Reworking Identity, Reworking Heteronormativity: The Case of Tongqi in China
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Scholars have studied the mundane reproduction of heteronormativity in everyday life. What happens when heteronormativity is disrupted? We shed light on this question using data from in-depth interviews with 34 heterosexual women ( tongqi) in China who are unwittingly married to men who have sex with men (MSM). Our analysis reveals four ways in which tongqi draw upon heteronormativity to rework their identities in response to the disclosure of their husbands’ sexuality: oppositional identity work to restore an unblemished identity, relational identity work to distance oneself from other tongqi, maintenance identity work to sustain the marriage, and subversive identity work to challenge heteronormativity. The ways in which tongqi negotiates gender and sexual hierarchies in relational power dynamics show the inherent link between gender and sexuality in the maintenance of gender order. More broadly, we highlight how identity provides a crucial link between individuals’ management of the contradictions in the dominant sexual binary and the reproduction of heteronormativity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.026 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".