We are all suffering an acute case of prostrate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the prostates of the men they love. The prostate—a gland located directly under the bladder—lurks on the periphery of many men's health issues, but as an object of anxiety it goes beyond the medical, affecting how we understand masculinity, aging, and sexuality. In this conversation, Ericka Johnson and Alan Shindel discuss what we think the prostate is and what we use the prostate to think about, examining it in historical, cultural, social, and medical contexts. Their conversation shows that our ways of talking about, writing about, imagining, and imaging the prostate are a mess of entangled social and biomedical relationships.

Presenter: Ericka Johnson, Professor of gender and society, Linköping University, Sweden, has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, gender studies, and science & technology studies. She is the author of several monographs and anthologies, including A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (MIT Press 2021). Johnson is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

In conversation with Alan W. Shindel, MD MAS, Professor, UCSF Department of Urology. Dr. Shindel graduated from the school of medicine at Washington University in Saint Louis in 2002.   He completed his residency training in urology at Barnes-Jewish Hospital in 2007.  After completion of his residency he started a 3-year research and clinical fellowship in andrology (men’s reproductive and sexual health) at UCSF under the direction of Drs. Tom Lue and Ira Sharlip.  He joined the faculty of urology at UC Davis in 2010.  He was the Inaugural Editor in Chief for Sexual Medicine, an open access journal of the International Society for Sexual Medicine from 2012 to 2015 and served on the board of the Sexual Medicine Society of North America from 2013 to 2015. In 2015 he left UC Davis to serve as a Medical Director at Genomic Health Inc, a manufacturer of genomic based tests for prostate cancer.  Dr. Shindel returned to UCSF in 2017. In 2020, Dr. Shindel was re-appointed as Editor in Chief for Sexual Medicine.  

This event is brought to you by the UCSF Library Archives & Special Collections and UCSF Health Humanities. 

Archives Talks are free and open to the public.