The next few months we’ll be highlighting authors who have published in Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry.
Lawrence T. Monocello is a T32 Postdoctoral Research Scholar in the Department of Psychiatry at Washington University in St. Louis. Lawrence Monocello received his Ph.D. in 2022 from the University of Alabama. His dissertation examined how cultural, social, and political-economic factors shaped disordered eating among South Korean men in Seoul. Currently, he contributes anthropological perspectives to a transdisciplinary team of world-class researchers on preventing/treating eating disorders and childhood obesity.
What is your article “Guys with Big Muscles Have Misplaced Priorities”: Masculinities and Muscularities in Young South Korean Men’s Body Image” about?
“Male body image research only makes up about 1% of the body image literature, and what literature does exist tends to focus on white, Western men’s concerns with muscularity. Using cognitive and biocultural methods, this article examines how young Korean men negotiate and navigate multiple cultural models of ideal male bodies. It not only questions the model of Western masculinity which underlies male body image research but also problematizes the notion of a single kind of “muscularity” to which men may aspire. Drawing on the concept of “masculinities”—the multiple, hierarchized, and increasingly hybridized ways of being male in a given society—this article advances the concept of “muscularities” to account for their multiple, hierarchized, and hybridized models of muscularity, not just as biological traits but as meaningful, embodied engagements with their social and political-economic conditions.”
Tell us a little bit about yourself and your research interests.
“My research interests lie primarily in understanding how individuals’ variable engagement with culture affects health. In non-anthropological health research, culture—if it is considered at all—is usually treated as some sort of monolithic, categorical variable to which causality is attributed. Anthropologists have long challenged this notion, understanding that culture is dynamic, and that the lived experience of culture varies individual-to-individual and in relation with other social, political-economic, and demographic factors. However, connecting rich ethnography with broader models and measures of health has proven difficult. Cognitive anthropological mixed-methods, which combine rigorous ethnography and statistical modeling, have a ton of potential for connecting individuals’ lived experience of their meaning systems on their own terms to health outcomes. As I’ve been recently working in a biomedical context, it’s become increasingly evident to me that there is not only great opportunity, but moral necessity, for medical anthropologists to contribute our expertise and be more active in framing research on topics like social determinants of health.”
What drew you to this project?
“When I was a junior at Case Western Reserve University, I took The Anthropology of Body Image with Eileen Anderson. I remember reading some of the literature on male body image and being confused at how, as a white, cisgender male who struggled with body image, the data presented and conclusions it reached seemed not to apply to me that much. It got me really interested in intracultural variation and how it affected lived experience. Once I got to graduate school, I found that body image was “good to think with” during my theory courses. Around the same time, my Asian-American friends from undergrad started sending me K-Pop videos and I noticed how male idols were presenting in media. I became curious about to whether and to what extent men internalized those images versus those in the global White Western media. I found that there wasn’t much research on it, so I decided to do it myself.”
What was one of the most interesting findings?
“One of the most interesting findings was that, despite a lot of my participants saying that people don’t talk about men’s bodies (at least to the same extent that they do women’s bodies), everyone had opinions about them and everyone’s understandings of social expectations about men’s bodies and their meaning were extremely consistent.”
What are you reading, listening to, and/or watching right now?
“Now that I’ve finished my dissertation I’m trying to get back into reading fiction. I’m in the middle of Moby Dick now. I used to be kind of skeptical of “queer readings” of literature, but I’m convinced that it’s the only way to read Moby Dick.”
If there was one takeaway or action point you hope people will get from your work, what would it be?
“When we’re looking to address difficult phenomena like eating disorders across cultures, it’s extremely important for researchers to (1) unpack how people are really experiencing it (i.e., not just transplanting political-economically powerful white US emic perspectives elsewhere) and (2) for anthropologists to be able to articulate the barriers and disjunctures which emerge during ethnographic fieldwork in ways accessible to the actors who directly interact with people suffering from the phenomena (i.e., clinicians, public health practitioners, policymakers).”
Thank you for your time!
Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 