Arch Sex Behav (2008) 37:354–355 DOI 10.1007/s10508-007-9299-4

BOOK REVIEW

Medicalized Masculinities Edited by Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher A. Faircloth. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006, 263 pp., $24.95. Emily Wentzell

Published online: 7 February 2008 Ó Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2008

While the medicalization of masculinity has become increasingly apparent in daily life, as in the recent flood of spam e-mails selling male sexual enhancement, this phenomenon has been largely ignored in academic investigations of gendered health and medicalization. This volume is thus a timely and much-needed collection that uses the perspective of qualitative sociology to investigate eight key U.S. sites in which medical ways of thinking are increasingly brought to bear on manliness: Viagra use, Cialis and Levitra marketing, forensic analysis of semen, andropause and balding, medical anatomy texts, ADHD, black masculinity, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder therapy. The introduction to the volume, written by the editors, makes a particularly useful foray into this field by examining why social scientific studies of medicalization, masculinity, and the sociology of the body have generally excluded medicalized masculinity as an object of study. In a clear and lucid style, Faircloth and Rosenfeld provide overviews of these fields and demonstrate how omission of medicalized masculinity is a result of disciplinary correlation between studies of medicalized femininity with gendered medicalization as a whole, focus on the medical control of underrepresented groups that excluded men as a category of analysis, an understanding of masculinity as a health risk that precluded study of medicine’s pathologization of men, and a general lack of intersection between Foucauldian investigation of the surveillance and discipline of bodies and embodiment in everyday life. This introduction is also an excellent resource that brings together

E. Wentzell (&) Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1107, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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the small but important body of work that does exist on medicalized masculinity, mostly concerning sexual dysfunction and heart disease. The chapters are generally as clear and accessible as the introduction. The contributors use a variety of methods, from ethnography to content analysis, to investigate particular instances of medicalized masculinity in the U.S. context. The strongest chapters in this collection both compellingly demonstrate the linkages between changing notions of masculinity and new medical possibility or mediation, and ground these changes in social and historical context. For instance, Hart et al. painstakingly analyze all the available statistics on child ADHD medication use to demonstrate that, as opposed to the conventional wisdom that poor, urban boys are most subject to medicalization of hyperactive behavior, the disorder is most highly treated in boys in affluent communities where children score higher than average on national standardized tests. Hart et al. ground this analysis in a discussion of changing gender roles and parenting tactics, arguing that Ritalin is a drug for gendered child socialization in social contexts where parents seek high child achievement, in part through medical techniques of child socialization. In another particularly strong chapter, Smith uses ethnographic data from research in Post-Tramautic Stress Disorder therapy groups in a V.A. hospital to demonstrate the use of refashioned masculinity as a therapeutic tool. Understanding masculinity as a social process that can be brought to bear in mental health treatment, Smith shows that therapy leaders encourage self-conscious adoption of new ideals of masculinity, based in various contexts on military, religious, and scientific discourses, that facilitate particular stages of therapeutic treatment. Smith deftly reveals the ways that masculinities function as medical tools as well as objects of medicalization. Other chapters, as early forays into the study of medicalized masculinities, make important but more partial contributions to

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the field. For instance, Moore and Durkin provide a fascinating description of the ways forensic analysis reduces masculinity to semen, which they argue comes to stand in for both men’s and women’s legal testimony. However, they ground this compelling thesis in a long and somewhat digressive history of forensic science, which leaves them without space to explore more fully the social consequences of semen analysis supplanting testimony as proof of sexualized crime. Similarly, Hickey uses the example of the Tuskegee syphilis experiment to illustrate the key point that medicalization, race, sexuality, and masculinity intersect to shape black men’s embodied experience. While Hickey’s call to account for race in studies of gendered medicalization is an important one, it would be strengthened by a clearer discussion of the ways racialized medicalization of masculinity is at work today. When read as a whole, this generally excellent volume suffers from two main weaknesses. First, many chapters contain literature reviews of medicalization scholarship; while these discussions may be useful to those reading only one or two chapters, readers of the entire work will find them repetitive, particularly as this topic is thoroughly covered in the introduction. Second, and more importantly, the volume fails to ground itself in place, lacking an explicit discussion of the American context of the phenomena discussed. While each

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chapter deals with American men, the volume is framed as a general discussion of medicalized masculinities, problematically making an implicit, and certainly unintentional, claim to generality. While some chapters deal with this issue, the volume as a whole misses the chance to discuss the ways the cultural specifics of American men and medicine, as well as the divisions within these broad categories, influence masculinity and medicalization. Further, the volume omits references to medicalized masculinity in non-Western contexts (e.g., the large body of work on medical interventions into gendered sex practices geared toward HIV/AIDS prevention), while this would not be a concern for a book explicitly concerned with American masculinities, it is a significant oversight for a general work on the topic. When understood as a volume focused on the U.S., however, this volume is an excellent collection that will be required reading for scholars interested in gender and health. Its clear and lively writing, the wealth of background information in the introduction, and its contributors’ compelling identification and analysis of key sites for the medicalization of masculinity in America today make it a pivotal addition to the fields of medicalization and gender research. Its accessibility and topicality will also make it an excellent teaching resource.

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