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Drawing on interview data with men and women who have engaged with in vitro fertilization (IVF) unsuccessfully, this article explores the ways in which men experience and make sense of the failure of treatment. Focusing on men's experiences of infertility, their perceptions of IVF as a technology, and their involvement in the IVF process, the analysis highlights the ambivalent relationship between men and IVF as a technology; the predominance of hegemonic masculine culture in mediating the meaning of IVF for both men and women, particularly in relation to the association of fertility and virility in the normative construction of masculinity; and the very traditionally gendered emotional scripts that structure the experience of IVF and its failure.Given the notion of a close connection between masculinity and technology (e.g., is perhaps surprising that relatively little work has been done to get inside the relationship between specific groups of men and specific technologies. This is especially true in relation to the new reproductive technologies (NRTs), and the aim of this article is to do just this. It investigates men's feelings, beliefs, and practices in relation to in vitro fertilization (IVF)-the medical procedure whereby eggs are collected from a woman's ovaries following hormonal stimulation, fertilized outside the body with sperm supplied by a man, and then transferred to the uterus.Our analysis is based on in-depth interviews with 13 heterosexual couples and 15 women (whose male partners did not participate in the interviews), all of whom have undergone at least one unsuccessful IVF cycle within the past five years and who have since stopped treatment. The approach taken is a feminist one. We start from the understanding that men and women have structurally different relationships to IVF, because of both normative assumptions about the different significance of childbearing/rearing for heterosexual men and women and the material impact of the technological

Drawing on (auto)ethnographic research—on the process of becoming a marathon swimmer, this paper argues that conventional characterisations of marathon swimming as being ‘80 per cent mental and 20 per cent physical’ reprise a mind–body split that at worst excludes women and at best holds them to a masculine standard. This in turn draws the focus towards sensory deprivation, bodily suffering and overcoming, to the exclusion of the pleasures of swimming, beyond the expected ones such as the challenge of swim completion. By exploring instead the ‘shifted sensorium’ of marathon swimming, and examples of the autotelic pleasures of swimming, this paper argues that training changes the way swimming body feels, and that it is these changes that enable a swimmer to feel ‘at home’ in an environment to which it does not naturally belong. This focus on the sensory aspects of swimming, and its unexpected pleasures, both highlights the ways in which those pleasures do not flow unproblematically to women, and brings to light alternative and politically provocative ways of experiencing the gendered sporting body. This highlights the contingency, however constrained, of even the most entrenched ways of thinking about bodies, both within and outside sport.