New Perspectives on the Maturing Field of Men’s Health: Introduction to a Special Conference Issue (original) (raw)
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The Case for Retaining a Focus on “Masculinities” in Men’s Health Research
International Journal of Men's Health, 2016
Within the health research literature there is increasing attention focussed on how the concept of “masculinities” can be employed to understand health and illness and used to inform health care practice and policy. At the same time, valuable critiques of masculinities frameworks have emphasised that there is often, within the published literature, a lack of rigour in defining and using these ideas, a tendency towards rigid and essentialist notions about men and gender but also recognition that some approaches specify masculinities as the “cause” of poor health outcomes for men, women and children. We consider and respond to these important questions and, using examples from empirical studies, make the case that it is important to advance the use of masculinities in men’s health research both as a means to describing the challenges to men’s health and the strengths men draw upon to promote their health and remedy illness. We argue, first, that masculinities be operationalised as “co...
The Politics of Men's Health: Contested Masculinities and Strategies of Change
In recent years the media in Australia has discovered men. Particularly, in the past five years or so, ‘men’s issues’ have become popular topics for television, newspapers and the ‘lifestyle magazine’. One of the key concerns of this new focus on men has been men’s health. Men’s health is presented in television specials, it is the stuff of tabloid articles, an emerging focus of community health services and government policy development, university courses and very recently, the ‘lifestyle magazine’, with the release of the Murdoch corporation’s Men’s Health in September 1997.
Journal of Men's Health, 2011
Gender, the complex of social relations and practices attached to biological sex, is one of the most important socio-cultural factors influencing health and health-related behavior. Although a large body of health research suggests that men with similar social disadvantages as women experience poorer health outcomes in relation to disability, chronic illness, injury rates and mortality, men's health is rarely deconstructed through the lens of gender. The purpose of this article is to increase understanding of the ways in which masculinities intersect with other social determinants of health creating health disparities among men, and to provide direction for masculine affirming health interventions aimed specifically at men. With the goal of promoting the health of men and decreasing health disparities, the authors have developed, within the Canadian context, an innovative theoretical framework for men's health, Health, Illness, Men and Masculinities (HIMM), based on the influence of masculinity throughout the lifecourse. We discuss three main phases of men's lifecourse showing how masculinity intersects with other social determinants of health differently during youth, middle-age and the older years. The HIMM Framework points to the need for research and theory development that moves us beyond a limited focus on any one individual man to consider men's health and illness practices in the larger social context within which masculinity is defined and produced. It can thus advance men's health research and theory development, and provide direction for policy, education, health care delivery and health promotion initiatives aimed specifically at men in many locales, contexts and countries.
An intersectional approach to Men's Health
Journal of Men's Health, 2012
Men's lives and health are rooted in opportunity structures that are shaped by race, ethnicity and other characteristics that have important social, political, economic and cultural meaning. Within men's health, there is a need to consider how structural factors and men's socially-defined characteristics affect the relationship between sex, gender and health. The goal of an intersectional approach is to simultaneously examine the social and health effects of several key aspects of identity and context in ways that create a new understanding of these factors and that are a more accurate reflection of the lived experiences of the populations of interest. Despite their promise, intersectional approaches have been criticized for being difficult to operationalize and study systematically. This paper, however, presents a framework for studying the intersection of gender and other identities and characteristics that are relevant for men's health, and explicitly identifies key pathways and stratification variables to guide future research. This framework highlights pathways and ways to think about why race, gender, age and ethnicity affect men's health, and offers a tool for studying the relationship between socially-defined characteristics and men's health. Future research on men's health should begin by recognizing that comparing how men experience and embody masculinities may be most useful when researchers are explicit about their assumptions and theories about what and how socially-defined characteristics intersect with gender in a given national and local context. Research employing an intersectional approach also may elucidate how men of specific population groups create new normative masculinities for themselves.