Book: Medicalized Masculinities

Here’s an interesting looking book: Medicalized Masculinities, edited by Dana Rosenfeld and Christopher Faircloth. From the Book Description out at Amazon.com:

When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, most social science gender scholarship focused on female or genderless bodies. The work on men, health, and medicine was scant and tended to depict masculinity as intrinsically damaging to men’s health.

Medicalized Masculinities considers how these threads in scholarship failed to consider the male body adequately and presents cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine. Renowned health and gender studies experts examine medicalized conditions such as balding, aging, and other dimensions of the life cycle in the tradition of the sociology of health and gender.

The book is laid out in eight chapters, including the introduction and one by Julia Szymczak and Peter Conrad discussing “the newly invented male ‘diseases’ of andropause and baldness.” Sounds like the chapter is critical of current trends, identifying both the medical/pharmaceutical industry and men themselves as co-conspirators in this rapidly growing segment of medicalization.

Without having read the book or the chapter most relevant to our normal topic conversation, it seems that I would likely find myself in agreement with the general thesis presented: It is a disservice to characterize some age-related baldness as a disease in need of treatment.