Medicalized Masculinities

Abstract

Now bolstered by a barrage of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements on American television, the framing of personal troubles as medical problems is one of contemporary society's most salient trends. Typified by the sky-rocketing rate of ADHD diagnoses in school children, the transformation of depressed people into a multi-billion dollar market, the proliferation of drugs for hair loss, sexual dysfunction, heartburn and so on, and the perceived increases in ‘awareness’ that people claim to have about medical problems, ‘medicalization’ continues to gain momentum. As medicalisation has become more ingrained in public consciousness, it is important that intellectuals help the public realise that what are today considered to be medical problems are often products of history, marketing and the dominance of pharmacology. Edited by Dana Rosenfeld, of Royal Holloway College and Christopher A. Faircloth, of the University of Florida, this book is a meaningful contribution to medicalisation theory. With a specific focus on how masculine physiology and behavior have become construed as medical problems, the volume is a much needed and, more importantly, readable eight-chapter anthology with an excellent introduction. A variety of medical issues pertaining to men are addressed in its contents, including, but not limited to: erectile dysfunction, baldness, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Each of the eight essays is well written and well edited, which should prove useful when assigning this text to students. Rosenfeld and Faircloth set an important tone for this volume in their introduction which clearly illustrates how far men have been neglected in the academic literature on medicalisation. As the authors state, ‘a funny thing happened on the way to theorizing medicalization: men's bodies were ignored’ (p. 1). Indeed, medicalisation studies have discussed various phenomena, including poverty, warfare, death, homelessness, female body image, drug addiction and pregnancy among other topics, but masculinity has never been a part of this academic discourse.