简介

Mary Burke: My primary areas of specialization are in gender, sexualities, and social movements, with an emphasis on LGBTQ social movements and queer politics. I have conducted research on mainstream and alternative press coverage of the same-sex marriage debate, focusing especially on the place of feminist and queer critiques of the institution of marriage within the debate. I have also conducted ethnographic research with a LGBT marriage equality group, examining the relationship between professionalization and emotions in social movements. In my current research, I continue to examine gender, sexualities, and social movements, while at the same time shifting to a focus on sociological studies of medicine and health.In this work, I examine debates over medical diagnosis and treatment within the transgender rights movement as a way to explore the role of and relationships between medico-psychological discourse and practice and social movement activity in changing conceptions of sex and gender and processes of medicalization and demedicalization. My work appears in Introducing the New Sexuality Studies and Advances in Medical Sociology, Volume 12: Sociology of Diagnosis. I received my B.A. in Sociology & Anthropology from Western Connecticut State University and my M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology, as well as a Graduate Certificate in Women's Studies, from the University of Connecticut. Before coming to UVM, I worked as an instructor of Sociology and Women's Studies at the University of Connecticut. I currently hold the position of Lecturer in the Sociology Department and Gender, Sexuality and Women's Studies Program at UVM, where I teach courses on gender, sexualities, LGBTIQ studies, medicine, and social theory.