Coping Strategies and the Emotionology of Masculinity

This chapter builds on data gathered through focus group interviews with men treated for prostate cancer. The aim of the chapter is, firstly, to analyse how group participants talk about and handle common side effects following treatment. Secondly, we investigate how the participants’ feelings about their disease affect or interfere with their understanding of masculinity. The chapter illustrates how participants partly broke from historical expectations of men as emotionally inexpressive. Instead, they talked openly about incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and other personal issues within the groups. At the same time, these discussions can be positioned within certain discursive coping strategies. Using jokes and intellectualisation, combined with a problematisation and partial redefinition of gender and masculinity, most of the men adapted to their new life situation. We argue that men’s ways of talking about and handling their emotions following prostate cancer can be situated in the interface between discursive and gendered emotion ideologies, and lived experiences and expectations of masculinity in daily intimate life.