ABSTRACT
This chapter prescribes for strengthening conceptual, theoretical and empirical links between masculinities and 'the body'. It considers the embodied care relations associated with the long-term care of people in their homes. Feminist geographer's interventions have prompted other geographers to rethink gender and most fundamentally to accept that gender is constructed in specific spatial contexts and at particular historical moments rather than as something that is fixed and stable. Dismantling masculinity as a taken-for-granted monolithic category has become an important project. Feminist and post-structural scholars emphasis the intertwining of the corporeality of the body with powerful discursive 'readings' of the body that etch materiality with social meanings of gender, race, sexuality and other dimensions of differentiation. The spatiality of embodiment means the interaction of bodies in the production of lived experience is central to the cultural and social processes whereby powerful discourses are embodied in 'the lived body' of everyday encounters in particular spaces.
