Lewin, Ellen

Ellen Lewin, a full professor in the Departments of Anthropology and Women's Studies at the University of Iowa, earned her Ph.D. from Stanford in 1975. Dr. 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 United States. Her current book in progress focuses 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.

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, class, sexual orientation, and maternal [Page 651]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. Several of these concerns come together in Lewin's research. Definitions of motherhood and assumptions about its intersection with womanhood have been central to feminist theory in anthropology and in other fields. Often these ideas draw directly on notions of nature and culture, merging particular components of motherhood with virtue and authenticity.