Men, masculinities, and reproduction – conceptual reflections and empirical explorations

What defines the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction? While certainly not an easy question to answer, many people are nonetheless likely to have an intuitive reaction to it: men don’t have children, women do. However reductive this immediate statement might be, it also mirrors a pervasive and persuasive assumption that influences our ideas, lives, and politics. Nevertheless, within masculinity and gender studies specifically, but also in the social sciences and humanities more generally, a focus on men, masculinities, and reproduction is rare (Almeling, 2020; Culley, Hudson, & Lohan, 2013; Dudgeon & Inhorn, 2003; Inhorn, Tjørnhøj-Thomsen, Goldberg, & Mosegaard, 2009). Looking through prominent journals in the field of masculinity studies – Men and Masculinities, The Journal of Men’s Studies, Psychology of Men and Masculinities, NORMA – reveals only a small number of articles on reproduction published since the mid-1990s (approximately 50-60). This is especially surprising given the overall explosion of scholarship in masculinity studies since then. Of these articles, around half are dedicated to issues of childrearing and fatherhood, about a quarter deal with issues of (in)fertility, and the last quarter of articles consist of contributions on topics such as contraception (including the male pill and vasectomy), abortion, semen, and ejaculation. As other scholars have pointed out, when broadening the scope beyond masculinity studies, other topics emerge (Marsiglio, Lohan, & Culley, 2013) such as men’s procreative desires and intentions or men’s participation in pregnancy and childbirth.

There have been two special issues on research in this area: one on how men prepare for fatherhood (Marsiglio et al., 2013) and the other on men’s experiences of reproductive technologies (Culley et al., 2013). However, these were published in journals not usually associated with gender or masculinity studies (Reproductive Biomedicine Online and the Journal of Family Issues). While this seeming lack of attention might not come as a surprise given the focus on women in most scholarship that explores reproduction, it simultaneously seems odd when keeping in mind that masculinity and gender studies have identified and keep reaffirming men and masculinities as central parts of the persistence of patriarchal gender relations. What is more, intimacy, the family, and the dyad of reproduction and production are seen as central arenas in and through which such gender relations take form, especially in Marxist and radical feminism and within critical studies on men and masculinities.

This apparent lack of attention to the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction in gender and masculinity studies might be explained by two dimensions of how these disciplines developed as scholarly fields. For one, feminism and gender studies have had for a long time (and in some parts rightfully continue to have) a focus on women and women’s experiences given that they had largely been written out of history, politics, and scientific knowledge production. The other dimension is the ambivalence towards men and masculinities as analytical and empirical objects of study in masculinity studies (Beasley, 2011). Committed to feminist critiques of patriarchal gender relations, masculinity studies might be said to have developed a love-hate relationship towards men and masculinities. On the one hand, they are the object of study, both empirically and analytically, while on the other they are also at the center of what is regarded as problematic due to their central role in upholding patriarchy. Given these two important dimensions, an exploration of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction might produce tensions because it would involve recognizing men and masculinities as also potentially vulnerable, weak, forgotten, and marginalized, something that ethnographic research in this area has accomplished (Barnes, 2014; Inhorn, 2012; Thompson, 2005). In other words, research on men, masculinity, and reproduction can involve confronting the ontological and epistemological premises of much of gender and masculinity studies, not always an easy and for some maybe even an uncomfortable undertaking.

