The gender of grief

A new book about men, masculinity and bereavement

This post is a little different, as I’m writing about my own work for a change. However, since it touches on issues discussed in recent episodes of the podcast, I hope readers will forgive me this temporary indulgence.

I wanted to share the news that the book on men, masculinity and bereavement that I’ve co-edited with my Open University colleague Kerry Jones has finally been published. Men and Loss: New Perspectives on Bereavement, Grief and Masculinity is now available to order, and you can find full details on the Routledge website by following this link.

As we say in the introduction to the book, although the experience of losing a loved one is traumatic for anyone, regardless of gender, men’s experience of bereavement continues to be framed, in western societies, by socially constructed ideas surrounding masculinity, which dictate that they should be stoic and resilient following a loss, suppressing their feelings of grief and focussing on the needs of others. Men who don’t grieve in accepted ‘masculine’ ways can feel judged, alienated or disenfranchised. In addition, gendered social expectations may also prevent grieving men from seeking help. Against this background, the book aims to deepen understanding of men’s experience of loss, drawing on recent research and cutting-edge ideas about both bereavement and masculinities, and at the same time offering insights into a range of personal and professional experiences.

Men and Loss is an interdisciplinary collection, consisting of 16 chapters and including examples of theoretical analysis, reports of research findings, reviews of interventions and forms of support, and a wealth of personal accounts. It includes discussion of partner loss, childhood bereavement, perinatal loss and bereavement through suicide, as well as bereavement at all stages of the life course. The book brings together authors from a wide range of backgrounds in research, teaching and professional practice, many with personal experiences of loss that have informed their thinking and practice.

                              A Sands United football team (via sands.org.uk)

The collection grew out of, and includes an account of, the research that Kerry and I undertook, with our colleague Samantha Murphy, exploring the experiences of fathers who had lost a child in the perinatal period, and who had formed themselves into football teams (supported by the stillbirth and neonatal death charity Sands) as a means of providing mutual support and memorialising their children.

The book also includes a chapter in which I explore the ways in which societal norms around men, masculinity and emotionality continue to constrain men’s experiences of bereavement, at the same time posing the question as to whether recent changes in gender relations are enabling more emotionally expressive forms of masculinity to emerge.

A number of chapters in the book discuss the appropriateness of different forms of care and support for men who have experienced loss, against the background of the well-known fact that men are much less likely than women to take advantage of, or benefit from, conventional talking therapies and support groups.  One of the themes that emerged from our own research is the ways in which bereaved men, as well as men experiencing other mental health challenges, are themselves developing new forms of mutual care, often based around physical or creative activity, of which the football teams we explored in our own study are just one example. Similar themes emerged in the recent BBC3/Open University documentary, James Arthur: Out of our Minds, for which I was the academic adviser, and we also explored them in the animation Man Open or Open Up (see below) which we developed as a resource to accompany the programme:

There are a number of points of connection here with discussions on recent episodes of Careful Thinking. In general terms, the concerns of our book mirror the recent work of Carlo Leget, my guest for Episode 8 of the podcast, and his Centre for Grief and Existential Values. More particularly, a number of episodes of the podcast have foregrounded the role of the body in care, building on Maurice Hamington’s pioneering book Embodied Care, which in turns draws on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. My conversation with phenomenologist and dancer Christine Leroy explored her intriguing notion of kinaesthetic empathy, while the most recent episode, on care aesthetics, featuring James Thompson, also emphasised the sensory, embodied aspects of care. I’m intrigued by the findings from our research with bereaved fathers, which seem to show that shared, embodied activity can somehow facilitate emotional expressivity, and as a consequence emotional repair and healing, particularly for men.

Additionally, my conversation with James Thompson also explored the question as to whether care for oneself, and particularly bodily self-care, might lead to an enhanced sense of care for others. Our research with bereaved fathers both appears to reverse that polarity and also to suggest an even closer intertwining of self-care and other-care. The bereaved men who form football teams, or engage in other kinds of collective, embodied activity, to support other men with similar experiences, appear to have found that caring for others can be simultaneously a means of caring for oneself and one’s own needs. It would appear that men are motivated to engage in activities that promote their emotional wellbeing at least in part by altruism. The question then arises (at the risk of venturing on to the risky territory of gender essentialism) as to whether or not this is a particularly masculine trait. But that’s probably a question for another time…

In the meantime, please consider buying the book - or, more realistically, given the cost, encouraging your organisation or university library to do so.

The header image is the sculpture ‘Trauernde Eltern’ (Grieving Parents) by Käthe Kollwitz (1867 - 1945) in Vladslo German War Cemetery, Belgium.