There are significant numbers of women in China who have inadvertently married closeted gay men. Women in China who unwittingly marry closeted gay men are known as Tongqi (同妻), and these women often discover their husband's secret only after giving birth to fulfill filial obligations. These women taken into this "marriage fraud" are initially unaware of their husbands' sexual orientation. Because China's divorce law favors men, even if the wife files for divorce, the husband often wins custody of children. The tendency to blame the woman who have unwittingly married gay men extends even to the woman's own immediate families.These women suffer heightened risk of not only physical death from AIDS and other diseases, but also psychological death through the loss of physical mobility, alienation of kin, and death of their heterosexual marriage identity. This article extends necropolitics to the social death situations of 12 educated and 47 low-educated Tongqi and reveals how they resist and overcome their circumstances. Tongqi are the
Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), Treatment as Prevention (TasP), and undetectability affect the experience of gay and bisexual men living with HIV. They also link ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ to raw sex and the use of recreational drugs as they relate to sexual practices among gay and bisexual men. From these insights, we can think about the complex connections between biomedical innovations in the field of HIV, sexual practices, subjectivity, pleasure, spaces, and technologies. This commentary offers a sociocultural perspective based on a study with 28 male sex workers (hereafter MSWs) on gay and bisexual men—mainly male sex workers— and their wives (Tongqi) in China.
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