Dr Liberty Barnes : Where are all the Infertile Men? A Sociological Look at Male Infertility and Masculinity

Infertile men are conspicuously absent from IVF clinics, social science research and public discourse on infertility in the United States. In order to track down infertile men and investigate the relationship between men’s fertility status and masculinity, sociologist Liberty Walther Barnes shadowed male infertility medical doctors in the U.S. and interviewed their patients. While all twenty-four of the patients interviewed fit the clinical definition of infertility, fully two-thirds of them did not self identify as infertile. In this presentation, Dr. Barnes argues that infertile men are powerful players in the social constructions of disease and gender and that their resistance to the “infertile” label explains, in part, the invisibility of male infertility. Men employ a variety of strategies to reconceptualize their inability to conceive in terms that feel less threatening to their personal sense of masculinity. These include: focusing on the etiology of their infertility, referring