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Disabled men with muscular dystrophy negotiate gender

ABBOTT, David
CARPENTER, John
GIBSON, Barbara E
HASTIE, Jon
JEPSON, Marcus
SMITH, Brett
2019

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Disability is often portrayed as a one-dimensional category devoid of further intersections. Work which has addressed the intersection of disability and male gender has rarely considered different types of disability or impairment, or foregrounded the experiences of disabled men themselves. This article is based on empirical work carried out in England with men who have Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). We explored with participants their sense of themselves as men and their commonalities and differences with other men. Findings suggest that men with DMD claim, reject and redefine what it meant to them to be men. Doing gender was often heavily reliant on the availability and permission of others. Our study highlights the usefulness of exploring gender with men with particular experiences of disability and of looking at how this might change over a life course, especially when the nature and extent of the life course is a precarious one.

Severe-to-profound hearing impairment: demographic data, gender differences and benefits of audiological rehabilitation

TURUNEN-TAHERI, Satu
CARLSSON, Per-Inge
JOHNSON, Ann-Christin
HELLSTROM, Sten
June 2018

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Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify and report demographic data of patients with severe-to-profound hearing loss, assess participation in audiological rehabilitation and analyze the benefits of various rehabilitation methods.

 

Materials and methods: Data on 4286 patients with severe-to-profound hearing impairments registered in the Swedish Quality Register of Otorhinolaryngology over a period from 2006–2015 were studied. Demographic data, gender differences, audiological rehabilitation and benefits of the rehabilitation were analyzed.

 

Results: Group rehabilitation and visits to a hearing rehabilitation educator provided the most benefits in audiological rehabilitation. Only 40.5% of the patients received extended audiological rehabilitation, of which 54.5% were women. A total of 9.5% of patients participated in group rehabilitation, with 59.5% being women. Women also visited technicians, welfare officers, hearing rehabilitation educators, psychologists and physicians and received communication rehabilitation in a group and fit with cochlea implants significantly more often than did men.

 

Conclusions: The study emphasizes the importance of being given the opportunity to participate in group rehabilitation and meet a hearing rehabilitation educator to experience the benefits of hearing rehabilitation. There is a need to offer extended audiological rehabilitation, especially in terms of gender differences, to provide the same impact for women and men.

Everyday life in older men living alone – a complex view needing a biopsychosocial perspective

VON HEIDENKEN WAGERT, Petra
NYGARD, Susanne
CEDERBOM, Sara
June 2018

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Purpose: To explore how older men living alone, describe their everyday activities and their abilities as well as how they could be helped in everyday life.

 

Materials and methods: Qualitative semi-structured interviews were analysed with inductive content analysis. Eight men aged 65+ years were included. They were all living alone, albeit with home help services. They were able to walk and had sufficient cognitive ability.

 

Results: The analysis resulted in one theme “A driving force of managing activities and overcome hindering factors requires a broad spectrum of prerequisites for participating in everyday life” with the following four categories: Importance of everyday activities; individual prerequisites enabling everyday activities; body and mind inhibit, and react to the decreased, abilities; and importance of the environment.

 

Conclusions: The results generate a complex view of older men’s everyday life. It is important for older men’s independence that health care and rehabilitation staff adopt a comprehensive view and work from a biopsychosocial (BPS) perspective.

Gender and diagnostic impact on everyday technology use: a differential item functioning (DIF) analysis of the Everyday Technology Use Questionnaire (ETUQ)

KOTTORP, Anders
MALINOWSKY, Camilla
LARSSON-LUND, Maria
NYGARD, Louise
May 2018

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Background: As the use of everyday technology is increasingly important for participation in daily activities, more in-depth knowledge of everyday technology use in relation to diagnosis and gender is needed. The purpose of this study was to investigate the stability of the perceived challenge of a variety of everyday technologies across different samples of varying diagnoses including both males and females.

 

Methods: This cross-sectional study used 643 data records from clinical and research samples, including persons with dementia or related disorders, acquired brain injury, intellectual disability, various mental or medical disorders, and adults without known diagnoses. The Everyday Technology Use Questionnaire, comprising 93 everyday technology artifacts and services (items) measuring the level of everyday technology challenge and relevance of and perceived ability to use these was used for data gathering. A two-faceted Rasch model in combination with differential item functioning (DIF) analyses were used for comparing item hierarchies across samples.

 

Results: Only three items (3.2%) demonstrated a clinically relevant DIF by gender, and nine items (9.7%) by diagnosis.

 

Discussion: The findings support a stable hierarchy of everyday technology challenge in home and community that can facilitate planning of an accessible and inclusive society from a technological departure point

Disability and masculinity in South African autosomatography

LIPENGA, Ken J
2014

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This article examines the representation of disability by disabled black South African men as portrayed in two texts from the autosomatography genre, which encompasses first-person narratives of illness and disability. Drawing on extracts from Musa E. Zulu’s The language of me and William Zulu’s Spring will come, the article argues that physical disability affects heteronormative concepts of masculinity by altering the body, which is the primary referent for the construction and performance of hegemonic masculinity. In ableist contexts, the male disabled body may be accorded labels of asexuality. This article therefore reveals how male characters with disabilities reconstruct the male self by both reintegrating themselves within the dominant grid of masculinity and reformulating some of the tenets of hegemonic masculinity.

Oscar Pistorius and the melancholy of intersectionality

SWARTZ, Leslie
2013

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The alleged shooting by Paralympian and Olympian athlete Oscar Pistorius of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp has led to strong reactions worldwide. Scholars in the field of disability studies have expressed shock and disappointment in response both to the death itself and to its implications for the representation of disability. In South Africa in the wake of the death of Ms Steenkamp, much has been made both by critics of Pistorius and by his defenders about his status as a white South African man, but little has been said about disability issues. This silence in South Africa about disability as a possible identity factor in this case draws attention to the extent to which disability questions remain profoundly raced and gendered, and influenced by the colonial and apartheid past. The tragic alleged shooting by Oscar Pistorius draws attention back to how important intersectionality is to understanding disability in South Africa and other unequal societies.

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