“Are men coming to the clinic now?!” Healthcare strategies for men

Abstract

This is a qualitative study from the perspective of dialectical hermeneutics on healthcare strategies for men in the view of health professionals. The authors drew on 18 semi-structured interviews addressing male sexuality, men’s healthcare, participation in prenatal care, and fatherhood. Three thematic lines were established, based on an understanding of the interviews as a whole, independently of both the specific themes mentioned above and the region. The themes provide structure for and are structured by ideas that traverse the various interviews. Themes of male sexuality associated with healthcare and fatherhood further evoke the private dimension, referred to the home’s geographic boundaries. These ideas people the cultural repertoire on maleness; the novelty lies in unlinking sexuality from sexual relations and sexual health from transmission and contagion in the interpretation of our material.