Kerstin Sandell

Sexuality in the Context of Prostate Cancer Narratives

In this study we explored how men diagnosed with prostate cancer experienced their sexuality from a lifeworld perspective. One essential meaning was identified: “having the elixir of life stolen.” This essential meaning had four constituents: “something that no longer exists,” “the threat to manhood,” “intimacy,” and “staged manhood.” The lifeworld for these men comprised the dynamic interaction between being deprived of their “life’s elixir” and their ability to have and experience intimacy. The men were preoccupied with embodied experiences unfamiliar to them. They mourned the loss of sexuality in connection with their new life situation that threatened their identity. Their female partner was a great support, and with her the man could picture himself and at best renegotiate his sexuality. In the future, cancer care should be organized so as to enable all aspects of sexuality to be acknowledged and discussed.

A feminist re-reading of theories of late modernity: Beck, Giddens and the location of gender

This article is a critical reappraisal of the understandings of gender and the location of women within theories of late modernity. These theories, as articulated by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck, have gained a wide use, not the least since they claim to account for changes in intimate relations. We will use four major feminist interventions for our argument — the problematization of the public-private divide, feminist theorizing of kinship, feminist understandings of labour, and the heterosexual matrix. We argue that the late-modern story is made through violently created presences — of the reinvention of the heterosexual matrix, the private sphere as the location of women/gender, reproduction coupled to biology, and gender as an intimate relation between women and men — and absences of analysis of reproductive and productive labour, of the role of the state, and of gender as a social relation constituted through and within other social inequalities.

To feel like an outsider: focus group discussions regarding the influence on sexuality caused by breast cancer treatment.

The aftermath of breast cancer treatment, especially the sexual side effects, appears to be a neglected issue in developed society. The purpose of this study was to explore how middle-aged women treated for a breast cancer experienced their sexual identity connected to the community norms and values in the society as a whole. Three focus group interviews were conducted, with a total of 12 women. The discussions were analysed using qualitative content analysis. The main theme to feel like an outsider symbolises the womens situation after breast cancer treatment. They experienced their body in a wholly new unfamiliar way, which affected their sexuality in a deep and profound way. This feeling affected their female roles and overshadowed earlier experiences in life. All their female roles were suddenly vague and this was expressed in various ways across each of the four subthemes: to feel different, the unruly body, eroticism is not what it used to be and re-evaluating. From a nursing perspective, there appears to be a definite challenge to identify the womens own unique sexual needs in the rehabilitation transition and to use the skills from all team professionals to improve sexual health in this context.

Exploring the Notion of Experience in Feminist Thought

Why is the notion of experience so relevant for feminist theory? How has the concept been used and by whom? What are the theoretical and political implications of postmodern theory for a re-thinking of the concept? In these pages we will explore the uses and abuses of the concept of experience in contemporary feminist thought through the works of influential feminist intellectuals. This article has two aims. The first is to create a theoretical space for reflection and re-appraisal of the concept of experience inspired by Dorothy Smiths contribution to feminist sociology. The second is to shift these debates from the periphery to the centre of sociology by taking into account the centrality of the concept for the discipline.

Sexual pleasure on equal terms: young women's ideal sexual situations

Objective: The aim of this study was to identify young women’s ideal images of sexual situations and expectations on themselves in sexual situations. Study design: We conducted audio-taped qualitative individual interviews with 14 women aged 14 to 20 years, visiting two youth centers in Sweden. Data were analysed with constant comparative analysis, the basis of grounded theory methodology. Results: The women’s ideal sexual situations in heterosexual practice were characterized by sexual pleasure on equal terms, implying that no one dominates and both partners get pleasure. There were obstacles to reaching this ideal, such as influences from social norms and demands, and experiences of the partner’s “own run”. An incentive to reach the ideal sexual situation was the wish to experience the well of pleasure. Conclusions: Our research further accentuates the importance of finding ways to focus on the complexity of unequal gender norms in youth heterosexuality. A better understanding of these cognitions is essential and useful among professionals working with youths’ sexual health.

Stories without significance in the discourse of breast reconstruction

Breast reconstruction is an everyday, apparently nonviolent, even benevolent, remaking of the normal, and the reasons for why reconstruction is motivated and legitimate are uncontroversial and widely accepted. In this article the author will, through Donna Haraways way of conceptualizing discourses, analyze what she calls “stories without significance.” The author has mapped the stories and interpretations of women undergoing reconstruction, stories that are not becoming part of the monovocal discourse of breast reconstruction. Thus, she focuses on the things said that are not assigned significance, the silences and impossibilities. The article is also an effort to account for some of the invisible work that goes into the process of breast reconstruction in dialogue with the feminist field of science and technology studies. This to explore the (re)making of the normal in a medical practice and reflect on how modest interventions could be made.

