Medicalized Masculinities

Synopsis

As in most social science research, gender in medicalisation scholarship translates as females. Moreover, most work on men, health and medicine depicts men in medicalised terms by deeming masculinity intrinsically damaging to men's health. In short, the male body in the study of gender, health, and medicalization largely has been ignored. Medicalized Masculinities considers what these scholarly traditions have missed by presenting cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine.The introduction traces sociological work on medicalisation, masculinities, and the body to uncover why these strains of research have never connected and to suggest that this may explain sociology's failure to recognise that medicalisation applies to both genders. Subsequent chapters document the medicalisation of: male sexuality through new sexual technologies, male sexual fluids through forensics, masculine behaviours in therapy sessions and in diagnoses of ADHD, and black masculinity through race science.