| Popis: |
In capitalist societies where time is commodified, waiting is something to avoid as it implies idleness and waste. Because waiting is a manifestation of power relations, people with power are more easily able to avoid waiting or diminish their wait times as their time is deemed to be more important than the time of individuals with less power. This dissertation examines the patterns of waiting within medical institutions and the power dynamics and processes which shape these patterns. Specifically, this dissertation explores how medical institutions shape how people wait and spend their time while seeking care as well as how waiting differs by gender. Using 200 hours of ethnographic fieldwork of five medical waiting rooms, this study reveals that medical institutions organize patients' time outside of the waiting room as patients spend time dealing with the logistics to get medical care. Inside of the waiting room, waiting is built into every step of the medical appointment process, and it only happens in one direction. Patients wait for medical staff members and not the reverse because it is efficient for medical institutions to have patients queue up for medical staffers, ensuring that medical staff members can see as many patients as possible. But this structure is inefficient for patients and burdens them with wait times, which can range from minutes to hours at each stage of the appointment. But not all patients experience this medical organization of their time similarly as women are more likely than men to wait in medical waiting rooms. Women are more likely to accompany patients to their appointments in some sort of caregiving role, and they are able to do gender through waiting, enacting normative feminine expectations of passivity and deference. In turn, it is a male entitlement not to wait as men enact normative masculinity through activity, the perceived antithesis of waiting. Waiting is another example of how people perform gender, and because waiting is a manifestation of power relations, gendered waiting further reinforces the unequal power dynamics between men and women. |
