Leaking Bodies, Sexual Health, and Masculinity

This chapter focuses on how men treated for prostate cancer talked about and understood the side effects they were experiencing following their treatment and on how these impacted their understanding of their body, sexual health, and masculinity. The chapter zooms in on how participants’ initial responses post-treatment involved new bodily understandings and socially informed strategies to handle incontinence and sexual dysfunction. Due to impotence and the loss of ejaculatory ability, the participants re-articulated the meaning of intimacy, as well as their understanding of masculinity and themselves as ageing men. Unlike in previous research, however, such re-articulations of masculinity and sexual health took place within rather than in opposition to hegemonic notions of masculinity and as part of ongoing changes in the gender order in many Western countries, particularly in the Nordic welfare states.