Search

In a qualitative study on masculinity, embodiment and sexuality, we interviewed men who were recreational gym-goers about their bodywork practices in Melbourne, Australia. We also asked whether the men had used performance and image-enhancing drugs (PIEDs) as an adjunct to their bodywork practices. While none had used PIEDs, all were considering, or had considered, using them. We found that participants held varying opinions on PIED use and those who used them. The literature on PIEDs noted men's concerns with body appearance and health and focused largely on individual problematic use, but non-users were not mentioned. A second issue in the literature focused on social influences on PIED use, but again with no mention of non-users. Discussion on risk reduction as a public health response did not mention non-users either. This paper, therefore, reports on non-users' thoughts on, regular exposure to, and considerations of PIEDs and other men who use them. We propose that PIEDs might more usefully be understood as an everyday, if contradictory, consideration within most men's bodywork and health practices. We argue that PIEDs constitute a discursive practice exposing a potentiality that engages non-users also and this requires new health promotion approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical Sexuality Studies is an emerging field of academic enquiry linked to an international network of advocacy agencies, activists, and political issues. This paper reports on the development of an advanced short course in sexuality theory and research, drawing on Critical Sexuality Studies and aiming directly at academics in developing countries working in sexuality issues. Over a three-year period, a new curriculum was developed by an international team. The course was piloted in two continents, refined, revised, and released globally under a Creative Commons licence in 2010 on a dedicated website. This paper documents the project and its progress to date. (Contains 5 figures and 8 notes.)

This paper explores how women think about men's bodies as objects of desire. It reports on one part of a larger qualitative study on men's bodywork practices in contemporary Australia. Drawing on material from three focus groups with 24 Australian women of varying ages, sexual orientations and backgrounds, the paper considers how women experience, understand and reflect on their desire for men and men's bodies. It also explores themes such as the connection women draw between what a man's body looks like and what it can do, how attraction is experienced, the meaning making women engage in as they think about men and men's bodies, and the broader politics of sexuality and objectification that inform their perceptions and ideas. These experiences are set against ideas in post-feminist thinking on women's sexual desire and debates on their sexual empowerment. The paper argues that these women are grappling with tensions between their personal experiences of sexual objectification and a feminist ethics relating to their active and reflexive projects of sexuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite public debate about alcohol and public violence among young people in Australia, the issue of masculinities or gender is rarely visible in alcohol policy. Instead, policy recommendations aimed at reducing violence focus on changing the availability and consumption of alcohol. Drawing on concepts from feminist and science and technology studies scholarship, this article analyses how "alcohol-related violence" is constituted as a specific policy object, and how it coheres to obscure men's contributions to and experiences of violence. Attention to the political effects of these policy practices is necessary for the development of more equitable alcohol policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we analyse interview data on how alcohol policy stakeholders in Australia, Canada and Sweden understand the relationship between men, masculinities, alcohol and violence. Using influential feminist scholarship on public policy and liberal political theory to analyse interviews with 42 alcohol policy stakeholders, we argue that while these stakeholders view men's violence as a key issue for intervention, masculinities are backgrounded in proposed responses and men positioned as unamenable to intervention. Instead, policy stakeholders prioritise generic interventions understood to protect all from the harms of men's drinking and violence without marking men for special attention. Shared across the data is a prioritisation of interventions that focus on harms recognised as relating to men's drinking but apply equally to all people and, as such, avoid naming men and masculinities as central to alcohol-related violence. We argue that this process works to background the role of masculinities in violence, leaving men unmarked and many possible targeted responses unthinkable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The certainties that characterized modern intimate life, and supported a hegemonic male sexuality defined by action and virility, are less present in contemporary men's intimate lives. In-depth interviews with ten heterosexual and gay men were conducted to explore how they organize their sexual and relational lives in contemporary Australia. Participants were committed to a 'late' modern notion of intimacy characterized by reciprocity, and placed emphasis on committed relationships where opportunities to disclose vulnerability and relinquish the burden of responsibility for sexual activity were present. However, casual sex appeared to be ordered by more conventional discourses related to male sexuality. These men reveal the importance of particular definitions of sexual intimacy to a meaningful sense of self in late modernity. Keywords: intimacy, late modernity, masculinity, men, sexuality, How do men conduct their sexual and relational lives in contemporary Australia? Certainly, their circumstances have changed. Australian women now have increased autonomy compared with earlier generations and demand equality [...]

