Couples Coping with Prostate Cancer: Women and Men (Re)Negotiating Discourse of Gender, Sexuality and Intimate Relationships
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation project investigates the ways in which men and their female partners navigate discourses of sex, gender, and relationships as they cope with recovery from prostate cancer and engage in penile/sexual rehabilitation. Study I involves a discourse analysis of online patient information sources for prostate cancer-related penile/sexual rehabilitation with a focus on how sex, erections, gender, patients, and relationships are depicted. Study II involves discourse analysis of in-depth interviews with prostate cancer survivors, female partners of men with prostate cancer, and couples, to explore the social norms and collective meanings they adopt when speaking about sex, their identity as a man/woman, recovery, and relationships. Analyses also explore discursive points of connection and discordance between the two studies. Penile rehabilitation is positioned in both studies as a medical imperative through close alignment with scientific empiricism. Sexual side effects (e.g., changes in erections) are framed in biomedical and mechanical terms, and penile rehabilitation is presented as a scientific and effective solution. Both Study I and Study II convey that one’s health and recovery are largely individual responsibilities. Ideal patients are framed as entrepreneurial, responsible, and informed in Study I, and Study II participants largely adopt these discourses. Online information sources situate sexuality within the realm of health and medicine so that changes in erections are positioned as medical issues best resolved using the expertise of medical specialists. The findings from Study II, however, challenge a purely biomedical or health-focused approach to erections. Many patients emphasize the relational and psychological aspects of sex and the inability of pro-erectile interventions to adequately address the injuries caused by prostate cancer treatment. Online materials from Study I reinforce narrowly defined views of masculinity/femininity and (hetero)sexuality. Masculinity and femininity are framed as complementary and distinct opposites, and intercourse is positioned as an essential sexual practice. Many participants frame prostate cancer as a major disruption to successful gender performance and to the sexual status quo. A number of participants resist medicalized/healthisized discourses of sex, and hegemonic masculine subjectivities. They espouse alternative definitions of what it means to be a lover and man/woman. Implications and recommendations are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".