Journal of Bodies, Sexualities, and Masculinities

There is often a suggestion—or direct accusation—that academic work is somewhat removed from the goings-on of what is labeled “the real world.” These charges can come from a variety of places, and there is plenty of fertile ground for such criticisms. One needs only to think of the many many hoax articles to try and demonstrate the silliness of scholarship, or the convoluted nonsense jargon of academic writing. This critique is also leveled from the position that scholarship deals with topics so minute as to be truly inconsequential in the lives of people—sometimes even when those people are the ones being discussed in the research itself.

The image is of a locker in a changing room. Men, bodies and changing rooms have historically been associated with sports, homosociality and homophobia. In such instances, the locker room has become a space where men learn how to be men where the talk and innuendo of the sexual degradation of women becomes a form of bonding, of men being men. Chow (2021) suggests that the locker room is more than just a place for the reinforcement of misogyny and homophobia. It's a space of watching and being watched, of glances, a place of visual touching. It's a place where there's an uneasy friction embedded in practices that are openly hidden.

This article uses a feminist lens to critique and repurpose the concept of homohysteria. Eric Anderson (2005) created the term homohysteria to explain seismic changes in social behavior of men, particularly noting how a society's relationship with homosexuality will explain sanctions enacted on men's behavior. I argue that while Anderson and his adherents developed a novel concept to discuss shifts in male behavior, the all-encompassing nature of a macro-concept, applies too broad a stroke in terms of explaining modifications in relations with manhood. Instead of dismissing the theory, I assert Anderson's original scope was limited, and that homohysteria is best understood at a meso-level of implementation and change. Further, I argue the concept of effeminophobia must be central to homohysteria, given the fear of the effeminate in a masculine form (Allan 2018). This research is pivotal in demonstrating wider use for Anderson's concept by expanding its relevance.

Masculinities play a key role in how men experience and interact with the world. The majority of literature, however, explores masculinities from the perspective of straight cisgender men. This study uses qualitative methods to answer the phenomenological question of how gay men understand and experience masculinity. Participants generally described their experiences with masculinities as gay men as more flexible than normative. There were, however, notable exceptions, particularly in the context of sexual relationships where participants described preferences for normatively masculine men and the association of sexual role preference with masculinity or femininity. Additionally, some men—particularly men of color and transgender men—described experiencing stricter expectations of normative masculinity than their white cisgender counterparts. These findings indicate that gay men perform masculinities differently based on social context and highlight potential racial and gender identity discrepancies.

In this article, I contribute to the scholarship that engages with the complexity of social factors in HIV/AIDS healthcare delivery. I draw attention to elements of care that occur on the margins of what is required by biomedical treatment regimens. I demonstrate how the contexts in which HIV healthcare is delivered can be expanded by being mindful of the history of the epidemic and its impact on gay communities. Drawing on ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with patients and healthcare professionals in an HIV clinic, I center history crucial for survivors of the epidemic. I propose this as a strategy for building an inclusive approach to understanding HIV healthcare, which regards an integral history as a resource in care delivery practices.

This study aims to examine how healthcare professionals (HCPs) understand the impact prostate cancer treatment can have on patients’ sense of masculinity, sexuality, and intimate life, and how they describe such issues are communicated with patients. Theoretically, HCP narratives are interpreted as part of a reflective process in which notions of hegemonic masculinity are communicated, and sometimes rethought and redefined, within the rehabilitation process. The study showed that HCPs sometimes felt unqualified to deal with issues concerning masculinity and sexuality as such topics were understood to be partially outside the medical domain of their professions. Nonetheless, HCPs engaged in such conversations with patients and described how they tried to support them in reorientating their sense of masculinity. The article concludes that, whereas HCPs tended to describe their patients’ responses to rehabilitation from an embodied and psychological perspective, their own professional and personal views on masculinity usually departed from a sociocultural level (focusing on what it means to be a man in contemporary Swedish society, suggesting that penetrative sex is overrated), where ongoing configurations of hegemonic masculinity were more evident.

In late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century America, doctors, scientists, and social commentators amplified concerns that white men were going bald at an alarming rate. Theories of baldness in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era created and relied on racial distinctions. This article examines the role of baldness and perceptions of baldness in the construction of racial categories during the turn of the twentieth century in the United States. Theories of baldness centered on racial claims-making; doctors and scientists described different racial groups as unevenly susceptible to alopecia (biological hair loss), and they referred to mechanisms of hair loss as resulting from race-specific qualities. The language of baldness, and efforts to understand the condition's causes and cures, used racial contrasts and racial logic. In this way, baldness became part of the schema through which race was discussed and understood.

Slavery's bloodstained gates simultaneously, and paradoxically, birthed a heritage of white hegemonic masculinity as well as the Afro-Caribbean man's longing for retribution for Empire's acute psychological emasculation. A subsequent emergent counter-hegemonic masculine figure claimed a heroism that was instrumental in creating an imperative of resistance. Many urban black men of the lower socioeconomic stratum utilized a hypermasculinity of sorts to assert this resistance. Humor became his coping technique as he grappled with the tensions, contentions, and collisions of colonial and postcolonial life. This article explores the interconnectedness of heritage, hegemony, hypermasculinity, and humor in shaping identities among representations of Empire-resistant Afro-Caribbean masculinities in V.S. Naipaul's Miguel Street. The overarching aim is to underscore Naipaul's implied androcentric philosophy regarding bodies, sexualities, and masculinities that plagued lower strata Afro-Caribbean men then and, quite possibly, today.

Michiel Baas, Muscular India: Masculinity, Mobility and the New Middle Class (Chennai: Context, 2020), 313 pp. ISBN: 9789389648218. Hardback, $19.79.