Books, articles & chapters

Temporalities of Interembodiment: Insights from Clinical and Community Health Practices

Robertson, William J., & Amaree Austin.

Social Science & Medicine 388: 118791.

This article elaborates Bunkley's concept of interembodiment by considering its temporal aspects. Bunkley's original formulation emerged from instances of what we call durable interembodiment, or interembodiments that operate over long periods of time and have lingering effects. We suggest that interembodiment also occurs in more fleeting and transient ways, and we term this ephemeral interembodiment. Drawing on theories of temporality, care, and intimacy, we examine the temporalities of interembodiment in two different settings: at an anal cancer prevention clinic in the US Midwest and among Black community birthworkers in the US South. In each of these settings, we analyze how moments of interembodiment are temporally structured to enable care practices in settings where patient bodies are biologically, socioculturally, and psychologically vulnerable.

Friends of George's Mister Act Audience Survey Report

Robertson, William J.

Brief report document with findings and data collection instruments for post-show audience survey for Friends of George's April 2026 show.

Creativity, Connectivity, and Care: The Role of San Pedro Playhouse in the Wellbeing of Cast and Crew

Fleuriet, K. Jill, & William J. Robertson.

Executive Report for summer 2025 Field School community partner, the San Pedro Playhouse (San Antonio, TX), with findings and data collection instruments for community partner.

The Butt of the Joke: Camp Humor and Queer Care

Robertson, William J.

Medicine Anthropology Theory 11(2): 1–27.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted at an anal cancer prevention clinic in Chicago, USA, this article considers queer camp humour as a care practice to better understand how providers and patients navigate clinical interactions centred around a stigmatised disease in a taboo body part. Humorous moments infused daily life at the clinic, and I came to see them as a critical feature of the clinic's uniquely queer environment and a central aspect of the staff's queer care practices. I argue the campy queer style of humour in the clinic was a vital tool for providing culturally appropriate care, and describe how humour mediated patient-provider interactions, had palliative effects, and managed dirt and bodily excess. The article concludes with a brief discussion of the importance of anthropological attention to humour and joking as forms of care.

Carceral Environments of Risk: Reframing Danger and Care in Imprisoned America

Robertson, William J., & Lindsey Raisa Feldman.

In Exploitation and Criminalization at the Margins: The Hidden Toll on Unvalued Lives, edited by Taryn VanderPyl & Shannell Sanchez. Lexington Books.

Anthropological Linguistics, Health, and Healthcare

Melo, Milena A., Carla Pezzia, William J. Robertson, & K. Jill Fleuriet.

In The Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare, eds. Pilar Ortega, Glenn Martinez, Maichou Lor, & A. Susana Ramirez. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Blackwell.

Iatrogenic Necropolitics: Forced Anal Examinations and State-Sanctioned Homophobia

Robertson, William J., & Emma N. Bunkley.

Culture, Health, and Sexuality 26(3): 317–331.

In 2016, Human Rights Watch, an international human rights organisation, published a report on the use of forced anal examinations to identify and prosecute putative ‘homosexuals’. The report provided detailed descriptions and first-person accounts of these examinations in several countries in the Middle East and Africa. Drawing on theories of iatrogenesis and queer necropolitics, this paper uses these accounts and other reports of forced anal examinations to explore the role of medical providers in the ‘diagnosis’ and prosecution of homosexuality. The goal of these medical examinations is explicitly punitive rather than therapeutic, making them quintessential examples of iatrogenic clinical encounters which harm rather than heal. We argue that these examinations naturalise socioculturally derived beliefs about bodies and gender that construct homosexuality as ‘readable’ on the body through close medical inspection. These acts of inspection and ‘diagnosis’ reveal broader hegemonic state narratives of heteronormative gender and sexuality, both within countries as well as internationally as different state actors circulate and share these narratives. This article highlights the entanglement of medical and state actors, as well as contextualises the practice of forced anal examination within its colonial roots. Our analysis offers the potential for advocacy and holding medical professions and states accountable.

Heteronormativity in health care is harmful for LGBTQ+ patients – and a source of tension for queer and trans doctors

Robertson, William.

The Conversation, April 3.

Dirt and Care: Queer Care in an Anal Dysplasia Clinic

Robertson, William J.

PhD Dissertation. (Co-chairs: Susan J. Shaw & Eric Plemons; Committee: Mark Nichter, Susan Stryker, & Victor Braitberg.)

This dissertation draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in an anal cancer prevention clinic to develop a queer theory of care with two aims: first, to draw queer/trans bodies and care practices out of the margins and into the center of the anthropology of care; and second, to challenge and disrupt the common heteronormative assumptions embedded in the anthropological study of care. I put Mary Douglas' theorizations of dirt, risk, and taboo in dialog with queer theory and more recent anthropological work on care to help make sense of how care can be a site of resistance to harmful normativities that marginalize and taboo.