Talking About Sexuality: Desire, Virility, and Intimacy in the Context of Prostate Cancer Associations

Prostate cancer and its outcomes are a real threat for health and well-being for men living in the Western world. The number of men with a diagnosis of prostate cancer, before the age of 65 years, has increased in recent decades. The aim of this study was to explore how some of these Swedish men experienced and talked about their sexuality. Four focus group discussions were performed in the context of associations for prostate cancer. Using qualitative content analysis, it was identified how the diagnosis was a threat to their male identity; the men’s vulnerability as a group in society was made explicit. Their sexuality was diminished by their illness experiences. These experiences were difficult to share and talk about with others and therefore connected with silence and sorrow. As a result of this, the informants often played a passive role when or if they discussed issues related to sexuality with someone in the health care organizations. The possibility of voluntarily joining a cancer association was probably highly beneficial for these men. During the sessions, several men expressed the opinion that “it is always great to talk.”

Functioning Numbness Instead of Feelings as a Direction: Young Adults’ Experiences of Antidepressant Use:

In this article we explore, through in-depth interviews, young adults’ experiences of depression and antidepressant use in contemporary neoliberal society. We show that medication initially brings relief and an ability to function. However, in the longer perspective the dominating experience of antidepressants is emotional numbness. We suggest that this functioning yet numb subject is well suited to neoliberal demands, where the informants respond to outer demands without challenging them. Inspired by Chantal Mouffe we suggest that depression as a diagnosis is depoliticising, and with Ian Craib, we can see a denial of disappointment that surfaces in how depression is related to contemporary society. As a possible form of resistance we identify the strong positive emphasis on emotions as giving direction, motivating the interviewees to stop medicating. Still, we see a tension between functioning – expected from adults – and emotionality – linked to adolescence as a phase that should pass.

Taking it out on the body? : A phenomenological study of young adults’ gendered experiences of antidepressant use

Abstract In this article, we use in-depth interviews with young adults in Sweden to explore the gendered and embodied experiences of depression and antidepressant use. Building upon previous phenomenological research, we analyse being depressed and on antidepressants as altered embodied states, in which corporealization—experiencing the body as a material object—is central. Feminist interventions by Toril Moi and Iris Marion Young inform our analysis of embodiment as gendered. The bodily facets of depression include the weight of the anxious body in crying and not sleeping, as well as the weakened or distorted relationship between body, mind and world in brooding thoughts and hopelessness. These experiences of corporealization are not expressed in gendered terms but, when acted out in depression, they do appear to be gendered. The female body becomes “the first battleground”—as the socially endorsed object upon which to act destructively. In contrast, male behaviour is not expressed as self-destructive, but projects in the world are emphasized at the cost of (bodily) well-being. Although antidepressants lift the corporeal weight of anxiety and low mood, they install a new, and in some respects more profound, corporealization of the body. This is expressed as feeling and caring less and being like a thing or machine. It can be understood in terms of an increased distance from the world—not articulated in gendered terms. As a way of existing in the world, the medicated state bears strong similarities to the depressed state from which it was originally an effort to escape. Thus, taking medication can be seen as yet another way of acting on the body as object. Furthermore, it could be suggested from our findings that when the body is not felt—when there is a breakdown of the meaningful relationship between the body and the world—the experience is less gendered.

Living the neurochemical self?: Experiences after the success of the SSRIs

ABSTRACT This is an exploration, in dialogue with Nikolas Rose’s conceptualization of the neurochemical self, of how people taking antidepressants through in-depth interviews make sense of their experiences of using selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. The neurochemical self, according to Rose, is a self understood as regulated by neurochemical processes, where how we feel is mapped onto the body, more precisely the brain. The findings suggest that one of Rose’s points – that the deep inner self informed by psychoanalysis is gone – has some bearing. However, the plasticity of the biological that Rose argues accompanies a neurochemical understanding that cannot be traced; rather, the understanding of depression is gravitating towards it being a biological, constitutional malfunctioning. Adding to this, even though the users experienced that the pills worked, their understandings bore no relation to the wider neurochemical framework and were riddled with uncertainty. As a conclusion it is suggested that depression is delinked from explanation, and exists in a void abandoned to containment by medicine, although not that effectively treated. In this, the only way to become a functioning subject once again seems to be to go on pills.