A “Phoenix” rising from the ashes: China’s Tongqi, marriage fraud, and resistance

There are vast 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 fulfil filial obligations. The wives taken into this “marriage fraud” are initially unaware of their husbands’ sexual orientation. Because China’s divorce law favours men, even if the wife applies for divorce, the husband often wins custody of children. The tendency to blame the victim 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 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 uneducated Tongqi and reveals how they resist and overcome their circumstances. Tongqi are the victims of human rights violations involving their own marriage, but they are not simply waiting for death. Taking an ethnographical approach, this work uses the concept of necropolitics of social death to provide an in-depth understanding of how marriage and gender laws perpetuate these dysfunctional unions.