Psychological and health science research has identified a disparate experience of body image dissatisfaction among gay men (particularly in relation to heterosexual men), and have theorised that this reflects an emphasis placed on physical appearance in gay male settings. However, these studies largely fail to reflect upon the centrality of the body in securing a visible gay identity, or upon discourses of the nature, appearance and expression of gay identity in a historical and social context. Similarly, sociologically informed work has tended to emphasise gay men's paradoxical relationship--dependant upon and desirous of--heterosexual masculinity as the foundation for this emphasis. Drawing on a concept of 'reflective embodiment,' interviews with four gay men are conducted to demonstrate how each negotiates an athletic, muscular body ideal with reference to understandings of masculinity, pride, and gay sexuality as a way of complicating these theorizations and injecting a discussion of subjectivity into this issue. Keywords: gay men, embodiment, body image, masculinity, pride, The suggestion that gay culture and gay male communities place emphasis on physical appearance and body shape is hard to dismiss if one spends any amount of time within the [...]

Analysis of alcohol policy suggests women are marked out for special attention while men and masculinities are often ignored. In this paper, we employ Carol Bacchi's work on 'gendering practices' and John Law's concept of 'collateral realities' to examine how gender is constituted in Australian alcohol policy. For Bacchi, policies actively produce what it is possible for 'men' and 'women' to become. For Law, realities are constituted through methodological instruments and representational practices. We analyze the making of three collateral realities in Australian alcohol policy: gender as an individual attribute; gender as a synonym for women; and gender as confined to the domestic sphere. These collateral realities contribute to the maintenance of binary notions of gender and reinforce a straightforwardly causal role for alcohol in harms, including violence. Attention to the political effects of these 'realities' should be prioritized in the development of more equitable responses to alcohol and harm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Alcohol‐fuelled violence' and its prevention has been the subject of recent intense policy debate in Australia, with the content of this debate informed by a surprisingly narrow range of research resources. In particular, given the well‐established relationship between masculinities and violence, the meagre attention paid to the role of gender in alcohol research and policy recommendations stands out as a critical issue. In this article, which draws on recent work in feminist science studies and science and technology studies, we focus on the treatment of gender, alcohol and violence in Australian research on 'alcohol‐related presentations' to emergency departments (EDs), analysing this type of research because of its prominence in policy debates. We focus on four types of 'gendering practice' through which research genders 'alcohol‐related presentations' to EDs: omitting gender from consideration, ignoring clearly gendered data when making gender‐neutral policy recommendations, methodologically designing out gender and addressing gender in terms of risk and vulnerability. We argue that ED research practices and their policy recommendations reproduce normative understandings of alcohol's effects and of the operations of gender in social arrangements, thereby contributing to the 'evidence base' supporting unfair policy responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This review article provides a thematic synthesis and overview of 30 years of research into the study of men and masculinity in men's magazines. Over 100 articles, book chapters, and books were reviewed to explore how scholars have approached the study of masculinity in such magazines and identify four major areas of inquiry: the commodification of masculinity; the relationship between sexism and misogyny in men's magazines and men's attitudes towards women; the vulnerability of men to, and the role of magazines in the construction of, men's body image anxieties; and the increasing sexualisation of men's bodies. The strengths and potential limitations of these four thematic approaches are identified, including an insufficiently nuanced account of the ways in which men might actually engage with images and ideas about masculinity in such magazines; an overly singular view of male sexuality that naturalises sexist and predatory behaviour; and an overemphasis on men's bodies as sites of vulnerability, risk, or crisis at the expense of more substantive considerations of the relationship between the representation of body modification practices and technologies, and men's embodied identities. The review concludes with an overview of the present field and some suggestions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Regular sexual partnerships among gay and bisexual men (GBM) who practice condomless anal intercourse (CLAI) have not been well characterised in terms of partnership type, HIV seroconcordance and risk of HIV transmission. Primarily sexual regular partnerships, although commonly reported by gay men, have largely been ignored in research and HIV prevention. Among regular partners reporting CLAI with each other, we determined factors differentiating romantic or committed relationships from partnerships organised primarily around sex ('fuckbuddies') and estimated the proportion of CLAI presenting risk for HIV transmission.Methods: An online, cross-sectional survey of Australian GBM was conducted. Univariate and multivariate generalised estimating equations were used to determine statistical associations.Results: Men reported on 2250 regular sexual partnerships. Over half the partnerships were romantic or committed relationships. Over half the partnerships were HIV-negative seroconcordant (54.9%), 3.1% were HIV-positive seroconcordant, 5.2% were serodiscordant and 36.8% were of unknown seroconcordance. Potential risks presented by CLAI were sometimes mitigated by protective factors, such as having a clear spoken agreement about sex with outside partners, having fewer outside partners, openly discussing HIV risk and having an agreement to reduce risk from outside partners. These protective factors were more often found in romantic or committed relationships than among primarily sexual partnerships, and were less often found in partnerships of unknown seroconcordance.Conclusion: CLAI is more common among regular sexual partnerships considered to be of a romantic, committed nature. However, factors associated with such romantic or committed partnerships can also protect against HIV transmission risk. Unknown seroconcordance, particularly lack of