The Impotence Epidemic

<div>Since the 1990s China has seen a dramatic increase in the number of men seeking treatment for impotence. Everett Yuehong Zhang argues in <i>The Impotence Epidemic</i> that this trend represents changing public attitudes about sexuality in an increasingly globalized China. 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. 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. For Zhang studying male impotence in China is one way to comprehend the unique experience of Chinese modernity.<br></div>