ABSTRACT
Over the past two decades, a vibrant social science scholarship has developed on men’s health and masculinity. This work draws inspiration from a number of sources, including the diverse strands of feminist scholarship and the broader field of critical men’s studies (see Sabo and Gordon 1995, Courtenay and Keeling 2000, Connell 2000, Sabo 2005, Courtenay 2009, O’Brien, Hunt and Hart. 2009, Evans et al. 2011). Despite the growth of this scholarship in other social science disciplines, health geographers have been largely silent on the question of masculinity and its significance for men’s health and well-being (see also Lewis 2014: this volume). As Thien and Del Casino (2012: 2) have argued recently, the sub-discipline has: ‘yet to interrogate men’s overall (un)healthiness, their health behaviours, experiences, and outcomes, including how socio-spatial practices of hegemonic masculinities affect men’s health, men’s spatial and affective relationships with and in support systems for health, and the contexts within which men’s health takes place’. In this chapter, we explore the utility of a geographic imagination for the topic of men’s health (see also Keppel 2014: this volume), using a case study of men’s drug and alcohol treatment. Our specific focus is on how treatment settings are staged and what implications such places hold for the enactment of masculinity.
