Dr Benjamin Hegarty

Benjamin Hegarty is a medical anthropologist and Senior Research Associate in Global Health Equity and Justice at the Kirby Institute at UNSW. His ethnographic research draws on queer theory and transgender studies to explain how gender and sexual subjectivity and embodiment shapes experiences of health and inequality. His previous research has largely concerned communities of transgender women and men who have sex with men in Indonesia, with whom he has conducted long-term, collaborative and interdisciplinary projects related to gender, sexual, and reproductive health. Within the Global Health Program, he is working with colleagues in Papua New Guinea to understand the impact of laws criminalising male-to-male sex and sex work on the health and human rights of key populations. He is also working on a project to develop community-based models of transgender health in Indonesia.

His first book, The Made-Up State: Trans Femininity, Technology, and Citizenship in Indonesia, was published by Cornell University Press in 2022. As well as visiting fellowships at the University of California, Irvine (2018-19) and the University of Cambridge (2022), he was a McKenzie Fellow in Anthropology at the University of Melbourne (2019-2022). He is an associate of the Australian Human Rights Institute at UNSW and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for HIV AIDS Research at Atma Jaya Catholic University in Jakarta, Indonesia.