How gay men’s wives in China practice co-cultural communication: Culture, identity, and sensemaking

ABSTRACT

Around 13.6 million heterosexual women in China are married to gay or bisexual men, and they call themselves tongqi. 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 the co-cultural strategies tongqi use, and identifies two novel co-cultural strategies: self-blaming and enduring. 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Gay man’s wife
• tongqi
• China
• narrative analysis
• co-cultural theory

Acknowledgement

We would like to thank Dr. Ronald Becker at Miami University of Ohio and two anonymous reviewers for reading earlier drafts of this paper and providing insightful comments.

Notes on contributors

Lu Tang is an Associate Professor of Health Communication at the Department of Communication, Texas A&M University. She conducts research on culture and health communication.

Cui Meadows is an Assistant Professor of public relations in the School of Communication at East Carolina University. Her research interests are crisis communication, health communication, and social media.

Hongmei Li is an associate professor of strategic communication at Miami University of Ohio. Her research interests include advertising and consumer culture, nation branding, global communication, gender and sexuality, and new technologies.

Notes

1 Tongqi can be used both as singular and plural nouns.

2 CES-D is a scale used for the screening of clinical depression first published in Radloff (1977). Usually, individuals scoring more than 16 points are considered having high depressive symptoms.

3 According to Zhang et al. (2014), more than 70% of the women in the sample were never tested. So, the rate of HIV/AIDS positive cases could be much higher.

4 It is possible that shorter stories also contain information about tongqi's sensemaking process and co-cultural strategies, yet such information is most likely to be present in longer stories included in our analysis.