1,721,062 research outputs found
Le fragilità del sesso forte. Come medicalizzare la sessualità maschile
No full textLa storia recente è stata segnata da cambiamenti radicali nei modi di vivere la sessualità. Soprattutto se la si guarda dal punto di vista delle donne. Per contro, la sessualità maschile, soprattutto quella banale, quotidiana, del marito e padre di famiglia, è rimasta un universo ampiamente inesplorato, oscurato dall’apparire biologicamente determinato e quindi ovvio, invariabile, astorico. Lo scenario sembra cambiato con l’avvento della pillola blu, che ha fatto parlare di una “rivoluzione sessuale” al maschile, guidata dai saperi medici. Il volume esplora diversi ambiti (impotenza, fertilità, invecchiamento, intersessualità) in cui, nell’era del Viagra, trovano spazio discorsi ed esperienze di medicalizzazione del sesso forte. Ne emerge una tensione tra nuove possibilità di riconoscimento della variabilità e delle fragilità della sessualità maschile, e forme di riproduzione di una visione degli uomini come sex machines
Italians (should) do it better? Medicalisation and the disempowering of intimacy
Full text linkRecent years have witnessed new processes of visibilisation of adult heterosexual men’s sexuality in the public arena in Italy, culminating in discussions on sexual scandals. The authors explore here one of these processes: the current mediatisation of a medicalised male sexuality, which appears as a more socially legitimate and scientifically grounded new discourse on masculinity. By analysing recent social campaigns on male sexual health, it will be shown how, far from opening spaces for a de-naturalisation of male sexuality and masculinity, this form of visibility through medicalisation actually works by re-naturalising male sexuality, and thereby restoring virility, through reference to highly gendered
respectability and predatory sexual scripts and the disempowering of intimacy as a new sexual script promoting a situational and more symmetric understanding of gender
Tra uomini: indagare l’omosocialità per orientarsi nelle trasformazioni del maschile
Full text linkThis contribution has a double aim: to state the relevance of male homosociality as a research object, and to illustrate the heuristic fruitfulness of looking at the situational specificities of homosocial interactions, as suggested by our research experiences. A review of research on male homosociality shows a move from viewing it as a context of reproduction of hegemonic masculinity to more contextualised understandings of its workings, also making room for the production of hybrid or inclusive masculinities. Based on our use of focus groups in two research projects on sexuality and fatherhood, we show the potential of this technique for detecting the doings of homosociality. We illustrate different uses of irony and coalition building among men, both reproducing and challenging the naturalization of gender hierarchies, and argue for the need of an intersectional approach to fully understand the situational conditions fostering persistence and change in masculinity
Medicalized Virilism under Scrutiny: expert knowledge on male sexual health in Italy
No full textThe “Viagra phenomenon” is the most visible, and most studied, expression of a broader global process of medicalization of male sexuality. Associating male health with self-control and the expression of sexual potency, this process is giving shape to a new public discourse on masculinity, taking the form of a medicalized virilism: legitimized by scientific bases, it restores the foundations of a naturalized notion of man and his sexuality.
Medical discourses have a crucial part in this process, setting male sexual health as a new public issue, and thereby constructing both the masculinity to be fixed and the new forms of medical expertise legitimized to treat it. By analyzing documentary material and interviews with medical experts in Italy, this article shows, however, that medical discourses are far from being just a cog in the medicalization machine. Medical discourses work at transmitting cultural scripts which reinforce normatively gendered expressions of sex focused on a phallocentric coital imperative and on a naturalized notion of male sexual desire, assumed as always present and unproblematic. Nevertheless, they also include elements of ambivalence, tension and problematization: an indication that the medicalization process, and the interpretive frames that it implies, are an object of possible redefinition not only by end-users – patients – but also by those actors, experts in the male sexual-health field, who are supposed to be the means of propagating and legitimizing it. By focussing on the plurality of accounts experts give for their clinical experience, we discuss which forms negotiations or challenges of medicalized frames take from within the medical field
Medicalizing male underperformance: expert discourses on male sexual health in Italy
No full textThe “Viagra phenomenon” is the most visible expression of a global process of construction of masculinity through medicalized practices, led by an alliance of specialized physicians’ expert discourses and multinational pharmaceutical companies’ marketing strategies. In Italy, since direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs is not allowed, insistent awareness campaigns have been promoted, reproducing a cultural script in which sex is recast as a core element of a healthy lifestyle: these campaigns depict male underperformances as an emerging social epidemic and invite all men to self-monitor their sexual health, living up to medically defined standards, and to ask for medical advice if they feel inadequate.
The analysis of documentary material and in-depth interviews with medical experts shows how medical discourses, setting male sexual health as a new public issue, construct both the masculinity to be fixed and the new forms of medical expertise legitimized to treat it. Treatments for male sexual dysfunctions work at transmitting cultural scripts which reinforce normatively gendered expressions of sex. However, some interviewees step aside the hegemonic narrative and criticize what they consider an improper and risky overuse of quick-fix diagnostic and therapeutic solutions, bringing psychological, relational and socio-contextual dimensions back into the picture
Beyond the Client: Exploring Men's Sexual Scripting
Full text linkSexual scripting theory, with its de-essentialising potential, is a powerful weapon in dismantling simplistic, classificatory, and derogatory understandings of men as clients of commercial sex, allowing us to explore how making sense of paying for sex is an everyday accomplishment for men in the scripting of heterosexual masculinity.
Drawing upon middle-aged and elderly Italian men’s accounts of their heterosexual sexual biographies, we point to directions along which the potential of scripting theory can further unfold in research on purchasing sex, by considering scripting as a situational, biographical and boundary-drawing process
Maschilità (dis)abilitate? (Ri)fare il genere attraverso disabilità e sport
No full textIn this article we aim to investigate how sport represents an area of practices that allows (re)building a masculinity considered socially adequate within biographies crossed by the turning point of an onset physical impairment. Making use of the approach of illness narratives, we analyze the life stories of three men who encountered severe physical accidents during adolescence. In this way, we try to outline some strategies of management of the so-called "dilemma of the disabled masculinity" (Shuttleworth et al 2012), showing how the manhood acts adopted by our participants are placed between the neutralization of the disabling impact of impairments and the attempt to enhance some aspects of their physical and emotional experiences that partially hybridize the dominant masculinity patterns
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