It is also worth noting that a more focused interest on the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction emerged at a time when gender scholars turned their attention to reproductive technologies, and in particular, to what the use of those technologies might mean for gender relations, family life, and kinship. Yet, as pointed out earlier, among the few researchers, who took up the topic of men and masculinities, the focus remained almost exclusively on issues of fatherhood and (in)fertility. This needs to be understood as part of a global policy context. Ever since the 1990s, policies have channeled an interest in men, masculinities, and reproduction towards issues of (in)fertility and fatherhood (Lohan, 2015, p. 216) and less so towards more peripheral topics such as the biomedical conceptualization of semen (Almeling & Waggoner, 2013, p. 823) or even sperm donors (Almeling, 2011; Mohr, 2018; Wahlberg, 2018). To take the example of sperm donors, who have been centrally important for the development of reproductive biomedicine (Mohr & Koch, 2016), scholarship has tended to dismiss their contribution as a selfish endeavor or as an easy job and therefore not needing any special attention (Mohr, 2014, 2020). However, sperm donors might also be regarded as pioneers of biosocial normalcy. Their lives and experiences reflect what it means to be a man and what it means to live masculinity in a society in which the rationales of biopolitics and the norms and logics of biomedicine are normalized and accepted almost without question and resistance, as work on sperm donors in the US and Denmark attests (Almeling, 2011; Mohr, 2018).

It is also the case that much of the existing research tends to focus on men rather than on masculinities. This is not uncommon in other areas of gender and masculinity studies scholarship as well, namely relying on identifiable men (and often only cismen) as a placeholder for masculinity. Put another way, the assumption seems to be that masculinity is present and at stake simply because (cis)men are the empirical object of study without much exploration of whether that suffices to make empirical and theoretical claims about the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction.

These limitations notwithstanding, there have been important conceptual contributions that help to better understand this relationship. Without aiming to cover all of these contributions, we want to focus on a series of important concepts put forth by scholars in feminism and gender studies and masculinity studies alike: Faye Ginsburg’s and Rayna Rapp’s concept of the politics of reproduction, Raewyn Connell’s concept of the reproductive arena, Cynthia Daniels’ concept of reproductive masculinity, Marcia Inhorn’s and Emily Wentzell’s concept of emergent masculinities, and Maria Lohan’s framework for studying the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction. Using these conceptualizations to think through the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction, we are interested in that relationship as a formative, productive, changing and not least normative dimension of sociality that makes a difference in people’s lives. Thus, while other scholars have explored men’s decision making when it comes to reproduction and their so called procreative consciousness (Marsiglio, 1991) and proposed different models for how to think the psychological dimensions of that decision making process (Marsiglio et al., 2013), our focus here lies with the conceptual backdrop (onto- and epistemological) of thinking about men, masculinities, and reproduction in relation to one another as an important element of social life. We go into detail with these concepts before then pointing towards how they might help us understand the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction conceptually. In the final section of this introduction, we will introduce the contributions to this special issue of NORMA.

Even as we emphasize the importance of concepts to move scholarship on men, masculinities, and reproduction forward, that does not mean we are advocating a turn away from empirical studies. Indeed, this special issue itself is a collection of excellent empirical studies. Neither should conceptualizations be understood as separate from empirical research. Quite to the contrary, we think it is important to think about concepts from the ground up, to be informed by people’s experiences, meaning making, and self-conceptions when trying to understand how we might think conceptually about men, masculinities, and reproduction. We also understand our attempt to contribute to the conceptual discussion of men, masculinities, and reproduction as a continuation rather than a break with the work of other scholars in the field. We thus offer our reflections here as a way of carrying on that work by exploring how assumptions about the ordering of sociality interplay with our understanding of men, masculinities, and reproduction. Put differently, we are interested in how claims about reproduction are linked to assumptions about what men are and what they do, as well as what masculinity is.

We begin our conceptual exploration with the classic work of Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, whose term the politics of reproduction brought together and inspired decades of research on topics related to reproduction such as pregnancy, birth, contraception, abortion, and infertility and not least scholarship on assisted reproductive technologies such as surrogacy, in vitro fertilization (IVF), and egg and sperm donation (1991). At its core, they offered a conceptualization of reproduction as both fundamentally biological and social. They argued that no aspect of reproduction ‘is a universal or unified experience, nor can such phenomena be understood apart from the larger social context that frames them.’ (Ginsburg & Rapp, 1991, p. 330) By social context, Ginsburg and Rapp mean the power of nations, markets, sciences, religions, social movements, cultural norms, and social inequalities to influence reproduction at every level, from individual experiences to state policies (see also Murphy, 2012). While their focus was primarily on women’s reproduction, later scholars expanded this view to include men and masculinities. For example, in her book, GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (2020), Rene Almeling offers an analytical framework to examine why there has been so little attention to the politics of men’s reproduction using the metaphor of a photographer’s aperture.

