Men and Masculinities

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The Dilemma of Disabled Masculinity

Russell Shuttleworth, Nikki Wedgwood and Nathan J. Wilson
Men and Masculinities 2012 15: 174
DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12439879

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 Men and Masculinities
15(2) 174-194
ª The Author(s) 2012
The Dilemma of Reprints and permission:
sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav
Disabled Masculinity DOI: 10.1177/1097184X12439879
http://jmm.sagepub.com

Russell Shuttleworth1, Nikki Wedgwood2, and

Nathan J. Wilson3

Abstract
A much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is
that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other because disability is
associated with being dependent and helpless whereas masculinity is associated
with being powerful and autonomous, thus creating a lived and embodied dilemma
for disabled men. This article maps and critically evaluates the conceptual develop-
ment of this dilemma of disabled masculinity, tracing how several developments in
the fields of disability studies and the critical study of men and masculinities have
shaped sociological understandings of disabled masculinity. We suggest that, while
social science scholarship has increasingly moved beyond a static understanding and
toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between masculinity and
disability, there are nevertheless several problems that require attention. The most
critical issue conceptually is that the focus of study has been more on masculinity
and how it intersects with ‘disability’ as an almost generic category, rather than
on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) differently with various types of
impairment. Thus, though there is quite a bit of research on the dilemma of disabled
masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment post-childhood and for
groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they were a homogenous

1
Faculty of Health, School of Health and Social Development, Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria,
Australia
2
Faculty of Health Sciences, Australian Family & Disability Studies Research Collaboration, Lidcombe,
New South Wales, Australia
3
Faculty of Health Sciences, Disability and Community Research Group, Lidcombe, New South Wales,
Australia

Corresponding Author:
Russell Shuttleworth, Faculty of Health, School of Health and Social Development, Deakin University,
Geelong Waterfront Campus, Locked Bag 20000, Geelong, Victoria 3220, Australia
Email: r.shuttleworth@deakin.edu.au

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Shuttleworth et al. 175

group, less research has been conducted with men who have specific impairments,
particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impairments. In this paper we
urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality to accommodate a
range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and behavioral types (impair-
ments) in their interaction with various masculinities and to show more explicitly
how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.

Keywords
disability, bodies, hegemonic masculinity, identity, sociology

A much-cited point by those who study the intersection of gender and disability is
that masculinity and disability are in conflict with each other. As Asch and Fine
(1988) in an early landmark paper put it, ‘‘Having a disability [is] seen as synon-
ymous with being dependent, childlike and helpless—an image fundamentally chal-
lenging all that is embodied in the ideal male: virility, autonomy and independence’’
(3). Thus, the competing cultural expectations of disability on one hand, and mascu-
linity on the other, invite the question: How do disabled men negotiate the intersec-
tion of these two social categories of experience? Whilst disabled men had
occasionally referred to the implications of normative expectations of masculinity
in their personal narratives and autobiographies, it was left for scholars in the social
sciences and humanities, some who were themselves disabled, to come to grips con-
ceptually with this dilemma.
Given that disabled masculinity is a lived and embodied dilemma which is expe-
rienced at a personal level, this paper focuses primarily on research with or about
disabled men that either explicitly or implicitly investigates how these men experi-
ence this dilemma in their everyday lives. In other words our review is limited to
qualitative social science research into men and masculinity. This also reflects our
own methodological backgrounds and areas of expertise–Shuttleworth, an anthro-
pologist with expertise in sexuality and disability; Wedgwood, a sociologist with
expertise in gendered embodiment and disability; and Wilson also with a sociologi-
cal perspective on sexuality and disability – all with a shared passion for ethno-
graphic methods and especially life history research.
In this paper we map and critically evaluate theoretical development on the
intersection of masculinity and disability – what we term the dilemma of disabled
masculinity – from early recognition to more recent understanding. In doing so,
we trace how several developments in the fields of disability studies and the critical
study of men and masculinities have shaped sociological understandings of disabled
masculinity. Our purpose is not to imply a linear, progressive development of ideas
that have become increasingly refined over time, but rather to pinpoint those devel-
opments which have shaped the way in which this dilemma is conceptualized by
social scientists and to identify which aspects of the dilemma remain undertheorised
and why. In particular, we suggest that whilst conceptualization has moved beyond a

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176 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

static understanding of the intersection of masculinity and disability in disabled

men’s lives toward a more nuanced and dynamic view of the multiple and diverse
ways in which disabled men embody this dilemma, there are nevertheless still some
areas of concern. The most critical problem conceptually speaking is that the focus
of study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with ‘disability’ as an
almost generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) inter-
sect(s) differently with various types of impairment.

