Congratulations Professor Mignon Moore!
Congratulations Professor Mignon Moore. Her superb book Invisible Families won the ASA Sex and Gender section’s 2012 Distinguished Book Award.
ASA Sex and Gender Section’s 2012 Distinguished Book Award recipient:
Moore, Mignon R. (2011). Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood Among Black Women. Berkeley: University of California Press.
While Moore’s title reflects the near invisibility of Black lesbian families in the literature on gay and lesbian families, she demonstrates that Black lesbian mothers have in fact become increasingly visible, living openly and crafting and displaying non-normative gender presentations of self in a range of public settings. Moore’s landmark text now makes these women’s lives visible in sociology.
We appreciated her strong analysis of the intersections of gender with race, sexuality and class within a single group. As one committee member put it, “Invisible Families offers a rare piece of in-depth empirical intersectional work that analyzes the complex and nuanced intersections of multiple identities, while still making a clear contribution to sex/gender scholarship.” Moore’s contributions to gender scholarship include her close attention to how women come into “the life,” and how these trajectories impact family formation; how gender displays and the “politics of respectability” operate at various points along these paths; and her analysis of the division of labor and power and gendered notions of mothering within Black lesbian families. One committee member concluded, “there is no one central gender contribution, but rather several important ones.”
Invisible Families is methodologically impressive as well, carried out over time with a large sample. Drawing upon multiple methods (ethnography, survey, interviews, focus groups) Moore is able to examine not only what respondents say, but what they actually do.
Committee members consistently identified this book as “well written,” “solid,” “sophisticated,” “ambitious,” and “nuanced.” As one committee member concluded, “I see this book being widely cited and utilized in undergraduate and graduate courses for years to come.”