A Tale of Two Shitties: Extreme Examples of Professional Habitus from an Anal Cancer Prevention Clinic

Robertson, William J.

Journal of Extreme Anthropology 4(2): 20–41.

Based on 12 months of ethnographic data collection in an anal cancer prevention clinic, this article uses the extreme examples of patients involuntarily defecating through the anoscope during the procedure to highlight the relationship between the extreme and the everyday. Despite the rarity of this occurrence, I argue that these extreme examples shed light on the ways the daily clinical routines are embodied as an expert habitus. High Resolution Anoscopy procedures are specialized, highly routinized practices that are performed hundreds of times per month at the clinic. These routines result in the development of a clinical habitus that guides physicians in deploying techniques to efficiently conduct the invasive examination. Exemplary examples of ordinary procedures certainly help explain how this expert habitus is enacted through routine clinical practices; however, this expertise becomes especially observable in moments when habituated practices are disrupted, forcing clinicians to react and respond in unscripted ways. I discuss the only two instances of patients defecating through the anoscope that occurred while conducting my research, each with a different clinician. These extreme examples provide rich opportunities to analyze how clinicians with similar procedural habits navigate extraordinary situations in expert and professional but idiosyncratic ways. Whereas exemplary examples of everyday routinized procedures can show the process of developing an expert clinical habitus, these extreme examples more clearly demonstrate how this habitus enacts expertise and professionalism by highlighting the clinicians' abilities to deftly navigate the technical and sociocultural aspects of such extraordinary disruptions.

Challenging heteronormativity in medicine

Robertson, William J.

In Routledge Handbook of the Medical Humanities, ed. Alan Bleakley. London: Routledge. Chapter 8: 105–113.

“Believe It or Not”: The Medical Framing of Rectal Foreign Bodies

Robertson, William J.

Culture, Health, and Sexuality 19(8): 815–828.

Medical and lay attention to and intervention for rectal foreign bodies, the presence of an object in the rectum most often via insertion through the anus, has long been a source of humour and suspicion in both medical and public discourses. How do the ways medical providers write and talk to each other about rectal foreign bodies shape and reflect understandings of gender, sexuality and the (im)proper use of the anus and rectum? This paper examines the medical literature on rectal foreign bodies to shed light on the ways in which medical providers frame rectal foreign bodies. It develops a set of six frames that demonstrate how the medical literature on rectal foreign bodies (re)produces a variety of normative assumptions about and sociocultural values concerning bodies and sexuality, danger, shame, deception, mental illness and medical professionalism. It concludes with a discussion of how these framings of rectal foreign bodies might potentially contribute to the ongoing stigmatisation not only of rectal foreign body patients, but of non-heteronormative sexualities in general.

The Irrelevance Narrative: Queer (In)Visibility in Biomedical Education

Robertson, William J.

Medical Anthropology Quarterly 31(2): 159–176.

How might heteronormativity be reproduced and become internalized through biomedical practices? Based on in-depth, person-centered interviews, this article explores the ways heteronormativity works into medical education through the hidden curriculum. As experienced by my informants, case studies often reinforce unconscious heteronormative orientations and heterosexist/homophobic stereotypes about queer patients among straight and queer medical students alike. I introduce the concept of the irrelevance narrative to make sense of how queer medical students take up a heteronormative medical gaze. Despite recognizing that being queer affects how they interact with patients, my informants describe being queer as irrelevant to their delivery of care. I conclude with a discussion of how these preliminary findings can inform research on knowledge production in biomedical education and practice with an eye toward the tensions between personal and professional identity among biomedical practitioners.

Mythbusting Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities (review of 50 Great Myths of Human Sexuality by Schwartz & Kempner 2015)

Robertson, William J.

Anthropology Book Forum.

Media, Medicine, Citizen, Capital: Theorizing the Production of Health and Disease (review of Making Health Public by Briggs & Hallin 2016)

Robertson, William J.

Anthropology Book Forum 3(1).

Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome

Robertson, William J.

In The Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Nancy Naples. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

Learning to Teach Anthropology

Robertson, Will.

Invited Guest Post. Teaching Culture blog. University of Toronto Press.

Queering Biomedicine: Culture and (In)Visibility in a Medical School

Robertson, William J.

Master's Thesis. (Chair: K. Jill Fleuriet; Committee: Michael L. Cepek, Jamon Halvaksz, & Craig Klugman.)

Medical Authority and Queer Health Disparities

Robertson, William J.

Anthropologies 17 (March).

“It's the revolution!” Queer Liberation and Anthropological Inquiry

Robertson, William J.

SfAA News: A Publication of the Society for Applied Anthropology 23(3): 26–27.