From Autoethnography to Sociological Framing

Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s the influence of feminism inspired an increas-
ing focus on disabled women’s gendered experience (e.g., Asch and Fine 1988;
Begum 1992; Browne, Connors, and Stern 1985; Deegan and Brooks 1985). This
literature, a mix of personal narratives and scholarly analyses, was in large part a
political response to the perception by disabled women and their allies of the dual
discrimination they faced. In contrast, male disabled scholars of the time only spor-
adically referenced gender as an explicit political issue in their autobiographical and
autoethnographic writings and focused predominantly on how impairment affected
their sense of masculinity at a personal level (e.g., Kriegel 1991; Murphy 1987; Zola
1982).
It was not until 1989 that Harlan Hahn, a political scientist from the United States
with post-polio who began his career writing about the Black civil rights movement,
became the first scholar to provide a more comprehensive interpretation of disabled
masculinity and one that had political undertones. Hahn’s insights were primarily
derived from his own personal experience but augmented through his long-term
involvement in disability rights and the feminist-inspired gender and disability liter-
ature of the time. Elaborating on Asch and Fine’s point regarding the contradiction
between disability which is associated with personal and physical weakness and
masculinity which is associated with personal and physical strength, Hahn noted that
this sets up a conflict within disabled men requiring some kind of resolution because
many of them tend to identify on both personal and political levels with hegemonic
notions of masculinity such as independence and bravado rather than identifying as
disabled. This, he suggests, creates both political and personal problems for disabled
men particularly given that, as much as they would like to deny it, most are excluded
in labor and devalued in society. Hahn concluded that, in their attempt to find a part-
ner to collude with them about the unimportance of their impairment, disabled men
alienate women; thus, they remain unfulfilled in their personal lives, even if they are
successful in their work and career.
To resolve this dilemma, Hahn proposed that disabled men redefine their identi-
ties in several ways: by first viewing their difference as aesthetically pleasing (also
see Hahn 1988); by exhibiting strength of character through embracing their physio-
logical weakness; and by lastly pursuing both personal and political relations with

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Shuttleworth et al. 177

people who are more interested in their sensitivity, purpose, and commitment than in
idealized masculine characteristics of personal power and physical strength.
Influenced by Hahn’s insights, US sociologists Thomas Gerschick and Adam
Miller (1994) conducted the first significant research with disabled men on their
sense of masculinity. Their study of men with acquired impairments in the United
States introduced into the field ideas from the critical study of men and masculinities
which had begun to emerge in the mid-1980s. Most significant was Connell’s con-
ceptualization of hegemonic masculinity (Carrigan, Connell, and Lee 1985; Connell
1995; Wedgwood 2009). For Connell, hegemonic masculinity is culturally exalted
and stabilizes a structure of dominance and oppression in the gender order. While
this dominance is most clearly seen in the unequal power relations between men and
women, it also occurs among men as part of a hierarchy of historically specific mas-
culinities, including subordinate, complicit, and marginalized masculinities. Sub-
ordinate masculinities are those masculinities that are negatively related to
hegemonic masculinity, internal to the gender order, best exemplified by gay men,
whereas marginalized masculinities are negatively related to the gender order in
terms of some other social category or relational structure such as class, ethnicity,
or impairment. Multiple masculinities thus exist in relationships of contest and
negotiation to one another. However, hegemonic masculinity is seen to exert a
reactive force on the gamut of competing masculinities.
Framing their research on disabled masculinity within Connell’s general concep-
tual schema, Gerschick and Miller developed a typology of three types of relational
responses to hegemonic masculinity—reliance, reformulation, and rejection—what
they refer to as the ‘‘Three R Framework.’’ Based on interviews with ten men with
acquired impairments, in which one task was to have these men provide their per-
spective on certain American masculine ideals, Gerschick and Miller concluded that
some disabled men continue to rely on hegemonic masculine ideals for their sense of
self, some reformulate these ideals in line with their limitations, and others reject
hegemonic masculinity, formulating instead an alternate masculinity for themselves.
Those men in their study who relied on dominant conceptions of masculinity were
more likely to internalize feelings of inadequacy and seek to overcompensate for
them, perceiving the problem to be in themselves rather than the social structure.
This reliance model of disabled masculinity was found to perpetuate the gender
order. Men who reformulated masculine ideals, although distancing themselves
from hegemonic masculinity, did not present a challenge to the gender order because
they still perceived their dilemma as an individual project. According to Gerschick
and Miller, rejection offered the most hope for change which they linked to a socio-
political model of disability. These researchers cautioned, however, that none of
their participants wholly fit into one of these response types.
Gerschick and Miller’s use of Connell’s theory of masculinities was a key turning
point in the study of disabled masculinity because it provided a more sophisticated
sociological framework than the intuitive schema of Hahn. It also provided scholarly
impetus to explicitly link disabled men’s dilemma to the feminist and masculinity

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178 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

studies agendas. Further, it presented a general conceptual framework that proved

