You are cordially invited to join the coming Wednesday Gender Seminar entitled “Phoenix” Rising from the Ashes: China’s Tongqi, Marriage Fraud, and Resistance" on Jan 20.

Time: Jan 20, 2021 12:30 PM Hong Kong SAR

Speaker: Prof. Eileen Yuk-ha TSANG (Assistant Professor, Department of Social and Behavioural Sciences, City University of Hong Kong)

Moderator: Prof. Susanne Yuk-ping CHOI (Professor, Department of Sociology, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Co-Director, Gender Research Centre, CUHK)

Registration: https://bit.ly/3oiqo8o

Abstract:

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 fulfil filial obligations. These women taken into this “marriage fraud” are initially unaware of their husbands’ sexual orientation. Because China’s divorce law favours men, even if the wife files 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 low-educated Tongqi and reveals how they resist and overcome their circumstances. Tongqi are the victims 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.

Bio:

Eileen Y.H Tsang’s research interests include the sociology of the middle class; sociology of gender and sexualities; gender, crime and human trafficking. Her recent books include Unlocking the Red Closet: Necropolitics, Male Sex Workers, and Tongqi (Cornell University Press, 2021); China's Commercial Sexscapes: Rethinking Intimacy, Masculinity, and Criminal Justice (University of Toronto Press 2019), The New Middle Class in China: Consumption, Politics and the Market Economy (Palgrave 2014). She has also published in British Journal of Sociology; Dialogue in Human Geography; Gender, Place, and Culture; The China Quarterly; and Psychology of Violence.