Of particular importance to the conceptual landscape within masculinity studies, Raewyn Connell put forth the concept of a reproductive arena in order to think about how gender and reproduction come together as important tropes of social life. As Connell argues, the reproductive arena is made up of all things related to reproduction and thus ‘includes sexual arousal and intercourse, childbirth and infant care, bodily sex difference and similarity.’ (2005, p. 71). It describes a reference frame that informs gender as social practice and that encompasses ‘the bodily structures and processes of reproduction’ (Connell, 1994, p. 14). As such, the reproductive arena frames how gender takes form, leaving its imprint on politics, social institutions, and not least also people’s self-perceptions and forms of embodiment. Yet, while arguing that it is the reproductive arena that configures gender relations, Connell does not claim that gender is reduced to human reproduction, nor that gender as a social practice is the reflection of a specific reproductive capacity. Rather, Connell argues that gender is the social expression of how we make the reproductive arena meaningful: ‘The gender structuring of practice need have nothing biologically to do with reproduction. The link with the reproductive arena is social.’ (2005, p. 73) The reproductive arena is thus also subject to change, and Connell insists that change very much comes from reproductive bodies as social agents themselves as well as from sociality more generally.

Therefore, in Ginsburg’s and Rapp’s and Connell’s concepts, reproduction emerges as a central ordering device of sociality without sociality being limited to or confined by reproduction. Ordering social life through the politics of reproduction or according to the reproductive arena is a human accomplishment, a social construction with consequences for how we imagine and live social relations. Specifically in Connell’s argument, the reproductive arena is a way of understanding how we arrived at a specific gendered sociality, namely by establishing a link between assumed reproductive capacities, sexual desires, and gender dichotomy, a link that came to be understood as the natural order of things rather than a human accomplishment.

This view of sociality connects to Cynthia Daniels’ concept of reproductive masculinity. As Daniels understands it, reproductive masculinity is ‘a set of beliefs and assumptions about men’s relationships to human reproduction.’ (2006, p. 6) As such, reproductive masculinity might be said to reflect how the politics of reproduction or the reproductive arena take form since it is a way of explicating how the relationship between men, masculinity, and reproduction is understood in American and European societies. As Daniels argues in her book Exposing Men, this understanding posits that men are ‘secondary in biological reproduction’, that men are ‘less vulnerable to reproductive harm than women’, that ‘men are assumed to be virile’, and that men’s own conditions do not ‘affect both pregnancy and the children they father.’ (2006, pp. 6–7) Daniels shows in her work that these common assumptions are the result of specific historical and social processes and far from uncontested natural facts, though most of the time they stand unquestioned. Rather, understanding the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction in terms of reproductive masculinity, and therefore a relationship defined by traditional tropes of male dominance (independence, invulnerability, and virility), is an achievement of gender as practice since the beliefs contained in reproductive masculinity persist to this day even in light of evidence contrary to the claims made in these beliefs. With reproductive masculinity, Daniels thus offers a conceptualization of how the naturalization process of the specific gendering of sociality that Connell describes takes form and what consequences it has, namely the positioning of masculinity as naturally grounded in the assumed reproductive capacity of men, their assumed role as reproductive agents, and their assumed heterosexuality configured upon dichotomous gender.

