Waiting on Others: Gender in the Medical Waiting Room

In this article, I describe how gendered interactions and power dynamics play out in medical waiting rooms. While people are spending time idle, waiting for the next thing to happen (i.e., to check in, to see the doctor, to pay), social processes continue to occur and reinforce these gendered interactions and dynamics. Using data collected from ethnographic observations of medical waiting rooms in the Midwestern United States, this article illustrates that waiting offers another opportunity to understand the subtle ways that gendered expectations and hierarchies are perpetuated. Patients, their friends, and families do gender in medical waiting rooms through the amount of auditory and physical space they take up and the ways in which they behave and respond to the actors and expectations in this space.