Vol. 23 No. 1 (2020)
Articles

“I have the bowed legs of a failed footballer”: An interpretative phenomenological study of Bulgarian men’s understandings of gender, and masculinity in the UK

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  • Peter PANGAROV,
  • Billy Lee

Published 06/10/2020

Keywords

  • masculinity,
  • gender,
  • Bulgaria,
  • phenomenology

How to Cite

PANGAROV, P., & Lee, B. (2020). “I have the bowed legs of a failed footballer”: An interpretative phenomenological study of Bulgarian men’s understandings of gender, and masculinity in the UK. Psychological Research (in the Balkans), 23(1). Retrieved from https://journalofpsychology.org/index.php/1/article/view/56

Copyright (c) 2020 Psychological Research (in the Balkans)

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This article used Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to examine how individuals living in London and Edinburgh, and originating from Bulgaria, a former meeting point of East and West, understood masculinity and gender. The experience examined was that of being a Bulgarian man in the United Kingdom. The analysis illustrated three themes. They were that Bulgarian men interviewed spoke of doing what they thought was right while adhering to social norms, to conceiving of their bodies as partially an expression of their masculinity, and to the importance that they attached to collective structures. These results indicated some similarities with earlier studies done in the United Kingdom, especially Scotland.

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