Winter 2020 Remote Research
At the intersection of sexual and gender minority (SGM) research and medical anthropology lies a body of literature that examines culturally informed experiences of health, medicine, and illness as it relates to queer people, what we will refer to as queer medical anthropology. These texts include publications that elevate SGM voices on topics medical professionals need to understand to provide equitable care, including SGM specific barriers to accessing healthcare services, culturally informed healthcare needs for queer patients, unique experiences that impact SGM health and wellbeing, and more.
The goal of this project is to write and publish a scoping review on queer medical anthropology peer reviewed articles. To our knowledge, there exists no coherent collection of works on this topic. We have already started the process of 1) identifying relevant journals, 2) identifying search terms, and 3) combing through journals for articles which qualify as queer medical anthropology, saving these papers for the next step: analysis and discussion.
We seek to understand the following:
- What is the breadth and scope of peer-reviewed queer medical anthropological literature?
- What are the common themes in articles at the juncture of SGM research and medical anthropology?
- How have ethnographic methods successfully been used to inform SGM healthcare practice?
- What are the gaps in the available body of queer medical anthropological literature?
While HIV is irrefutably an important aspect of study with regards to SGM health, we hypothesize that inductive, ethnographic research will illuminate important aspects of SGM health beyond only HIV. The anthropological/ethnographic process allows for an intimate look at the way queer individuals interact with health, medicine, and illness; ethnographic methods elevate the voices of the people studied, bringing to light the queer experience in ways that are unexampled in other literature.
Additionally, our intention is that a scoping review of the available ethnographic research on the relationship between queer bodies, culture, and medicine can reveal shortcomings in the current literature with the hope of promoting future work that will lead to greater health equity.
