Men’s Everyday Health Care: Practices, Tensions and Paradoxes, and Masculinities in Denmark

Abstract

ABSTRACTMy interest is in how masculinities are enacted and implicated in different care repertoires. Drawing on Mol’s notion of “logic of care,” I illustrate that in Denmark some men’s care practices are an integral part of their life projects, and so they target both the human body, and sociality and relationality, as everyday care. In this way, men enact, embody, and weave together a self- and other-directed “caring masculinity” with practices of autonomy, self-discipline, and the aestheticization of male bodies. Contesting and enriching familiar framings of men’s health care and masculinities, I draw attention to the value of considering practices of health care beyond individualized experiences, and of acknowledging the complex patterns of masculinity in health and illness.