formative—influencing the way in which many subsequent researchers in the field
conceptualized the dilemma.
During this embryonic period, several key concerns in the study of disabled men
and masculinity developed out of scholarly work on sexuality and disability. In
1981, Hahn had published a groundbreaking critique of the research on sexuality and
disability as predominantly concerned with medical and functional problems rather
than the social and interpersonal aspects that are often much more important to dis-
abled people (see also Gill 1989). Yet it was not until the mid-to-late-90s that a
research focus on interpersonal and social aspects of sexuality and disability began
to be taken seriously. Like Hahn, Mitchell Tepper’s (1999, 2001) work was influ-
enced by his own experience of impairment and disability, that of spinal cord injury
and paraplegia. However, unlike Hahn, Tepper augmented his personal understand-
ing with systematic research that he conducted with men and women with spinal
cord injury. While Tepper’s work was not overtly focused on interpersonal or gen-
der issues (in fact, it was focused on pleasure and orgasm before and after injury),
some of the conclusions he drew from his findings nevertheless directly addressed
the interpersonal and gendered dimensions of sexuality and disability. Tepper
argued that typical masculine socialization in the United States has dire conse-
quences for men who acquire an impairment postadolescence and lose their
strength and sense of self-reliance. He suggested that, in reconstructing their mas-
culine identities in the face of their new impairment, disabled men must learn how
to express fear and despair.
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, disabled masculinity also emerged as a key con-
cern for the men in Tom Shakespeare’s (1999) analysis of the dilemma derived from
a larger study of sexuality and disability in the United Kingdom (Shakespeare,
Gillespie-Sells, and Davies 1996). This study was theoretically driven by the social
model of disability— which had come to prominence in Britain during the 1970s and
was heavily influenced by by structuralist and Marxist theories that were especially
popular in sociology and across the social sciences at the time. Shakespeare was also
indebted to the earlier work of Gerschick and Miller and, by implication, Hahn as well
as ideas from post-modern and critical race theorists on perspectivity and intersection-
ality that were starting to infiltrate disability studies in the late-1990s. Moreover, like
Hahn, Shakespeare’s understanding of the central issues was enriched by personal
experience as a disabled person (he is a person with restricted growth). What Shake-
speare’s insights on disabled masculinity added to our understanding of the dilemma
was a crucial acknowledgment that this contradiction is experienced differently
depending on impairment type, ethnicity, sexuality and class. As he puts it, ‘‘disabled
men [not only] differ from one another, but . . . individual disabled men receive and
embody contradictory and confusing messages’’ (Shakespeare 1999, 60).
Shakespeare’s more nuanced picture of disabled masculinity may also be derived
from his research team’s employment of loosely structured, open-ended interviews
with participants who were simply encouraged to elaborate on their sexual lives.

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Shuttleworth et al. 179

That gender emerged spontaneously from these semistructured interviews as one of

the predominant concerns of the disabled men and women in the study reveals the
intimate link between sexuality and gender and that sexual negotiations are in fact
gendered negotiations. Following Gerschick and Miller’s lead, Shakespeare incor-
porated a relational perspective based on gender power but further contended that
prejudice against any ‘‘other,’’ like women, nature, ethnic, or sexual minorities and
disabled people, can be attributed to hegemonic masculinity. Shakespeare concluded
with a call to redefine gender relations and particularly masculinity in ‘‘less oppres-
sive, more open and more acceptable ways,’’ seeing models for this reformulated
masculinity existing in the margins, in for example, the lives of gay men and dis-
abled men (Shakespeare 1999, 63–64).
This formative scholarship of the 1980s and 1990s by early scholars in the field laid
important groundwork for the sociological study of disabled men and masculinities
and opened up productive empirical and theoretical directions for future researchers.
Yet, several critiques can be made about this body of work. To begin with there was a
general lack of specificity relating to impairments. Aside from Tepper’s research
which was specifically about men with spinal cord injury, impairment differences
among disabled men were not much noted nor deemed important. This can be at
least partly attributed to the pan-impairment focus within disability studies at that
time on disabled people as a homogenous group—an emphasis that served as an
empowering political strategy. It is also partly due to the sociopolitical focus on
the disabling structures of society rather than an individual’s impairments per
se, which was seen purely as the domain of the medical view of disability.
Moreover, autoethnographic and insider accounts during this period such as Hahn’s
that spoke for the larger category of disabled men often inadvertently relied on insights
gleaned from their personal experience and particular impairment. Failing to differenti-
ate between impairments implies that differences in type and degree of impairment do
not articulate and interact differently with masculine expectations. Indeed, the minimal
attention paid to differences in impairment, as well as to intersecting identities such as
ethnicity, class, and sexuality, presented a rather one-dimensional picture of disabled
men. Even, Shakespeare who had argued that disabled men embody masculinity differ-
ently depending on the particularities of their situation, unfortunately did not elaborate
on his important insight at the time; although he further elucidated this point more gen-
erally for disabled people in later work (e.g., Shakespeare 2006).
In addition, with the exception of Gerschick and Miller’s work, most of the early
scholarship was minimally theorized and even the typology devised by these two
researchers, an early milestone in the field, was not without its limitations. By expli-
citly asking for insights from participants into their own relationship to hegemonic
masculinity, Gerschick and Miller may have compromised contextual richness for a
more conceptual understanding—one that is not borne out well in the empirical data
discussed in their paper. In particular, while they presented some examples of parti-
cipants relying on, reformulating and rejecting hegemonic masculinity, they failed to
present a convincing argument for the distinction between reformulation and

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180 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

rejection. For example, one participant is characterized as rejecting the hegemonic

