Prostate Cancer and the Emotionology of Masculinity: Joking, Intellectualization, and the Reconstruction of Gender

Abstract

This article builds on data gathered through focus group interviews with Swedish men treated for prostate cancer. First, we aim to analyse how the participants talk about and handle sensitive issues and common side effects. Second, we investigate how the participants’ feelings about their disease affect or interfere with their understanding of masculinity. The findings illustrate how participants partly break with historical expectations of men as emotionally inexpressive. Instead, in the groups they talk openly about incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and other sensitive issues. At the same time, these discussions can be positioned within certain discursive coping strategies. Using jokes and intellectualizing their health narratives, combined with a problematization and partial redefinition of gender and masculinity, most of the men adapt to their new life situation. The men’s ways of handling their emotions can be situated in the interface between discursive and gendered emotion ideologies, and lived experiences of masculinity.