The Invisible Illness and the Invisible “Other”: How Men Manage Contested Illness

• In Event: Gender, Sexuality, and Health

Abstract

Chronic, contested illnesses highlight how illness experiences are socially negotiated and shaped by stigma, recognition, and institutional responses. This is even more nuanced for men, as vulnerability and perceptions of weakness are fundamentally at odds with masculine norms. This work, a chapter from my forthcoming dissertation, examines how men living with migraine and long COVID navigate illness within a gender order structured by hegemonic masculinity and perpetuated by stigma. Extending Connell’s (2005) theorization of hegemonic masculinity and Goffman’s (1963) work on stigma, I draw on my analysis of 51 semi-structured interviews to argue that men’s illness experiences are deeply social processes through which masculinity is performed, contested, and policed. This dynamic is sustained through continual comparison to an imagined hegemonic “Other”: a healthy, productive, emotionally restrained man against whom participants measure themselves and anticipate judgment and disappointment from. Findings indicate that men cope with the specter of what I term the “Hegemonic Other” in three key ways: 1) controlling one’s symptoms; 2) minimizing illness; and 3) drawing symbolic boundaries such those between the self/others and sick/well. Each of these three strategies is tied to hegemonic norms of masculinity (rationality, protection, invulnerability), which work in tandem to uphold societal gendered power structures. I conclude with the material consequences that this extension of Connell’s theory of “hegemonic masculinity” and Goffman’s original conception of “stigma” have in the lives of my participants. In doing so, I argue that men continue to reproduce gendered ideals that position “less masculine” experiences or behaviors as inferior, leaving little room for masculinity to be decoupled from patriarchal power.

Author

• Kate Jennie Freeman, Case Western Reserve University