Unlike womanhood, manhood is widely viewed as a status that is elusive (it must be earned) and tenuous (it must be demonstrated repeatedly through actions). This focus on the structure—rather than the content—of gender roles can shed new light on men’s use of action and physical aggression. Here, we review theory and research connecting manhood, action, and aggression. We interpret men’s aggres...

This ethnographic study is aimed at understanding a group of women's knowledge about menopause and how they experience it. The methods used for data collection were participant observation, recorded interviews and previously produced drawings. Data were analyzed based on a theoretical framework using both the ethnographic method and biographic interpretativism. From the narratives the authors o...

This paper examines how socio-economic contexts shape local meanings of infertility, how the prevalence of infertility affects these meanings, and how the above affect community responses, life experiences and infertility treatment-seeking behaviors in two African communities. The paper is based on interdisciplinary research conducted among the Ijo and the Yakurr people of southern Nigeria that...

The Modern English term "gender" derives from the Middle English gendre, an Anglo-Norman loan word derived from the Latin genus, meaning "kind," "type," or "class." Gendre was used from the late fourteenth century onward to designate masculine and feminine as types or categories of people, as when the narrator in Thomas Usk's The Testament of Love (c.1385-1387) asserts confidently that there ar...