If You Prick Us: Masculinity and Circumcision Pain in the United States and Canada, 1960–2000 (2020)
This article examines how shifting understandings of masculinity and changing practices in biomedicine combined to transform approaches to circumcision pain in the United States and Canada from 1960 to 2000. Male circumcision was adopted as a preventive medical practice in late nineteenth-century North America, a process facilitated by claims that infants did not feel pain and by ideals equating masculinity with stoicism. Starting in the 1960s, the convergence of renewed emphasis on empirical evidence in medicine, research demonstrating that infants experienced pain and feminist critiques of traditional gender norms enabled physicians and lay people to see circumcision as potentially painful in multiple ways. While North American medical associations debated whether circumcision caused or alleviated physical and emotional suffering, grassroots opponents insisted that the surgery inevitably triggered not only bodily pain but also gendered emotional problems. After Canadian and US medical organisations began insisting on pain relief at circumcision (in the 1970s and 1990s respectively), activists advanced new claims about long-term suffering due to infant circumcision. This analysis reveals how approaches to circumcision pain were shaped by old and new ideals of masculinity, how gender intertwined with age to shape interpretations of pain and how women activists and scientists helped construct knowledge about male circumcision pain.
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