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

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