communication about HIV status among primarily sexual partnerships, is a key risk factor that needs to be addressed by HIV education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: How gay and bisexual men (GBM) establish partnership agreements may be affected by several factors, including age. The ability to communicate with a partner about sexual agreements has important sexual health implications for GBM.Objective: To assess differences in partnership agreements among GBM.Methods: We surveyed GBM about their partnerships using a national, anonymous online survey in 2013-14. We compared men who had monogamous partnerships with men who had non-monogamous partnerships, according to age and other factors.Results: Regarding the nature of their partnership with their primary regular partner (PRP), younger men were less likely to have an agreement of any sort and were less likely to have discussed it. Younger men were more likely to report having a monogamous partnership, but they were also less likely to report condomless anal intercourse with their PRP. In multivariate analysis of partnership arrangements, having a non-monogamous partnership with their PRP was associated with being older (adjusted odds ratio=1.03; 95% confidence interval=1.02-1.04; P<0.001). Nearly two-thirds (62.9%) of men with monogamous partnerships had a clear spoken agreement with their PRP about whether they could have sex with other men, largely regardless of age. Although slightly fewer than half the men with self-described open partnerships (46.0%) actually described it as a 'relationship', younger men were particularly less likely to do so.Conclusions: Due to less communication with partners about sexual agreements, when young GBM engage in sexual risk behaviour they may be at an increased risk of HIV and other sexually transmissible infections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Few studies have explored how young gay men negotiate opportunities for rethinking sexual and relationship life associated with gay sexual cultures upon coming out. Drawing on qualitative interview data with Australian gay men aged 18–30, this article explores a tension these participants described between a desire for monogamy as the basis to a committed, enduring and mature relationship on one hand, and sexual opportunities associated with ‘the gay scene’ on the other. We analyse these men's negotiation of this tension in the context of wider political shifts in the social status of gay men's relationships, encapsulated in a debate between those who see ‘homonormativity’ and those who see transformation in the contemporary relationship practices of gay men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gay men's relationships has neglected monogamy. Instead, it has tended to (a) emphasize HIV risk and relationship agreements between partners regarding sex and condom use with outside partners or (b) focus on nonmonogamous relationships as emblematic of relationship innovation. On the basis of qualitative interviews with 36 gay Australian men who favored a monogamous relationship as ideal, this article explores the meaning and practice of monogamy and its association with HIV risk. The authors present themes that include men's use of condoms in monogamous relationships, expectations of fidelity, and understandings of trust and security as the basis to meaningful and satisfying relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical Sexuality Studies is an emerging field of academic enquiry linked to an international network of advocacy agencies, activists, and political issues. This paper reports on the development of an advanced short course in sexuality theory and research, drawing on Critical Sexuality Studies and aiming directly at academics in developing countries working in sexuality issues. Over a three-year period, a new curriculum was developed by an international team. The course was piloted in two continents, refined, revised, and released globally under a Creative Commons licence in 2010 on a dedicated website. This paper documents the project and its progress to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In much psychological literature, gay men are reported as experiencing body image dissatisfaction as a result of participating in an appearance-focused subculture. Based on interviews with gay men, this paper uses discourse analysis to explore the wider media and consumer images informing gay identity in relation to contemporary political discourses underpinning gay and lesbian movements. Personal and political questions around masculinity, visibility, and the status of gay men in society more broadly informed these men's body -identity relationships, with implications for how gay men might embody their identities and be understood by the dominant psychological research on body image. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on a study on impact of prostate cancer on sexuality and mental health of gay men. Topics discussed include differences found between gay men and heterosexual men in diagnosis, treatment, care and support, implications of prostate cancer for gay men in terms of sexual recovery and mental health, and connection of findings of the study to HIV infection.

Objective: To determine if heterosexual and nonheterosexual men treated for prostate cancer differ in diagnostic and treatment outcomes and in various measures of physical health, sexual function, and well being, before and after the treatment. Methods: Four hundred sixty self-identified heterosexual and 96 self-identified nonheterosexual men completed an anonymous online survey. The men in the 2 groups were then compared using logistic regressions that controlled for differences among countries. Results: There were no significant differences in age at diagnosis for men in the 2 groups. However, Gleason scores at diagnosis were significantly lower for the nonheterosexual men (P = .02). There were no significant differences among men in the 2 groups in the proportion who receive different treatment modalities or in the incidence of urinary incontinence, who experience bone pain (as a marker of disease progression), who take antidepressants (as a proxy measure for mental health), or who experience erectile dysfunction after the treatment. However, nonheterosexual men rated the degree to which they were bothered by an inability to ejaculate significantly higher than did the heterosexual men (P = .04). Conclusion: This is the first set of findings from a survey that compares heterosexual and nonheterosexual men treated for prostate cancer. Although the groups were generally similar, nonheterosexual men might experience more intensive screening for disease, as indicated by lower Gleason scores at diagnosis. Nonheterosexual men appear more distressed by loss of ejaculation after prostatectomy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]