This ethnographic study explores how men constructed and enacted masculinity in a total institution. The author observed residents in public areas in two branches of a mental hospital in an urban area in the Midwest. She found that the residents at the hospital adhered to gender ideologies found in larger Western cultures. The structural constraints at the hospital, however, hindered the men from doing masculinity in ways granted to men in the “outside world.” The male residents found alternative means to maintain their masculine status through the only resource they had: themselves.
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