The symposium Toxic: Masculinities and Health/Care emerges at a time when questions of gender, knowledge, and authority are being reworked across public and academic spheres. The resurgence of toxic figures such as Andrew Tate or Conor McGregor, the virality of “alpha” discourses online, and the backlash against feminist and queer gains all signal persistent cultural anxieties around masculinity and the social order. These anxieties shape ideas of health, control, and legitimacy and intersect, within medicine and the life sciences, with enduring structures of androcentrism and paternalism that have historically centred the male body as the universal norm of inquiry and care (Fausto-Sterling 2000; Schiebinger 1993; Oudshoorn 1994). As a result, women, racialized groups, and queer or trans individuals remain underrepresented in medical data and decision-making (Criado-Perez 2019). Hegemonic masculinity operates here as an unmarked standard: it privileges some cis men while simultaneously constraining or marginalising those whose bodies, identities, or roles do not conform to it, including gay and bisexual men, men working in feminised medical professions (such as nursing and midwifery), and men living with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Masculinities, then, are not merely cultural phenomena but epistemic forces: they shape how knowledge is produced, whose experiences are deemed credible, and whose pain is acknowledged (Kidd and Carel 2017). Moreover, masculinities are lived intersectionally, inflected by race, class, sexuality, age, and ability, which profoundly affects how individuals access, experience, and are disciplined by healthcare systems (Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; hooks 2004). From racial disparities in maternal and mental health outcomes to the stigmatization of emotional vulnerability in men, these dynamics expose how gender operates as both a social determinant of health and a structuring logic of biomedical knowledge itself.

By bringing together scholars, clinicians, artists, and activists, Toxic seeks to interrogate how masculinities circulate through systems of care, both as instruments of harm and as possible sites of reflection, accountability, and repair. How might medical humanities methodologies (narrative, visual, and creative) challenge inherited masculinist paradigms of detachment, mastery, and rationality (Charon 2006; Frank 2013)? And how can reimagining masculinities contribute to more equitable, relational, and reflexive forms of health knowledge and practice? In attending to these questions, the symposium reminds us that masculinities are not fixed identities but evolving, intersecting configurations of power and care that continue to shape what counts as knowledge, whose bodies matter, and how healing is imagined.