Time and Collective Biology: Relationships Between Individual and Societal Life Course Ideologies in Mexican Men’s Sexual Health Treatment

People may seek to embody cultural ideals of the life course through their use or rejection medical interventions, including but not limited anti-aging treatments. Here, I analyze this phenomenon via interviews with men engaging two different forms sexual health medicine in urban Mexico: erectile-dysfunction treatment and testing for sexually transmitted infections (STIs). argue that, contrast biomedical understanding patients as individuals who change during lives, my interlocutors understood themselves components broader “collective biologies” that on a longer timeline. These are culturally-defined groups people understand be comprised interrelated members whose behaviors concretely affect group’s physical social well-being over time. In both arenas discussed here, used rejected interventions response local narratives about nature Mexican population collective biology, ideas how it should time away from its roots colonial past. They characterized predispositions machismo disinterest preventative care embodied inheritances reject order achieve health-promoting modernity future. My analysis describes these sought live out desirably modern race gender decisions way they hoped would contribute positive, body findings show despite assumptions individualism generally naturalized biomedicine, make an effort aid population-level timescales.