To Inform or to Signify. Public Health Communication and Masculinities

Abstract

Over the past decades, communication has become a central component of public health policy, although many health interventions still rely on instrumental conceptions centered on information transmission. Through a theoretical reflection on Latin American communication studies, collective health, and masculinity studies, this essay argues that public health communication constitutes a space for the social production of meaning rather than a mere channel for preventive messages. It contends that hegemonic models of masculinity, associated with self-sufficiency, the denial of vulnerability, and the rejection of care, operate as cultural mediations that shape how sanitary discourses are appropriated, as evidenced by the male excess mortality documented for the Americas. This cultural reading must be complemented by the recognition that the informational model produces real, albeit moderate, empirical effects, by the need not to essentialize men as a homogeneous group, and by a relational approach that analyzes masculinity within the webs of relationships in which it is actually embedded, with partners, other men, family, and the health system. Accordingly, it argues that the informational model and the model of meaning production do not compete with one another, but rather coexist depending on the communicational situation, as shown in extreme form by the COVID-19 pandemic. It also incorporates the Hegemonic Medical Model, social determinants of health, the relational approach, and intersectionality as complementary frameworks, together with documented Latin American experiences of dialogic communication in men's health that function as intervention precedents. The specific contribution of this essay consists in showing how the cultural meanings of care and the material, relational, and structural conditions articulate and mutually reinforce one another.