Mignon Moore

Her book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (University of California Press), is the 2012 winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Award from the Sex & Gender Section of the American Sociological Association. It explores how initial self-understandings based on race influence subsequent practice of same-sex desire, processes of union formation, routes to motherhood, and the enactment of gendered power relations in families headed by two women. Drawing on three years of meticulous survey, interview, focus group and participant-observation data collection on more than 100 women, Moore reveals the ways Black women who were born in the 1960s and 1970s in large Northern U.S. cities, small Southern U.S. towns, and parts of the Caribbean use these past experiences to shape current thinking about their own lesbian sexuality.