific and complex phenomenon. The transformation of sexual repression at a historical moment took the form of an assemblage of the return of love discourse and an emergent desire-centered subjectivity in the great transformation from Maoist socialism to the post-Mao reform period.

Key Words: desire • Maoist socialism • ownership of the body • sexual repression • subjectification

Body & Society, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1-25 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/1357034X05056188
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