The mourning of masculinity. Mexican males facing infertility diagnosis

Abstract

Studies on masculinity in Mexico and in other Latin American countries such as Chile and Brazil show that fatherhood is the culmination of masculinity, its full state, its greater solidity both heterosexual and gay. What emerges from a diagnosis of male infertility? How is masculinity reconfigured in the absence of having genetically related offspring? This communication inquiries about the speeches, practices and representations of males who face the possibility of having offspring via sperm donation. Based on interviews and ethnographies compiled between 2015 and 2018 with heterosexual couples using medically assisted reproduction in public and private clinics in Mexico City, it is observed that the genetic inheritance is defining in the recognition of offspring.
Our anthropological study among Mexican male gamete receptors reveals a nuanced landscape in which a diagnosis differentially affects the construction of masculinities and femininities. While male infertility is associated with lack of virility and sexual impotence, for women, infertility prevents them from fulfilling “their natural feminine vocation of being a mother”. The acceptance or not of the possibility of receiving sperm, the meaning acquired by the genetic inheritance as well as the transmission of phenotypic characteristics to the progeny they are not only constitutive elements of paternity but content of masculinities in Mexico City.