Ellen Lewin is professor in the departments of Women’s Studies and Anthropology at the University of Iowa. She is the author of Gay Fatherhood: Narrative of Family and Citizenship in America (2009), Recognizing Ourselves: Ceremonies of Lesbian and Gay Commitment and Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture.
Ellen Lewin’s major research interests center on motherhood, reproduction, and sexuality, particularly as these are played out in American cultures. Over the course of her career, she has completed studies that focus on low-income Latina immigrants in San Francisco, lesbian mothers, and lesbian and gay commitment ceremonies in the US. She is now writing a book on gay fathers — men who have fathered or adopted children either on their own or with male co-parents or who became parents during earlier heterosexual unions. Her work explores questions such as if men can be mothers, then can the conventional, biologically-drawn boundaries of the basic gender categories — women and men — be defended? To the extent that gay male communities have normatively included only “adults,” how do gay fathers position themselves and create communities and systems of social support and how do they articulate their identities?
As a scholar working at the juncture of feminist, cultural, and medical anthropology, Lewin’s work has long concerned the ways in which women make sense of the multiple identities they derive from ethnicity, race, and class, sexual orientation, and maternal status. In lesbian and gay studies her work has focused on the construction of community in American cultural contexts, and, in response to recent debates in feminist and queer theory, to devising more nuanced understandings of concepts of resistance and accommodation. Lewin’s work in both feminist anthropology and lesbian and gay studies has also led her to write about questions of ethnographic representation in relation to both gender and sexual orientation. She has also maintained an active interest in women’s experience in the health care system, particularly in terms of the ways in which patients and providers negotiate access to reproductive care.