Toxic: Masculinities and Health/Care
An Online Symposium organized by the Arts and Humanities Institute – Critical Medical Humanities Research Cluster
Maynooth University, Ireland
Date: May 8, 2026
Location: Online (Zoom)
Deadline for proposals: March 1, 2026
Notification of acceptance: March 15, 2026.
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Call for Papers
The symposium Toxic: Masculinities and Health/Care emerges at a time when questions of gender, knowledge, and authority are being reworked across public and academic spheres. The resurgence of toxic figures such as Andrew Tate or Conor McGregor, the virality of “alpha” discourses online, and the backlash against feminist and queer gains all signal persistent cultural anxieties around masculinity and the social order. These anxieties shape ideas of health, control, and legitimacy and intersect, within medicine and the life sciences, with enduring structures of androcentrism and paternalism that have historically centred the male body as the universal norm of inquiry and care (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Schiebinger 1993; Oudshoorn 1994). As a result, women, racialized groups, and queer or trans individuals remain underrepresented in medical data and decision-making (Criado-Perez 2019). Hegemonic masculinity operates here as an unmarked standard: it privileges some cis men while simultaneously constraining or marginalising those whose bodies, identities, or roles do not conform to it, including gay and bisexual men, men working in feminised medical professions (such as nursing and midwifery), and men living with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Masculinities, then, are not merely cultural phenomena but epistemic forces: they shape how knowledge is produced, whose experiences are deemed credible, and whose pain is acknowledged (Kidd and Carel 2017). Moreover, masculinities are lived intersectionally, inflected by race, class, sexuality, age, and ability, which profoundly affects how individuals access, experience, and are disciplined by healthcare systems (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; hooks 2004). From racial disparities in maternal and mental health outcomes to the stigmatization of emotional vulnerability in men, these dynamics expose how gender operates as both a social determinant of health and a structuring logic of biomedical knowledge itself.
By bringing together scholars, clinicians, artists, and activists, Toxic seeks to interrogate how masculinities circulate through systems of care, both as instruments of harm and as possible sites of reflection, accountability, and repair. How might medical humanities methodologies (narrative, visual, and creative) challenge inherited masculinist paradigms of detachment, mastery, and rationality (Charon 2006; Frank 2013)? And how can reimagining masculinities contribute to more equitable, relational, and reflexive forms of health knowledge and practice? In attending to these questions, the symposium reminds us that masculinities are not fixed identities but evolving, intersecting configurations of power and care that continue to shape what counts as knowledge, whose bodies matter, and how healing is imagined.
Possible Topics
We encourage submissions from across the arts, humanities, social sciences, health professions, disability studies, and health-related disciplines, including but not limited to:
Þ Creative, practice-based, and activist responses to harm: reimagining masculinities through performance, visual arts, digital storytelling, narrative medicine workshops, peer support, and community projects
Þ Cultural representations of masculinities (film/tv, literature, digital spaces, etc.)
Þ Disability, neurodiversity, and masculinities
Þ Histories of medicine and gender: men in female-dominated health disciplines; androcentric knowledge production; hormonal, psychiatric, and reproductive regimes of masculinity
Þ Intersectional masculinities: race, class, disability, sexuality, neurodiversity, religion, and age in shaping healthcare encounters, institutional power, and health outcomes
Þ Masculinity, mental health, and suicide prevention; emotional literacy, stigma, and help-seeking in medical and therapeutic contexts
Þ Methodological and ethical questions
Þ Narrative medicine, storytelling, and masculinities
Þ Occupational cultures and masculinities in care work
Þ Perpetrator narratives and ethics of accountability: confronting violence through arts-based, narrative, or restorative approaches; refusal, denial, and institutional cover-up
Þ Masculinities, Public health, and social work perspectives
Þ Sports medicine, sports and healthcare, health, fitness, and masculinities
Þ Toxic and caring masculinities in healthcare institutions: epistemic violence, moral distress, burnout, complicity, resistance, and the experiences of men in feminised professions.
Þ Toxic environments: ecological, chemical, digital, and social toxicity as intertwined metaphors for masculinity and health
Format
We invite presentations, case studies, or creative-critical interventions that foster interdisciplinary dialogue. We welcome proposals for full panels of 3-4 speakers (12 minutes each), roundtables or 6-7 speakers (6 minutes each). We also welcome proposals for art-based workshops (45-60 minutes).
Submission Guidelines
Please submit a 250-word abstract and a 100-word biographical note by March 1, 2026 to toxicmasc2026@gmail.com.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent by March 15, 2026.
References
Bordo, Susan. The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and in Private. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Charon, Rita. Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Connell, R. W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.
Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt. “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–859.
Criado-Perez, Caroline. Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men. London: Chatto & Windus, 2019.
Fausto-Sterling, Anne. Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000.
Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. 2nd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018.
hooks, bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria Books, 2004.
Horton, Richard, and Laura Camfield. “The Health Humanities: A New Agenda.” The Lancet 394, no. 10194 (2019): 1796–1797.
Kidd, Ian James, and Havi Carel. “Epistemic Injustice and Illness.” Journal of Applied Philosophy 34, no. 2 (2017): 172–190.
Oudshoorn, Nelly. Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones. London: Routledge, 1994.
Schiebinger, Londa. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. Boston: Beacon Press, 1993.
Whitehead, Anne, and Angela Woods, eds. The Edinburgh Companion to the Critical Medical Humanities. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016.