imperative for biological fatherhood by acknowledging that what is really important
is the relationship between father and child. But another participant comes to the
conclusion that sex is more about the emotional than the physical, and the research-
ers characterize this change in perspective as a reformulation. This speaks to the
issue of providing contextual richness in analyses of disabled masculinity—richness
in which the reader can ascertain the interpretational fit between theoretical schema
and empirical evidence.
This lack of contextualization was partially addressed in a later paper by
Gerschick (1998) in which there was a de-emphasis on the reformulation/rejection
distinction. Employing the three interacting concepts of: (1) the stigma of impair-
ment; (2) gender as an interactional process; and (3) hegemonic masculinity as a gen-
der standard, Gerschick investigated the arenas of work, athletics, sexuality, the body,
and independence/control in the lives of disabled men. To the data he collected in his
research with Miller, he also added ten autobiographies, semiautobiographies and col-
lections of essays by disabled men. In this later article, Gerschick perceived disabled
men as either complicit with or resisting hegemonic masculine standards; and there
seems to be an implicit acknowledgment that resistance can embody reformulation
and/or rejection and that the line between them is not so clear in everyday practice
within different social contexts.
A final critique that can be made of these early researchers is that they often ended
their articles with suggestions that placed most of the onus on individual men with
impairments to overcome the dilemma of disabled masculinity. For instance, Gerschick
contends that marginalization creates a social space of reduced expectations and dimin-
ished scrutiny within which disabled men can construct and revise counterhegemonic
gender identities largely unnoticed by the nondisabled majority: ‘‘In order for this
reconstruction to occur, men with physical disabilities must resist the stigmatization
associated with having a disability, change their primary reference group, and reject
or redefine the hegemonic standards of career orientation, activeness, physical strength
and athleticism, sexual desirability and virility, and independence and control’’
(Gerschick 1998, 174). This is not to say these researchers fail to recognize or critique
the structural constraints of ableism and gender that men with impairments face—far
from it. However, in highlighting the project of self-change, that is, of redefining or
reconstructing one’s self in terms of nonhegemonic forms of masculinity, they perhaps
default to a modernist prioritizing of the individual and downplay the limited power
disabled people have to influence how they are viewed by many nondisabled people
(Wedgwood 2011) and how we might work to change these constraining structures
at a societal, rather than individual, level.

Diversification in the New Millennium

Within this mix of scholarship and research on disabled masculinity in the 1980s and
1990s were the seeds of more nuanced perspectives that would develop in the new

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Shuttleworth et al. 181

millennium into a more detailed elucidation of the cultural and psychosocial contours
of disabled men’s responses to the dilemma of disabled masculinity. There were sev-
eral reasons for this. In the mid -to-late-1990s, sociopolitical models of disability,
especially the social model in the UK, came under increasing scrutiny and critique for
their conceptual limitations (e.g., Corker 1999; Hughes and Paterson 1997; Paterson
and Hughes 1999). The emergence of this critique prompted an increase in the theo-
retical and analytical diversity within disability studies (e.g., Hughes 2002; Shake-
speare 2006; Shakespeare and Watson 2002; Shildrick 2002). Meanwhile, around
the same time, the critical studies of men and masculinities experienced a diversifica-
tion of perspectives and a move toward interdisciplinary research. Since the publica-
tion of the book Masculinities in 1995, much of the social–scientific work on men and
masculinities has been influenced by Connell’s theory of multiple masculinities and
hegemony (Wedgwood 2009). Nevertheless, at the same time, different ways of
researching and conceptualizing masculinities have also emerged and researchers are
now analyzing multiple forms of masculinity, using an increasing variety and combi-
nation of theoretical and methodological approaches (Wedgwood and Connell 2004).
Whilst not necessarily suggesting a lineal progression of ideas, as a result of these
developments a more complex understanding of disabled men’s gendered experience
began to develop.
In the field of disability studies dominated by sociopolitical models, the body was
initially perceived as irrelevant to an emancipatory politics. Consequently, early
calls (Zola 1991) to bring the body into the field were largely ignored. This was pri-
marily due to the strict separation of an impairment’s functional limitations from the
disabling structures of a society in these models, which dismissed the role of the
body in disability both in terms of the ways impairments are experienced and the
processes whereby everyday structures and meanings become embodied. However,
during the 1990s, increasing numbers of disability scholars and sociologists called
for the development of an approach to disability studies which accounted for the
body but not at the expense of broader social structures and the relationships of
power within which everyday experiences occur (Hughes 2002; Hughes and Pater-
son 1997; Paterson and Hughes 1999; Shakespeare and Watson 1996; Turner 2001).
Thus, by the dawning of the new millennium, the body was accorded more credence
in disability studies although there were still many disability scholars who main-
tained allegiance to more strictly sociopolitical models. Bringing back the body into
the study of disability was beneficial to the theorization of the dilemma of disabled
masculinity in several important ways. To begin with, it focused attention on the
dynamic interaction between agency, practice and structure, a major debate in social
theory in the late 1970s and early 1980s (e.g. Bourdieu 1977; Giddens 1984) which
had begun to influence disability studies by the turn of the century. This theoretical
development was important because, although structures like ableism and gender
undoubtedly shape people’s practices, it is not all one-way; ‘‘people’s practices
[also] constitute (and reproduce) structures’’ (Sewell 1992, 4). People with impair-
ments are not ‘‘passive victims of a society that fails to include them’’ (Watson 1998,

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182 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

