When medicalization—the characterization of human traits in terms of disease and ailment—first appeared as a concept in the 1970s, most social science gender scholarship focused on female or genderless bodies. The work on men, health, and medicine was scant and tended to depict masculinity as intrinsically damaging to men's health.

Medicalized Masculinities considers how these threads in scholarship failed to consider the male body adequately and presents cutting-edge research into the definition and regulation of masculinity by medicine. Renowned health and gender studies experts examine medicalized conditions such as balding, aging, and other dimensions of the life cycle in the tradition of the sociology of health and gender.

Dana Rosenfeld is Lecturer in the Department of Health and Social Care, Royal Holloway, University of London, and the author of The Changing of the Guard: Lesbian and Gay Elders, Identity, and Social Change (Temple). Her interests include the medical and lay interpretation, management and regulation of the body, the experience of embodiment in ill health and old age, and identity in historical and interactional context.

Christopher Faircloth is a Research Health Scientist at the North Florida- South Georgia VA Medical Center and Assistant Professor of Occupational Therapy at the University of Florida. He is the editor of the forthcoming Aging Bodies: Images and Everyday Experience.