Narco-Queer: Unmaking Toxicity and the Bonds of Abnormality

Abstract This article examines how two queer groups in urban China, specifically gay men engaged in chemsex and transgender people using long-term hormones or psychiatric medications, navigate discourses that cast chemically mediated bodies and practices as toxic, dangerous, and deviant. Drawing on 22 in-depth interviews, the article develops the concept of narco-queer to analyse intersections of chemical practices, embodied difference, regulation, and survival without treating chemsex and gender-affirming medication use as equivalent. Toxicity here denotes a socially and politically produced classification rather than an intrinsic property of participants or their practices. Participants neither simply reject biomedical knowledge nor uncritically embrace risk. Gay men negotiated erotic pleasure, vulnerability, and intimacy through situated harm-reduction strategies, while transgender participants pursued bodily autonomy and gender affirmation through selective adaptations of medical knowledge and peer support. Across both groups, participants transformed stigmatizing narratives of toxicity into resources for self-determination, mutual care, and relational belonging. The political force of these practices lies not in toxicity itself, but in participants’ reappropriation of the conditions under which their bodies and chemical practices are rendered toxic. Narco-queer contributes to queer criminology and critical drug studies by reframing chemically mediated queer life as a contested terrain of alternative world-making.