Whereas Connell’s reproductive arena and Daniels’ reproductive masculinity might be said to point towards the pervasiveness and persistence of social constructs, or what Pierre Bourdieu so famously referred to as social fiction (Bourdieu, 1996), more recent conceptualizations of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction focus on how the normatively established links are contested and changed in and through men’s daily lives and reproductive practices. In this line of thought, Marcia Inhorn and Emily Wentzell offer the concept emergent masculinities to explore and understand contestations of hegemonic forms of masculinity through ‘ongoing, context-specific, embodied changes within men’s enactments of masculinity’ (2011, p. 802). Explicitly grounded in empirical research on men’s engagements with new medical technologies in the areas of reproductive and sexual health, and informed by Connell’s concept of hegemonic masculinity, Raymond Williams’ understanding of emergence, and notions of embodiment, Inhorn and Wentzell argue that masculinity might be best understood as an ever changing and contested form of gendered sociality. The contestations of hegemonic forms of masculinity emerge in men’s daily sexual and reproductive practices since men act out ‘new masculinities in relationship to their changing bodies and new medical technologies’ (Inhorn & Wentzell, 2011, p. 811). Thus, while discussions of the politics of reproduction and reproductive arenas train our attention on the structural and structuring dimensions of a naturalized understanding of masculinity based on assumptions about reproductive capacities as well as dichotomized sexual and reproductive relations, Inhorn and Wentzell help us see that those structuring elements are continuously contested in men’s everyday engagements with bodies and technologies. By calling attention to the emergent dimensions of men’s reproductive lives, bodies, and experiences, Inhorn and Wentzell broaden our understanding of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction to also include elements of subversion, contestation, and rebellion. This move very much mirrors an understanding of gender as proposed by Judith Butler, with Butler arguing that the trouble in gender lies both in its persistence and in its always already existing subversive potential (1990, 1993).

Equally interested in men’s experiences of reproduction and what those might tell us about the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction more generally, Maria Lohan offers a research agenda capable of exploring the manifestations and contestations of the politics of reproduction, the reproductive arena, and reproductive masculinity. Combining critical studies on men and masculinities, theories of late modernity and intimacy, the sociology of the body, and science and technology studies, Lohan offers a methodological framework with which to explore men’s engagements with reproduction. In Lohan’s own words this framework ‘is feminism-informed, reflecting on the social shaping of intimate relationships across societies, on the materiality of the body, and on technologies in intimate relationships.’ (2015, p. 228) Within that framework, Lohan points to an important nexus of men, masculinities, and reproduction between two influential spheres of social life: the institutional level of policies, law, and organized practice and the individual level of people’s relationships, biographies, and capacities (Ibid., p. 225). Thus, her research agenda for exploring men’s experiences of reproduction highlights the important connection between institutionalized dimensions of social life on the one side and men’s everyday lives on the other, marking that connection as a pivotal one for the manifestation and contestation of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction.

What emerges from these prominent conceptualizations in the scholarly field of masculinity and reproduction are important insights into how the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction might be understood. In order to highlight these insights, we will sum them up here in four points. First of all, the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction is not a given one, but one that is established in and through human practice. While the specificities of that relationship are potentially indefinitely variable, in Western European and American societies the relationship is very much confined within cis- and heteronormativity and the assumed reproductive and sexual normalcy of the heterosexual matrix. Second, the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction is (re)established and (re)naturalized over time taking form as a pervasive and persuasive set of beliefs and practices that inform self-perceptions, embodiments, relationships, institutions, and societies throughout. Third, while the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction manifests itself again and again in this way, it is also heavily contested, reimagined, and reformed in and through men’s reproductive lives. Though not necessarily overturning the more structuring elements informing these beliefs and practices, men’s reproductive lives and men’s experiences with reproduction hold the potential to imagine the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction differently, finding its reforming potential at the nexus between individual agency and institutional formation. And fourth, an important modal point of all these elements of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction is the body, both as the realm of gendered and sexualed reproductivity as well as the place of experiential differentiation, agential resistance, and not least embodied fulfillment of potential futures. With these conceptual reflections on the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction, we close this introduction by briefly introducing the individual contributions to this special issue in a non-chronological order.

