Mignon R. Moore

Mignon R. Moore is Professor and Chair of Sociology at Barnard College. She has research and teaching interests in the sociology of family, race, gender, sexuality, qualitative methods, aging, and adolescence. Although her research spans various age cohorts, income ranges, social environments and methodological frameworks, it is united in its purpose to challenge those assumptions and paradigms drawn from the experiences of the dominant racial and socioeconomic group that cannot explain processes and outcomes for people who occupy a different structural position in society. She analyzes race, gender, class and sexuality not just as identity statuses but structural locations that influence individual life chances and the ways individuals experience their social worlds. Professor Moore’s first book, Invisible Families: Gay Identities, Relationships and Motherhood among Black Women (2011, University of California Press) examined the intersection of race with sexual orientation for family-building and lesbian identity among African-American women. Her current research includes a new book project, In the Shadow of Sexuality: Social Histories of African American Lesbian and Gay Elders, 1950-1979 (University of California Press). This work builds on her prior training as a qualitative sociologist of racial and sexual minority populations, while incorporating new archival methods to construct a sociocultural history of Black sexual minority women in the mid-twentieth century. She has published on such topics as LGBT-parent families, adolescent sexual debut and pregnancy, intersectionality, research methods on hard-to-reach populations, and processes of aging and health for racial and ethnic minority seniors.  Professor Moore is the 2021 President of Sociologists for Women in Society, and Vice-President-Elect of the American Sociological Association.