Medicalized Masculinities

A funny thing happened on the way to theorizing medicalization: men’s bodies were ignored. This seems a startling statement, given the sheer number of articles and books written on the medicalization of—well, everything, it would appear. But with the exception of a few scattered but important pieces (see Ehrenreich 1983; Tiefer 1994; Potts 2000; Riska 2002, 2004; Mumford 1997), most of which are very recent, medicalization research has focused on genderless or female bodies. In medicalization research, as in most social-scientific research, gender seems to mean womanhood. This is not to say that the male body is absent in social scientific research. It is clearly present in work on the body and in masculinity studies, both relatively recent strains of research, but neither of which considers male bodies as having been medicalized. It is also present in work on men and health, which often actively applies medical reasoning to male health, pathologizing masculinity as a health risk rather than commenting on its medicalization. Are we to assume that, of all the things that have been medicalized (from sexuality to reproduction to emotions to deviance to the family and caregiving to aging to race to femininity), masculinity has somehow managed to elude medical definition and regulation? And if it hasn’t, how do we account for this gap in