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Abstract
In Conceiving Masculinity, Barnes sets out an ethnographic work from a North American perspective. Based upon her 2011 dissertation, and conceived through her own encounter with reproductive technologies, she draws from fieldwork of 24 men's experiences of infertility diagnoses and treatment.1 Barnes's central argument is that instead of emasculating, the medical and societal system empowers and reinforces gender order and masculinity. The sperm-donating industry ‘was created to protect masculinity’ (p. 151) and the ‘[c]onfining walls of the gender system’ (p. 50) were stifling medical progress and therapy. This then is a book about power and culturally pervasive notions of gender that have shaped understandings of male infertility and vice versa. Building upon the by now extensive literature of sociology of reproduction that establishes connections between male reproduction and the body, she argues that ‘science and medicine are driven by remarkably unscientific ideas about gender’ and shaped ‘by the power dynamics between men and women and between doctors and patients’ (p. 50).
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