150). For instance, Gil Valentine’s (1999) case study of a spinal cord injured man
whose acquired impairment severed his ability to reproduce his previous working-
class male identity and bodily hexis shows how, by taking up wheelchair basket-
ball and becoming an international athlete, this man resisted negative discourses of
disability and renegotiated hegemonic masculine characteristics within the para-
meters of his impairment, thereby developing a confident self-identity once more.
Yet, as Valentine concludes, this man’s renegotiation of his identity does not chal-
lenge ableist social structures directly. Nor, we would add, does it challenge, but
rather attempts to recuperate, hegemonic forms of masculinity.
Moreover, while participation in disability sports is a way for some physically
disabled men to construct or recuperate a hegemonic masculinity (Berger 2008;
Lindemann and Cherney 2008; Rapala and Manderson 2005), not all are able
to do so (Wedgwood forthcoming) due to the fact that levels of personal agency
are ‘‘laden with collectively produced differences of power’’ (Sewell 1992, 20–
21). Thus, our understanding of the intersection of these two structures needs
to take into account differences in power related to gender, class, status, ethnicity,
and sexuality and how these can affect agency in any particular situation such as
participation in disability sports.
For example, one’s decision of whether or not to participate in disability sport, or
indeed any other project that involves hegemonic masculine practices, invariably
includes an evaluation of one’s relative loss/gain in social status. Indeed, Brett Smith
and Andrew Sparkes show how four men who experienced spinal cord injury
through playing rugby union in the United Kingdom failed in their attempts to recon-
struct the self that they had been before their injury because the status of their ath-
letic identities as high-level sportsmen was such that they did not view disability
sports as ‘‘real’’ sports (Sparkes and Smith 2002, 270). Faced with their new status
as impaired, their masculine sense of dominance, assertiveness, and aggression
became problematic and they described a loss of masculine self and their social, per-
sonal, and corporeal athletic identities. Disability sports was not palatable to these
men because it did not offer them the high social status that they had enjoyed in sport
pre-injury. This incongruity between the responses of Valentine’s informant and
Smith and Sparkes’ participants in their use of sport within the masculine project
shows the importance of noting status hierarchies, and changes within status hierar-
chies, and the role these can play in producing different outcomes.
Another positive development in the field to come from focusing on embodiment
is that it highlights degree of impairment as a possible factor in these kinds of
responses to the dilemma. Valentine informs the reader that his participant had no
function below the chest, while Smith and Sparkes’ participants suffered a C4/5
spinal cord injury. Though information identifying the specific functional limita-
tions that were incurred by the men in Smith and Sparkes’ study is not offered
directly, these authors do tell us that one participant tried archery but found that hav-
ing to use various adaptations and aids distanced him from the carnal and visceral
experience he had become accustomed to pre-injury. The implication being that if

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Shuttleworth et al. 183

his functional limitations were less and he did not have to use aids, he would have
enjoyed his archery experience more. Thus, status changes and degree of impairment
shape disabled men’s responses to hegemonic masculine expectations.
A major limitation in both the study and theorization of disabled masculinity is that
until recently much of the impairment-specific research has tended to focus on men
with spinal cord injuries. This is perhaps partly due to the fact that acquired injuries
present a stark example of how disabled masculinity can manifest as an identity crisis
driven by disruption of their bodily proprioception and a challenge to their taken-for-
granted embodiment of gendered power. As Connell (1995) suggests, masculinity
becomes vulnerable when, for whatever reason, gendered performance breaks down
(54). Those who acquire an impairment after they develop an embodied identity as
a nondisabled person can become disconnected from their impaired bodies (Seymour
1998, 1), with differing implications than for people with early-onset impairments.
Thus, there has been much less-systematic research on the masculinity dilemma for
men with early-onset impairments. This is a critical lacunae in our understanding.
The bias in the field toward men with acquired injuries that has predominated is
likely to be at least partly due to the fact that people with impairments such as spinal
injuries or amputations are accorded more similarity with the nondisabled, normative
majority, what Garland-Thomson has termed the ‘‘normates’’ (1997), than people with
early-onset impairments like cerebral palsy (Howe, 2008; Mastro et al., 1996). While
from the normative perspective, the former may be perceived as ‘once like us’ and may
benefit from an empathy as to what terrible circumstances (e.g., accident, illness) befell
them, those with early-onset impairments are likely seen as more fundamentally ‘other’
who from an early age transgress bodily norms with dysarthric speech and/or involun-
tary bodily movement such as drooling or repetitive limb motion (Howe 2008; Schantz
and Gilbert 2008; Shuttleworth 2000). That is, people with early-onset impairments
may be more readily perceived as anomalous (Douglas 1966), monstrous or abject
(Hughes 2009; Shildrick 2002) than people with acquired impairments. Thus, although
they may not have to deal with biological disruption and a sudden assault on their per-
sonhood, people with early-onset impairments must contend with a more radical trans-
gression of normative embodiment from a young age and accordingly integrate their
identity in the face of the powerful cultural symbolism that their impairment/impair-
ments can evoke.
The biased focus on men with acquired injuries reflects a gendered as well as
ableist viewpoint. That is, it is indicative of a concern primarily with ‘real’ men who
lost their masculinity, rather than those who were never perceived as masculine in
the first place because they had an impairment from an early age. This focus on loss
and subsequent attempt at reconstructing masculine identity perhaps also accounts
for the concomitant emphasis on narrative process in much of the work with men
with spinal cord injuries, a methodological approach that is much less employed
in research with men with early-onset impairments.
A critical benefit of the more recent inclusion of a broader range of impairments
within the purview of masculinity research is being able to better discern how age at

