CGF Higher Seminar with Rene Almeling

CGF Higher Seminar | 24.04.2019 kl. 15-17, room 3A:340

Associate Professor Rene Almeling, Yale University

"GUYnecology: The Missing Science of How Men’s Health Matters for Reproduction"

Medical researchers have been making headlines with a surprising series of findings about how the health status of men’s bodies prior to conception can directly affect the health of their children. As a result, many of the warnings that women receive about pregnancy - regarding their age and watching what they eat, drink, and smoke - also apply to men during the three months that sperm develops inside their bodies. Scientific knowledge about the effects of men's bodily health on reproductive outcomes has only recently begun to be produced. The lack of knowledge is only more glaring when considered alongside the enormous efforts to study women’s reproductive bodies over the past 150 years. What took so long for researchers to begin asking basic questions about how men matter for reproduction? Situated within sociological literatures on gender, medicine, and knowledge-making, and drawing on historical and qualitative data, the goal of this book project is to encourage social scientists, clinicians, public health professionals, and policymakers to attend to men’s role in reproduction. Doing so has the potential to improve men’s health and the health of their children. It may also influence reproductive politics more broadly, expanding beyond the narrow focus on women to include men in discussions about how bodies and societies intersect to affect the health and lives of individuals.