Making sense of a changed physical body: Why gender matters at end of life

• Men were stoical and struggle against their loss of bodily closure.
• Women were resigned about their loss of capacity for self-containment.
• Men became angry and sad towards their loss of ability to move and act.
• Women come to terms with their loss of ability to act as an autonomous agent.
• Men and women experience the loss of bodily autonomy in dissimilar ways.

The bodily experience of patients near end of life has been presented within sociological literature as largely undifferentiated. The attempt of this paper is to overcome this gap by exploring how gender intersects with the loss of bodily autonomy experienced by hospice patients. The study was conducted in two in-patient hospice units located near Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. A total of ten terminally ill patients were interviewed, along with twenty family members and twenty members of hospice staff. For the men in this study loss of bodily autonomy was a very dramatic experience as it contravened masculine norms. The women's reactions towards their loss of autonomy were less negative compared to those of men and they made a considerable effort to integrate the best as they could their physical condition. This reflected feminine traits. Findings suggested that the loss of bodily autonomy is gendered in the sense that men and women experience it in dissimilar ways.