Virile Infertile Men, and Other Representations of In/Fertile Hegemonic Masculinity in Fiction Television Series
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Virile Infertile Men, and Other Representations of In/Fertile Hegemonic Masculinity in Fiction Television Series Marjolein Lotte de Boer 1 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
Fiction television series are one of the few cultural expressions in which men’s infertility experiences are represented. Through a content analysis of twenty fiction series, this article describes and analyzes such representations. By drawing on Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity and Ricoeur’s understanding of paradoxical power structuring, four character types of infertile men are identified: (1) the virile in/fertile man, (2) the secretly non-/vasectomized man, (3) the intellectual eunuch, (4) the enslaving postapocalyptic man. While these various dramatis persona outline different ways of how infertile men relate to normative hegemonic masculinity, they all represent infertile men as diverging from shared masculine norms. This non-normativity initially excludes many represented men from hegemonic positions. Eventually, however, these men generally aspire to and succeed in reaffirming their hegemonic masculinity through coercive force towards women and other men, through instigating the precondition for any power structure – the shared will to live together as a community –, and/or by seeking and finding explicit recognition for their normativity and dominance. At the end of this paper, I will reflect on the potential harmful effect of these outlined representations of infertile men and make a plea for diversifying representations of infertile men in our culture. Keywords Male infertility . Hegemonic masculinity . Power . Ricoeur . Representations . Fiction television series . Content analysis
Introduction Male infertility is not an uncommon phenomenon. Approximately 40% of couples’ infertility can be traced back to the man (Agarwal et al. 2015). Moreover, an estimated 2.4% of men
* Marjolein Lotte de Boer [email protected]
1
Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities & Digital Sciences, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153 5000LETilburg, The Netherlands
Journal of Medical Humanities
within couples who do not want to have more children have a vasectomy through which they become voluntarily infertile (Shattuck et al. 2016). Given the large number of men who experience and deal with infertility, it is surprising how sporadic representations of male infertility experiences are in our Western culture. In public life, infertility is predominantly framed as a female issue (De Boer, Archetti, and Solbraekke 2019; Edge 2015). While some media occasionally represent male infertility, these cultural expressions typically reduce the phenomenon to anthropomorphic portrayals of “unmotivated,” “feminizing” (Gannon, Glover, and Abel 2004, 1173), “non-romantic,” “slow,” “sad,” and even “loser” (Moore, 2003, 289290) sperm cells that are not able to fertilize an egg cell. Arguably, one of the few contemporary cultural expressions that frequently represent actual men who deal with their infertility is fiction television series. This
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