Intimate Encounters: Men Negotiating Sexuality When Working as Midwives

This paper explores how men in midwifery negotiate sexuality and gender when providing intimate care (IC). Midwifery has long positioned itself as a mono-gendered profession protecting cisgender women from male encroachment. Men were admitted to midwifery in the United Kingdom (UK) in 1983 and our study is the first in-depth qualitative account of their experiences. We present empirical findings from an interpretative phenomenological analysis of 15 interviews with men who work as midwives in the UK, examined through Ahmed’s concept of Orientations to reveal how men disrupt lines predicated on cisheteronormative caregiver interactions. Orientations accounts for their bodily reactions and how they viscerally experience and manage their gender. Through the use of vignettes, we show how men recognise that IC creates boundaries to their acceptability, how they reconfigure these boundaries to render their IC less transgressive, and how they process the conflict they experience when their IC is at risk of rejection. By working with the concept of Orientations we make a key contribution to both the fields of midwifery and sexuality studies by showing how sexuality becomes visible in caregiver interactions and likely shapes the experiences of men in midwifery and other IC-based professions.