Arizona State University

Faculty Member, Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies

Professor of American Studies; Women and Gender Studies

New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences

About

I studied sociology in college and in graduate school, receiving my Ph.D. from UCSF in 1995. My research and teaching interests include bodies, feminist technoscience studies, medical sociology, gender and sexuality, women’s health, environmental justice, cultural politics of reproduction, security and war, disability studies, trauma studies, and biopolitics—in short, “life itself.”

I'm author of The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery (Rutgers University Press, 1998), co-author of Missing Bodies: The Politics of Visibility (NYU Press, 2009), editor of Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life (Routledge, 2003), and co-editor of Corpus: An Interdisciplinary Reader on Bodies and Knowledge. I have published widely on women’s health topics including breast cancer, cervical cancer, the HPV vaccine, abortion, sterilization, infant mortality, and pregnancy. My current research investigates the biopolitics of infant mortality and maternal/child health in North America.

With Lisa Jean Moore, I co-edit the NYU Press book series Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the 21st Century.  We welcome proposals. I'm also Co-Editor of Trivia: Voices of Feminism, and a member of the Editorial Collective of The Feminist Wire.

I live in Phoenix with my partner Bill Simmons, who founded ASU's MA Program in Social Justice and Human Rights, and our daughters. In addition to my academic work, I write creative nonfiction and fiction. 

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