This special issue has no specific analytical or empirical focus. When we wrote up the call for papers, we explicitly emphasized that we were interested in contributions on men, masculinities, and reproduction in a very broad sense so as to be able to think through concepts and conceptualizations across the contributions’ different empirical and analytical objects. All eight articles thus are also not classifiable in terms of common themes enabling grouping articles under headings such as fatherhood or infertility for example. Neither are the articles necessarily alike in terms of their methodological and analytical frameworks. However, all of them address the four conceptual dimensions of the relationship between men, masculinities, and reproduction that we identified above.

Offering a historical look at the construction of masculinities in the doctor’s office, Camille Bajeaux explores how physicians and their patients navigated male infertility in France and neighboring Switzerland from the late nineteenth century through the 1960s. Through archival research, Bajeaux reveals how physicians, men, and their partners tiptoed around the topic of male infertility, with the result being that women were often made responsible for their partner’s care. Likewise, Meghana Joshi considers male infertility through the lens of the work involved, but does so in present-day Germany. Joshi argues that men achieve reproductive visibility in fertility clinics and that this ‘labor of paternity’ can serve as a lens both for demographic anxieties and men’s role in social reproduction. Relatedly, Nurhak Polat’s contribution examines how men negotiate ‘biosocial exclusion’ in Turkish fertility clinics, paying special attention to how their emergent masculinities manifest in the clinic and in online forums.

Whitney Arey’s article takes on another classic topic in the politics of reproduction – abortion – but does so from outside the clinic: on the sidewalk, where men who are accompanying their partners for the procedure are subject to harassment from protestors. Drawing on 18 months of fieldwork, Arey evaluates the underlying assumptions about masculinity that shape both the protestors shouts and the men’s responses. Likewise, Florencia Herrera analyzes the role of hegemonic masculinity in how Chilean men describe the birth of their first child, finding that men incorporate particular elements of both masculinity and femininity to create space for themselves in the birthing narrative. Rhetoric is also the focus of Efrat Knoll and Adi Moreno’s article on gay men and surrogacy in Israel. Drawing on two studies that involved 60 in-depth interviews, they examine how the social scripts men use have changed over time, with surrogacy becoming what they call a ‘homonormative fatherhood choice’ during the past decade.

Taking us from the clinic to the marketplace, Charlotte Kroløkke’s contribution to the special issue, examines how men and masculinities are becoming entangled with new technologies for assessing and optimizing sperm. While women’s bodies have long been the target of fertility apps and while women hear endless advice about how to best manage reproduction, Kroløkke’s research delves into a few of the companies that have set their sights on men’s fertility. Moving even further afield from traditional topics in scholarship on reproduction, Jaime García-Iglesias’ contribution on fictionalized accounts of bugchasing – a practice that regards HIV as a source of kinship – expands our notions of what might be included in an analysis of the reproductive arena.

Last but not least, we are honored to include a commentary on the collection of articles in this special issue by prominent anthropologist and masculinity studies scholar Marcia Inhorn, who has been decisive for the development of a scholarly interest in men, masculinities, and reproduction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Sebastian Mohr is Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at Karlstad University with research and teaching interests in intimacy, masculinity, technology, and health. With the help of a mix of ethnographic and qualitative methods, Sebastian explores how different forms of governance interplay with gender and sexuality in a variety of empirical fields such as reproductive biomedicine, scientific knowledge production, militarization, and gender equality. Sebastian is the author of Being A Sperm Donor: Masculinity, Sexuality, and Biosociality (2018/2020).

Rene Almeling is Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University with research and teaching interests in gender and medicine. Using a range of qualitative, historical, and quantitative methods, she examines questions about how biological bodies and cultural norms interact to influence scientific knowledge, medical markets, and individual experiences. She is the author of Sex Cells: The Medical Market for Eggs and Sperm (2011) and GUYnecology: The Missing Science of Men’s Reproductive Health (2020).