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184 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

onset, type, and degree of impairment can influence responses to the dilemma of dis-
abled masculinity. For instance, Lisa Gibbs (2005) shows how progressive pain and
increasing functional impairment for men with severe arthritis over time resulted in their
move from relying on to reformulating or rejecting hegemonic masculinity. More tell-
ingly, Gibbs suggests that as severity of pain, impairment, and distress increased, these
men’s reliance on hegemonic masculine expectations like strength and independence
decreased and they were more apt to access self-management services and support
groups that emphasize sharing of feelings. On the other hand, Barbara Gibson et al.’s
(2007) research on the lives of men with Duchene’s muscular dystrophy reveals how,
because of the relatively rapid progression of their condition, increasing degree of
impairment and relatively truncated life span, these men developed a sense of fatalism,
which overrode any weak attempts at resistance. However, for the men with cerebral
palsy, a relatively stable condition, in Russell Shuttleworth’s (2000, 2004, 2007) ethno-
graphy of sexuality and disability, this fatalistic sense was absent. There was no sense of
urgency for these men who from a young age had striven to integrate their differently
functioning bodies into their identity. Through trial and error, many participants of
Shuttleworth’s research came to pragmatically resist hegemonic notions of masculinity
and sexuality in the context of negotiating sexual relationships because they found that
acting strictly in terms of the hegemonic standards was often not an effective way for
them to be successful in love. This stark reality led some of these men to expand their
masculine repertoire to include and emphasize dispositions and practices that stressed
sensitivity and interdependence; more typical masculine dispositions and practices
were not totally abandoned but employed less often depending on their relative useful-
ness to a particular romantic or sexual situation (Shuttleworth 2000, 2004).
As Gerschick (2000) emphasized early in the new millennium, ‘‘age of onset
combines with the type, severity, and visibility of a person’s disability to influence
the degree to which she or he is taught and subjected to gendered expectations’’
(1265). Indeed, any analysis of disabled masculinity requires an understanding of mas-
culinity as a dynamic and context-specific social structure. For instance, while Gibbs
and Shuttleworth’s participants both pragmatically reformulated or rejected hegemo-
nic masculinity by ‘‘seeking emotional support’’ and ‘‘emphasizing sensitivity and
interdependence’’ a closer look at the dynamics within these two contexts shows a
myriad of differences in both the pressures and claims exerted by masculine expecta-
tions and the precise ways these disabled men formulated their response in practice.
Recent research has also included several historical investigations into the responses
of disabled men to the call to be masculine. A historical perspective is crucial in discern-
ing both the dynamism and durability of this social structure. For instance, research on
the post World War I era, a historical period which was crucial in the development of
some of the principles of rehabilitation (Stiker 1999), has shown how notions around
masculinity were changing but also stable during this time (e.g. Gagen 2007; Kinder
2007). A powerful example is Wendy Gagen’s (2007) case of a World War I veteran
who joined the King’s Royal Rifle Corp in 1915 and had to have an arm amputated early
in his stint. Analyzing this man’s documents and letters, she employs Connell’s notion

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Shuttleworth et al. 185

of body reflexive practices to show how this man’s injury took on almost an identity of
its own as he negotiated his gender identity against the prevailing view that disability
equaled emasculation. Gagen provides a detailed description of the way disabled men
take up new projects of selfhood (e.g. mastering prosthetic limbs or mastering remain-
ing function); but she also effectively demonstrates that in doing so they nevertheless
recuperate hegemonic masculinity, and thus show its durability over time.
The dynamism of disabled masculinity becomes most apparent in research that
focuses not only on changes from one socio-historical context to another but also the
changes that can occur from one life-phase to the next, the latter being an especially
under-theorized process in this area of study. Daniel Wilson’s (2004) study, for exam-
ple, reveals how both historical change and different life phases can impact the inter-
action between masculinity and disability. Wilson examines the writings of men who
became impaired as a result of polio during the 1940s and 1950s in the United States
when masculinity was perceived to be in crisis due to the anxieties of the cold war and
collectivist mass society. It seemed to these disabled men at the time that the only way
for them to ‘‘construct a sense of masculinity consistent with society’s values and
expectations’’ (121) and also the rehabilitative ethos was to ‘‘fight like a man’’ and
wage war against their condition. This masculinist creed did in fact often reduce the
limitations of their impairments and thus had functional meaning for these men, but at
the cost of repressing the anger that they felt at their fate. It was only with the onset of
post-polio syndrome later in life when the urgency of the masculinity construction
project during young adulthood had waned and the metaphors of competition no lon-
ger sustained them that ‘‘they had to create new images of masculinity to sustain
their struggle with disability’’ in a later life phase (p. 119).
At first, scholarly work on masculinity and disability understandably focused pri-
marily on the intersection of these two social categories. However, in the late 1990s,
there was renewed effort within disability studies to incorporate a concern with how
some disabled people experience prejudice because of their identification with two
or more marginalized social categories referred to both in the general sociological
and disability literature as ‘‘multiple identities’’ (Vernon 1998, 1999). The concept
of intersectionality emerged out of the writings of black feminists in the US in their
attempts to move beyond the simply additive notion of multiple identities (Collins
1990; Crenshaw 1991). Intersectionality is concerned with working out how social
categories like race and gender less mechanistically and more complexly affect
self-identification and social location. It was this move toward intersectional anal-
yses that Shakespeare was partially alluding to in his assertion that disabled men
embody masculinity according to the particularities of their experience and which
was taken up in the new millennium by disability scholars (e.g., Meekosha 2006;
O’Neill and Hird 2001; Rapala and Manderson 2005).
Some research with disabled men during this period draws from the literature on
intersectionality in order to explore how the power differentials embodied in the
intersecting categories of class, ethnicity, and sexuality interact with disabled mas-
culinity (e.g., O’Neill and Hird 2001; Rapala and Manderson 2005). For instance,

