Men’s Health: Body, Identity and Social Context

Abstract

While most of the volume's authors who view masculinity as healthdenying claim a social-constructionist stance towards gender, they do not cast a social constructionist eye on claims about health, help-seeking, and medical efficacy made by powerful agents and agencies such as the biomedical enterprise, the neo-liberal state, and the pharmaceutical industry. [...] Galdas (p. 72) presents White's (2000) argument that "men are continually undergoing self- surveillance to assess their performance against their impressions of society's expectations of them, a performance which is threatened by the possibility of ill-health" without considering that men's collaboration in the neo-liberal approach to health- potentially as insidious a system of social control as are gender regimes1- by engaging in health-related self-surveillance might be equally problematic.