‘My Wife Ordered Me to Come!’: A Discursive Analysis of Doctors’ and Nurses’ Accounts of Men’s Use of General Practitioners

Abstract

This study used a discursive approach to analysing doctors' and nurses' accounts of men's health in the context of general practice. The analysis worked intensively with interview material from a small sample of general practitioners and their nursing colleagues. We examine the contradictory discursive framework through which this sample made sense of their male patients. The 'interpretative repertoires' through which doctors and nurses constructed their representations of male patients and the 'subject positions' these afforded men are outlined in detail. We describe how hegemonic masculinity is both critiqued for its detrimental consequences for health and paradoxically also indulged and protected. These constructions reflect a series of ideological dilemmas for men and health professionals between the maintenance of hegemonic masculine identities and negotiating adequate health care. Men who step outside 'typical' gender constructions tended to be marked as deviant or rendered invisible as a consequence.