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186 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

Terry O’Neill and Myra Hird (2001) interviewed 13 gay disabled men in order to
interrogate the tensions between intersecting masculinities, revealing how they sub-
ordinated disabled masculinity beneath gay masculinity. Whilst their research parti-
cipants acknowledged the possibility of resistance and dissent against hegemonic
male power, they dismissed the possibility of ‘‘a combined homosexual-disabled
axis . . . [and] neither dissent nor its objective—the contestation of male structural
power—was considered plausible if undertaken under the auspices of an identity
which prioritized impairment over sexuality’’ (218). This hierarchization of inter-
secting marginalized masculine identities and the further subordination that may
exist within these marginalized masculinities themselves (queer and impairment
hierarchies) present some seemingly intractable problems in the quest for working
coalitions against hegemonic masculine forms (see also Blyth 2010). O’Neill &
Hird’s study makes an important contribution to the slowly growing literature on the
intersection of non-hegemonic masculinities with disability. Unfortunately, how-
ever, though they take a less one-size-fits-all approach to masculinity, their concep-
tualization of disability is more generic, as they do not specify their participants’
impairments.

CURRENT PERSPECTIVES ON DISABLED MASCULINITY

The past decade or so has seen a rising research interest within the social sciences in
disability and masculinity. Over this time, research on disabled masculinity has
increasingly moved beyond a static understanding of disability and of masculinity,
toward a dynamic view of the articulation and interaction between the two social
structures. This conceptual sophistication has been aided in part by the growth in
perspectivity and intersectional theory within the social sciences but is also due to
the increasing use of ethnographic and life history methods to study disabled men’s
lived experience. As far back as 1990 Connell had called for more in-depth, life his-
tory studies and ethnographic contextualization of men’s lived experience as ways to
more clearly comprehend ‘‘social structures and their dynamics as they impinge on
(and are reconstituted in) personal life’’ (Connell 1990: 84). Indeed, the use of life
history case studies is central to the grounding of the theory Connell develops in
Masculinities and the deep insights into gender relations and gender construction
produced (Wedgwood 2009: 333). For instance, Nikki Wedgwood’s recent life his-
tory study of the role of sport in the lives of young men with physical impairments
reveals that, whilst playing sport is a form of cultural capital in the construction of a
masculine identity during adolescence for young men with impairments, male social
power constructed and conferred within a disability-specific sport may not necessa-
rily have currency in the broader society (Wedgwood forthcoming). By focusing on
adolescence as a crucial time in terms of gender identity development, Wedgwood’s
study also contributes to our understanding of the complexities of the disabled mas-
culinity dilemma by highlighting life-phase as another complicating factor.

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Shuttleworth et al. 187

At the same time, autobiographical and auto-ethnographic literature written by

disabled men continue to be a rich source for sociological analysis and interpretation,
as it has been from the beginning. Indeed, some disabled men are extending Hahn’s
suggestion to construct ‘‘disability as beautiful’’ and as a ‘‘strength’’ not weakness
(e.g. Guter and Killacky 2004). Other disabled scholars are attempting to dissolve the
ability/disability distinction in their work (e.g. Overboe 2007: 219). As Gerschick
(1998) showed us early on, such transformative narratives offer social researchers
unique insight into the dynamic interaction between social structures and the way they
are reconstituted in personal life and the possibility to further conceptualize how dis-
abled men construct and resolve the dilemma of disabled masculinity.
Whilst there has been a limited range of diversity in impairment-specific research,
the gap between research with men with early-onset and acquired impairment has
diminished. Yet there remains an almost exclusive focus on how the dilemma of dis-
abled masculinity is experienced by men with physical impairments. In a rare excep-
tion, Nathan Wilson’s (2009) richly contextualized ethnographic research in group
homes for young men with significant cognitive impairments, clearly confirms that
the dilemma is a sociocultural construction. However, because these men are signif-
icantly cognitively impaired and so are unable to participate in interviews, the
dilemma can only be gleaned from interviews with their caregivers; thus, the degree
to which they experience a contradiction of expectations between being masculine
and being disabled is unknown. It may well be that men with cognitive and intellectual
impairments experience such a dilemma only minimally if at all. While further study
of the intersection of masculinity with intellectual impairments might add to this
understanding, there is a also a critical need for impairment-specific research with
men with sensory impairments, degenerative diseases, transient impairments such
as mental illness and impairments that affect social functioning such as Aspergers.
A recent trend has been the medicalization of masculinity (Rosenfeld and Faircloth
2006) which reframes particular issues and behavior previously considered personal
or social issues as medical conditions or impairments. A good example of this is the
diagnosis of ‘‘learning disability’’ and ‘‘attention deficit disorders (ADD)’’ amongst
mostly young boys (Hardt, Grand, and Riley 2006). What was previously perceived
on a natural continuum of young boy and adolescent male behavior is now redefined
as requiring treatment to control behavior and attention. For some young boys with
‘‘ADD’’ there may be no treatment that will prove to be satisfactory, and it becomes
pertinent to ask whether the medicalization of these issues will lead to boys so labeled
experiencing the dilemma of disabled masculinity.
Cross-cultural research promises to provide further challenges to the ways in which
the dynamics between masculinity and disability are seen to play out. Indeed, to what
extent the dilemma of disabled masculinity is universal or culture-bound is mainly
conjecture at this point because there has been very little work on disabled masculinity
that does not pertain to Western societies. The minimal research which has been con-
ducted thus far indicates both broad similarities with the dilemma in Western cultures
along with differences in how these similarities are locally interpreted in terms of

