During the last decades, new treatments for men evolved, e.g., treatments for erection disfunction, men’s menopause as well as a rising industry of beauty treatments for men. While the female body traditionally is the subject of medical interventions and beauty-enhancing treatments, we now see, how the male body increasingly also is subjected to treatments and modifications, rejuvenating products, and performance enhancing substances, including an intensified medicalization of sexual practices. These transformations and reconfigurations of masculinity are closely aligned to dominant cultures of biomedicalization and neoliberalism.
This special issue aims to explore medicalized masculinity as it (re)configures in social and mediated practices and cultures, e.g., popular culture, in social media, news, and online health sites as well as health institutions, sport, and other social arenas. We invite papers asking how historical and contemporary masculinity assembles and emerges. What forms does it take in significant historical settings, and how is masculinity (re)configured when being increasingly medicalized in a 21. Century neoliberal setting? How does medicalization transform or reinstall hegemonic notions of masculinity? How does the medicalized male body assemble and emerge through material, affective, linguistic, and cultural influences, practices and intra-actions and form new notions of sexuality? How does it appear in different settings, including digital and popular culture?
We also invite papers aiming to discuss contemporary theories and analytical approaches towards tensions and potentials related to contemporary notions of masculinity. How does new configurations of masculinity emerging from both gendered and medicalized technologies enable us to conceptualize embodiment and masculinity, including discursive and non-discursive, structural, imaginaries, as well as human and nonhuman elements? How can we develop new analytical approaches in conjunction with theories of materiality, somatechnics, assemblage, affect theory, cultural studies etc.
