China’s ‘Money Boys’ and HIV for the Greater Good: The Queer Body and Necropolitics |Biomedgrid

The struggles of China's money boys-who are men who sell sex to other men-illustrate how the multi-layered stigma they experience acts as a form of necropolitical power and an instrument of the state's biological citizenship. One unintended side effect of this state power in China is the subsequent reluctance by medical professionals to care for gay men who are living with HIV. Data elicited from self-described money boys and physicians who specialize in the treatment of HIV provides evidence that the necro power of stigma is routinely exercised upon the bodies of gay sex workers. Through the exercise and imposition of state sanctioned stigma, China's health system excludes gay sex workers through biopolitical surveillance measures as part of a wider necropolitical project that creates death instead of promoting the conditions that might preserve life. Public health priorities demand that the cultured scripts of gendered Chinese citizenship must reevaluate the marking of the body of the money boy as a non-entity, a non-human and a living ‘dead body.