Switching between Traditional Chinese Medicine and Viagra: Cosmopolitanism and Medical Pluralism Today1

Abstract

Based on the fieldwork in China in the Viagra era, this paper examines the reluctance to embrace Viagra as well as the willingness to switch back and forth between taking Viagra and taking Chinese medicine among impotence patients. Through the notion of "switching" as a framework, this paper discovers the conflict between Viagra and herbs not only as two types of medicine but also as representing two types of economy of potency and ethics of sexuality, and the difficulty in replacing the latter by the former. Nonetheless, switching back and forth so as to absorb them together in the body creates possibilities to cross the line between the Viagra regime revolving around desire and the regime of Chinese medicine revolving around the cultivation of life. Out of switching is the possibility of hybridization of Chinese medicine and biomedicine as well as a hybridized economy of sexual potency and ethics of sexuality.

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