While working on the previous study about how gay men in China come out, I learned about the existence of gay men’s wife. Around 13.6 million heterosexual women in China are married to gay or bisexual men, and they call themselves tongqi 同妻. Tongqi belong to both co-cultural groups (as women and wives) and a dominant group (as heterosexuals).

Through a narrative analysis of 51 stories told by tongqi, this study examines how tongqi make sense of their husbands’ communication behaviors and the co-cultural strategies tongqi use.

The study identifies two novel co-cultural strategies: self-blaming and enduring. Self-blaming means that co-cultural group members blame themselves for their situations. Enduring (or ren) refers to the practice of putting up with the oppression from the dominant group without protest for an extended period of time.

It also examines how tongqi narratively construct their husbands’ co-cultural strategies and finds that tongqi often internalize the ideologies (of gender, sexual orientation, marriage, and family) in their sensemaking process and in their communicative responses to their husbands.

Tang, L., Meadows, C.Z., & Li, H. (2020). How gay men’s wives in China practice co-cultural communication: Culture, identity, and sensemaking. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 13(1), 13-31. doi: 10.1080/17513057.2019.1569252 [Full article]