Susan Markens

I joined the Sociology Department at Lehman College in September 2007.  I am currently serving as Deputy Chair of the department.  Additionally, I’m affiliated with the Women’s Studies Program at Lehman, and am also Affiliated Faculty with the Sociology Department and Women’s and Gender Studies Programs at The Graduate Center.  Prior to arriving at Lehman I taught at Temple University, and have held Mellon and NIH post-doc positions at Rutgers University, Brandeis University and UCLA.  I received my Ph.D. in Sociology from UCLA, and my B.A. in Sociology from Brandeis University. 

The main course you will find me teaching every semester at Lehman is Sociological Perspectives of Gender and Society (Soc. 228).  I have also taught Fundamentals of Sociology (Soc. 166), Sociology of Gender & Reproduction (Soc. 322), and Sociology of the Family (Soc. 227).  Most of my courses are cross-listed with Women’s Studies courses, and I often teach sociology sections that are cross-listed with the Lehman’s Honor’s Program. 

My research focuses on the proliferation of reproductive practices and biomedical and genetic technologies as they shape and are shaped by ideologies of gender, race and class, notions of kinship relations, risk discourse, medicalization processes, and conceptions of health and illness.  My book, Surrogate Motherhood and the Politics of Reproduction, was published by University of California Press.  In this study, I explored how social actors and institutions came to define, and respond to, the “social problem” of surrogate motherhood in the late twentieth century. As a follow-up to the book I also published two articles in which I analyze more recent U.S. media accounts of transnational surrogacy and the racialized and stratified assumptions that continue to permeate discourses about reproduction and mothering.  

In most of my other published research to date I have pursued my interests in reproductive issues, particularly with respect to the medicalization of pregnancy and women's bodies, as well as the geneticization of health.  I am the lead author of several papers that address the extent to which contemporary pregnant women comply with a biomedical vision of their pregnancies and ask to what degree women control decisions about prenatal care and activities.  I am also a co-editor of vol. 20 of Advances in Medical Sociology, Reproductive, Health, and Medicine.  Currently, I am working on a NSF grant-funded project that examines genetic counselors and their translational and ethical roles as genetic science moves from the lab to the clinic.  

• CV (PDF)