British Pakistani Muslim Masculinity, (In)fertility, and the Clinical Encounter

Abstract

The experiences of men facing fertility disruptions are understudied. For British Pakistanis, the impact of infertility is heightened for women because of normative pressures to bear children. But what of men? I present data from in-depth interviews in North East England with infertile British Pakistani Muslims and relevant health professionals. British Pakistani men's level of participation in clinical encounters and responses to diagnoses of male factor infertility must be understood in the context of kinship, the construction of Pakistani ethnicity in the UK, and the subordinated forms of masculinity which accompany this identity. The assumption that women's bodies are responsible for infertility is remarkable considering that male factor infertility appears to account for the majority of infertility cases worldwide (Kumar and Singh 2015). It has been argued that in some cultural contexts, men are protected from the threat to masculinity posed by male factor infertility by everyone, from professionals to partners (Barnes 2014). Barnes (2014:8) has suggested that "[m]ale infertility provides a useful case study for exploring masculine themes because infertility prevents men from accomplishing the most hegemonic form of masculinity." In this article, I explore the relationship between gender and engagement with infertility treatment, focusing on British Pakistani men facing disrupted fertility. My analysis includes the experiences of these men and perceptions of them by others, including their wives and various health professionals. In what follows, firstly, I describe the methods used in data collection and analyses, then provide background information about the context of the research, both in terms of the population of study and the health care system. These are followed by sections about the major themes emerging in data analysis (including communication problems, anger, conjugality, disengagement, and blame), and an unfolding argument about the role of emotion, (hegemonic and subordinated) masculinities (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), and other relations of power that shape both British Pakistani men's actions and others' perceptions of these men. MethodsThis article is based on a three-year project investigating infertility in the lives of British Pakistanis. The study was conducted using a multi-site ethnographic approach over two phases. The first phase CONTACT Mwenza Blell

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