MEDICALIZED MASCULINITIES

Abstract

While studies of masculinities often trace processes of either medicalization or mediatization, few interrogate masculinities at their very intersection. Doing so is the main contribution of this panel, which brings together cases that illustrate the effects these large-scale changes in digital and medical technologies have on masculinities today. Theoretically, the panel is based on the notion that society and everyday life are increasingly intertwined with and enrolled in both the logics of the health and pharmaceutical industry and in communication technology and media. Femininities have long been the subjects for the (bio)medicalizing, and conversely, up until the release of Viagra, privileged or hegemonic masculinities were left seemingly unaffected. At the same time, to understand masculinity today we must also consider how media technologies take part in the negotiation, practice, and affect of masculinities. To do so the panel presents four cases of mediatized and medicalized masculinities: Mie Birk Jensen uses analyze thousands of spam emails for their affective and normative production of virile masculinity; Tobias Raun and Michael Nebeling Petersen use ethnographic archive analysis of Youtube communities to understand peer learning and monetization of hair-loss products; and Kristian Møller uses participant observation to capture the sexual intensification in an online gay drug scene.