Aug 12, 20231 min read

Unhitched: Love, Marriage, and Family Values from West Hollywood to Western China (NYU Series in Soc

Judith G. Stacey (born 1943) is an author and Professor Emerita of Social and Cultural Analysis and Sociology at New York University.[1] Her primary focus areas include gender, family, sexuality, feminist and queer theory, and ethnography.[2] Her book Unhitched explores family configurations that deviate from the standard Western concept of "marriage", including polygamous families in South Africa, the Mosuo people in southwestern China, and intimacy and parenthood among gay men in Los Angeles, California. She has published many works.[3] She is perhaps most known for her paper, co-authored with Timothy Biblarz, titled "(How) Does the Sexual Orientation of Parents Matter?" This study found that children with gay or lesbian parents "are well-adjusted, have good levels of self-esteem and are as likely to have high educational attainments as children raised in more traditional heterosexual families."[4]

A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world.