IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v59y2004i6p1169-1175.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Masculinity, infertility, stigma and media reports

Author

Listed:
  • Gannon, Kenneth
  • Glover, Lesley
  • Abel, Paul

Abstract

There is growing concern about the health of men in the developed West. Compared with women they have higher rates of morbidity and mortality and are less likely to seek out and employ medical services. Several authors have drawn on social constructionist models, such as the concept of hegemonic masculinity, to account for these gender differences in risk and behaviour. One might anticipate that certain conditions, such as male infertility, would be perceived as posing a particular threat to conventional views of masculinity. There is some support for this, although there is little research into the social construction of male infertility. In this study Discourse Analysis was employed to analyse newspaper accounts of a reported decline in sperm counts in order to study the way in which infertility and masculinity were represented and constructed in the media. The results indicate a construction of fertility as being in crisis and of male infertility as conflated with impotence. Men were positioned as vulnerable and threatened by forces outside their control. The accounts drew on a range of stereotypically masculine reference points, such as warfare and mechanical analogies. These results are consistent with concepts of hegemonic masculinity and suggest that men are offered a highly restricted set of options in terms of perceiving and representing their bodies and their health.

Suggested Citation

  • Gannon, Kenneth & Glover, Lesley & Abel, Paul, 2004. "Masculinity, infertility, stigma and media reports," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 59(6), pages 1169-1175, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:59:y:2004:i:6:p:1169-1175
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(04)00019-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Gough, Brendan, 2006. "Try to be healthy, but don't forgo your masculinity: Deconstructing men's health discourse in the media," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 63(9), pages 2476-2488, November.
    2. Esmée Hanna & Brendan Gough, 2020. "The impact of infertility on men's work and finances: Findings from a qualitative questionnaire study," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 27(4), pages 581-591, July.
    3. Esmée Hanna & Brendan Gough, 2015. "Experiencing Male Infertility," SAGE Open, , vol. 5(4), pages 21582440156, October.
    4. Lucia Cervi & David Knights, 2022. "Organizing male infertility: Masculinities and fertility treatment," Gender, Work and Organization, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 29(4), pages 1113-1131, July.
    5. Bornstein, Marta & Gipson, Jessica D. & Failing, Gates & Banda, Venson & Norris, Alison, 2020. "Individual and community-level impact of infertility-related stigma in Malawi," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 251(C).
    6. Liu, Xuekun & Luo, Zhengpeng, 2024. "Communicating male sexual dysfunction: The medicalization and psychologization of sexual experiences in Chinese online medical consultations," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 350(C).

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:59:y:2004:i:6:p:1169-1175. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.