Tsang Eileen Y H
Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong.
Br J Sociol. 2021 Jun;72(3):793-807. doi: 10.1111/1468-4446.12812. Epub 2021 Jan 8.
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 (), 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 women who have unwittingly married gay men of violations involving their own marriage, but they are not simply waiting for death. Taking an ethnographical approach, this work uses the social death concept of necropolitics to provide understanding of how marriage and gender laws perpetuate these dysfunctional unions.
在中国，有相当数量的女性无意间嫁给了 closeted gay men（隐藏性取向的男同性恋者）。在中国，那些不知情地嫁给隐藏性取向男同性恋者的女性被称为“同妻”，这些女性往往在为履行孝道而生子后才发现丈夫的秘密。这些陷入“婚姻欺诈”的女性最初并不知道丈夫的性取向。由于中国的离婚法律偏袒男性，即使妻子提出离婚，丈夫往往也能赢得孩子的抚养权。指责那些不知情嫁给男同性恋者的女性的倾向甚至延伸到了女性自己的直系亲属。这些女性不仅面临因艾滋病和其他疾病导致身体死亡的更高风险，还因身体行动能力丧失、亲属疏远以及异性婚姻身份的丧失而遭受心理上的“死亡”。本文将死亡政治扩展到 12 名受过教育和 47 名未受过教育的“同妻”的社会死亡状况，并揭示她们如何抵抗和克服自身处境。“同妻”是那些不知情嫁给涉及自身婚姻违规行为的男同性恋者的女性，但她们并非只是坐等死亡。采用人种志方法，这项工作运用死亡政治的社会死亡概念来理解婚姻和性别法律如何使这些功能失调的婚姻关系长期存在。
