Toxic: Masculinities & Health/Care

Dive into how toxic masculinity shapes health and care in this interdisciplinary online conference. Free and open to all.

Toxic: Masculinities and Health/Care is an interdisciplinary online conference exploring how masculinities shape experiences of health, care, and vulnerability across cultural, clinical, and creative contexts. Bringing together scholars from literary studies, film, medical humanities, and social sciences, the event examines themes such as mental health, reproductive politics, palliative care, sport, trauma, and queer embodiment. Organised by the Critical Medical Humanities Research Cluster, Maynooth Arts and Humanities Institute

Toxic: Masculinities and Health/Care

Online Conference Programme • 8 May 2026

9:30–10:15 Opening Workshop (optional)

Loïc Bourdeau and Chase Cormier: Drop-in Narrative Medicine and Poetry Workshop

10:30–11:45 Panel 1: Care and Masculine Roles

• Yakubu Salifu: Negotiating Masculinity in Palliative Care: Intersectional Insights
• Simon Walker: Male Nurses, Moral Distress, and Suicide Risk
• Vaitsa Giannouli and Konstantinos Giannoulis: Can Gender Affect the Perception and Experience of Health Problems in Orthodox Christian Older Persons? Some Thoughts about Measuring Spirituality
• Áine Larkin: Toxic and Caring Masculinities in Antoine Sénanque’s Novels

12:00–1:00 Panel 2: Representation and Reproductive Power

• Kailee Parsons: Destigmatising Male Mental Illness through Contemporary Tragicomic Narratives
• Jonathan Ervine: Re-imagining Masculinity in Sports Films about Synchronised Swimming
• Christina Hennemann: Re-Writing Masculine Authority and Reproductive Control in Irish Abortion Poetics

1:00–2:00 Break

2:00–2:45 Panel 3: Care to Dance

• Lucille Toth: From Football to Dance: Masculinity in Motion
• Yann Descamps: Odd One Outs: Athletic Masculinity and Dance

3:00–4:00 Panel 4: Trauma, Crisis, and Resistance

• Loïc Wright: Pinpricks: Masculinities, Panic Attacks, and Social Change in Irish Writing
• Habib Zanzana: The Pathological Legacy: Colonial Trauma, Failed Care, and Reactive Masculinity in Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation
• Madison Schindele: Biopolitical Resistance: Women’s Voices in Die Neue Generation and Die Frauenbewegung

4:15–5:45 Closing Roundtable: Queer Bodies, Queer Trauma

• Daniel Nabil Maroun: Haunted Care: Masculinity, Credibility, and HIV/AIDS Temporalities in French Cultural Production
• Gautham Warrier (Gaw): Mad Queer Boys Want to Live and Love: Reading Alternative Masculinities in and through Justin Torres’s Work
• Miel Assas: Relational Transitions: Top Surgery and Embodied Queer Temporalities in Jess T. Dugan’s Self-Portrait with Mom
• Shaweta Nanda & Sameer Thomas: No Cure for Toxicity: The Homosexualisation of the Impotent Male Body in Jaggi (2022)
• V. Hunter Capps: Three Studies of the Consequence of Audience