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188 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

embodiment, cultural meaning and social context. For example, anthropologist Mat-
thew Kohrman’s (1999, 2005) research on mobility impaired men in China showed that,
as in Western societies, people who have difficulty walking experience stigma and dis-
crimination and that the expectation to venture out into the public sphere and earn a liv-
ing affects men’s identity development more than women’s due to higher expectations
for men in public life. Yet, at the same time these broad similarities were imbued with
ideas about national development and mobility and the Confucian emphasis that trans-
mutes bodily imperfection into social meaning.
James Staples’ recently published paper on his anthropological work with men with
leprosy and men with cerebral palsy in India provides an even more complex cross-
cultural example both across impairments and social contexts within a particular soci-
ety. Staples found that the spacticity and involuntary movements of men with CP
make them appear as ‘‘less able to perform the roles associated with men’’ than men
with leprosy (555). However, the fact that the participants with CP resided in middle-
class homes and rehabilitation settings in which they had to contend more often with
the larger society contrasted with men with leprosy who resided in colonies where tra-
ditional gender roles could more easily be enacted complicates any direct comparisons
of disabled masculinity (see also Phillips 2010).

WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Our discussion of this research has been selective. We have highlighted developments
we feel are of major significance in this field of study, along with certain gaps in
thinking. Though we have divided our review of research on the intersection of mascu-
linity and disability into several periods for the purposes of this paper, these are largely
arbitrary and not to suggest that the impact of theoretical developments in the field have
been linear and consistently applied. For example, earlier insights such as Shake-
speare’s that disabled men will embody the dilemma differently depending on a range
of identity differences while picked up sporadically by some researchers (for example,
O’Neil and Hird, 2001) did not become a driving theoretical force in the field until
recently. Nevertheless, on the whole, scholarship on masculinity and disability has
become more dynamic at least in theory and most researchers now explicitly recognize
that a range of other intersecting identities and contexts can effect disabled men’s sense
of masculinity. We would urge researchers, however, to extend themselves further.
The most critical problem conceptually, as we have indicated is that the focus of
study has been more on masculinity and how it intersects with disability as an almost
generic category, rather than on how masculinity (or masculinities) intersect(s) dif-
ferently with various types of impairment. Thus, though there is plenty of research
on the dilemma of disabled masculinity for men who acquire a physical impairment
post-childhood and for groups of men with diverse impairments studied as if they
were a homogenous group, less research has been conducted with men who have
specific impairments, particularly early-onset, intellectual or degenerative impair-
ments. We therefore urge researchers to open up the concept of intersectionality

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Shuttleworth et al. 189

to accommodate a range of differences in bodily, cognitive, intellectual and beha-

vioral types (impairments) in their interaction with masculinities and to show in
more explicit detail how context and life phase contribute to this dynamism.
The core aspects of the dilemma of disabled masculinity recognized by early
scholars and researchers in the field are still cogent today and in many ways continue
to inform our analyses. We suggest that the notion of a ‘dilemma’ will continue to
hold relevance for scholars and researchers interested in how masculinity impinges
on the experience of disabled persons. Yet as research from the past decade or so has
shown there are still unresolved conceptual problems and the dilemma of disabled
masculinity itself is not beyond certain challenges, particularly the question of its
universality across different impairments, contexts, life phases and cultures.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or
publication of this article.

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thesis, Faculty of Medicine, University of Sydney.
Zola, Irving. 1982. Missing Pieces: A Chronicle of Living with a Disability. Philadelphia, PA:
Temple University Press.
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ent, and Future ‘‘Medical Sociology’’. Journal of Health and Social Behaviour 32:1–16.

Bios
Russell Shuttleworth, PhD, MSW, is currently a Senior Lecturer in Social Work at the
School of Health and Social Development, Faculty of Health Sciences, Deakin University.
Russell’s primary research interests include sexuality and disability, masculinity and disabil-
ity and sexuality and ageing. He employs critical and phenomenological social theories and
ethnographic methods in his work. As a social worker, Russell worked with disabled and
elderly clients for several years. He has also been involved in the Disability Rights Movement
since the mid-1980s and worked for many years as a personal assistant for disabled men.

Nikki Wedgwood, PhD, is a lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of
Sydney. A sociologist, her past research includes research into the gendered embodiment
of schoolgirls, schoolboys and women who play Australian Rules football. She has also
explored the role of sports participation in the adolescent development, embodiment and
social inclusion of young people with physical impairments. Her current research explores
how young people with physical impairments meet the developmental challenges of

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194 Men and Masculinities 15(2)

adolescence and emerging adulthood. Her research interests include gender, embodiment,
sport, disability and life history research.
Nathan J. Wilson has been working with people with intellectual disability for 22 years as a
specialist disability nurse. Nathan now works as a researcher at the University of Sydney. His
research interests include men’s health, sexual health, masculinity and how they intersect with
intellectual disability. Nathan’s recent publications include an article on penile hygiene
published in the January 2009 edition of the Journal of Intellectual Disability Research, and
an article on gendered tropics in the intellectual disability specific research literature in the
March 2010 issue of the Journal of Intellectual and Developmental Disability.

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