About

Liz Montegary is an Associate Professor in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department at Stony Brook University. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from UC Davis. Her research interests include feminist and queer theory, transnational American studies, LGBT/queer activism, travel, tourism, and mobility studies, as well as the cultural studies of militarization.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Library science
• World Wide Web
• Gender studies
• Psychology
• Media studies

Selected publications

• Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation Queering Reproductive Justice: An Invitation, by Bond-TheriaultCandace. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2024. 276 pp. $28.00 paper. ISBN: 9781503639584.

  Contemporary Sociology A Journal of Reviews · 2026-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Anti-Gender, Anti-University: "Gender Ideology" and the Future of US Higher Education

  Feminist formations · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Gender studies

  This article illustrates how the global movement against "gender ideology" informs rightwing attacks on university-based research and mainstream academic institutions in the United States. I take as my starting point the figure of Robert Oscar Lopez—a "pro-family" activist who participated in anti-gender mobilizations in Western Europe as a tenured professor at a California public university. In addition to publishing numerous online pieces about the dangers of marriage equality and "same-sex parenting," he has written extensively about US higher education and the difficulties he faced as a Brown, Christian, conservative professor. Through an examination of Lopez's essays on the university from 2012 (when he first spoke out against LGBT equality) to 2016 (when he resigned from his faculty position), I track the shifting contours of conservative hostility toward the academy amidst the resurgence of far-right populisms around the globe and the mainstreaming of ultraconservative ideas in US political culture. The first half of this article discusses the role counterknowledge production played in Lopez's "pro-family" activism. Taking cues from anti-gender campaigns in Western Europe—and building on the American right's ongoing efforts to produce "academicized" conservative expertise—Lopez sought to undermine marriage equality by debunking queer and feminist research and offering alternative perspectives on LGBT families. In the second half, I examine Lopez's drift farther rightward. While his early writing imagined the possibility of a politicized conservative intellectual movement, his later essays abandoned this fantasy and, instead, derided college degrees as wastes of money and denounced publicly funded education. I pay careful attention to Lopez's attempts to cast his anti-gender/anti-university position as advancing women's rights, racial justice, and anti-colonial resistance. In the process, this article provides insight into how far-right racial, gender, and sexual politics scramble conventional distinctions between the left and the right.

  PublisherDOI

• Healthy Families, Secure Bodies

  GLQ A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies · 2020

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Political Science
  • Library science

  Research Article| January 01 2020 Healthy Families, Secure Bodies Liz Montegary Liz Montegary Liz Montegary is an associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University in New York. She is the author of Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families (2018) and the coeditor of Mobile Desires: The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice (2015). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google GLQ (2020) 26 (1): 140–151. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7929171 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Liz Montegary; Healthy Families, Secure Bodies. GLQ 1 January 2020; 26 (1): 140–151. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-7929171 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsGLQ Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

  PublisherDOI

• Index

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-12-31

  paratext1st authorCorresponding
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• Familiar Perversions

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2019-08-20 · 6 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past two decades, same-sex couples raising children have become more visible within US political and popular culture. Thanks to widely circulated images of well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-off two-parent families, a select number of LGBT-identified parents have gained recognition as model American citizens. In Familiar Perversions , Liz Montegary shows how this seemingly progressive view of same-sex parenting has taken shape during a period of growing racial inequality and economic insecurity in the United States. This book evaluates the recent successes of the “family equality” movement, while asking important questions about its relationship to neoliberalism, the policing of sexual cultures, and the broader context of social justice organizing at the turn of the twenty-first century. Montegary’s investigation of the politics of LGBT family life takes us on a journey that includes not only activist events and the courtrooms where landmark decisions about same-sex families were made, but also parenting workshops, cruise ships, and gay resort towns. Through its sustained historical analysis, Familiar Perversions lays critical groundwork for imagining a queer family movement that can support and strengthen the diverse networks of care, kinship, and intimacy on which our collective survival depends.

  PublisherDOI

• For the richer, not the poorer

  2018-07-04

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter explores the uneven effects of marriage equality on different lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) populations. It focuses on the ways that marriage, gay and straight alike, functions as a tool that both the nation's richest citizens and the national government use to preserve their wealth. The chapter also explores what interests most is what happened after the nationwide legalization of same-sex marriage: The Obama administration identified poor LGBT communities as potential targets for federally funded programs to promote marital family norms. It shows how the political visions driving Christopher Street's advisory practices and HHS's marriage-promotion initiatives are tied to a very narrow understanding of what it means to be a family and what it looks like to fight for social change. Marriage has been a tool that many families use to pool and protect their assets, and the laws of most countries continue to provide financial benefits to many married couples and their families.

  PublisherDOI

• Familiar Perversions: The Racial, Sexual, and Economic Politics of LGBT Families

  2018-07-18 · 3 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Over the past two decades, same-sex couples raising children have become more visible within US political and popular culture. Thanks to widely circulated images of well-mannered, well-dressed, and well-off two-parent families, a select number of LGBT-identified parents have gained recognition as model American citizens. In Familiar Perversions, Liz Montegary shows how this seemingly progressive view of same-sex parenting has taken shape during a period of growing racial inequality and economic insecurity in the United States. This book evaluates the recent successes of the "family equality" movement, while asking important questions about its relationship to neoliberalism, the policing of sexual cultures, and the broader context of social justice organizing at the turn of the twenty-first century. Montegary’s investigation of the politics of LGBT family life takes us on a journey that includes not only activist events and the courtrooms where landmark decisions about same-sex families were made, but also parenting workshops, cruise ships, and gay resort towns. Through its sustained historical analysis, Familiar Perversions lays critical groundwork for imagining a queer family movement that can support and strengthen the diverse networks of care, kinship, and intimacy on which our collective survival depends

  PublisherDOI

• Cruising to Equality: Tourism, U.S. Homonationalism, and the Lesbian and Gay Family Market

  Women's studies quarterly · 2017-01-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article looks back on the recent history of Rosie O'Donnell's gay family cruise company in order to illustrate how consumption practices bolstered lesbian and gay claims on citizenship during the post-9/11 era. Through an analysis of the production of lesbian and gay parents as consumer citizens, I contribute to the body of transnational feminist and queer cultural studies scholarship dealing with tourism, sexuality, and national identity, and I provide new insights into understanding homo-sexuality's collusions with U.S. nationalism at the turn of the twenty-first century.

  PublisherDOI

• Sounding the Border

  Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2015-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author

  'Sounding the Border' is a conversation between the editors and artist duo, Bambitchell, about their 2011 installation, Border Sounds. Focusing on the material elements of their site-specific installation, the artists reflect on their use of passports, dubstep, a parking garage, and dance to interrogate the complex and nuanced web of affects and intimacies produced and experienced at the site of the border. Blending contradictory elements and objects in the production of their work, Bambitchell aligns Border Sounds with queer critiques of mobility by taking into account the deeply subjective aspects of movement in relation to borders and border-crossings while foregrounding a sense of intimacy within processes commonly understood and depicted as only ever alienating. Keywordsaffectborders(im)mobilityintimacysite-specific installation

  PublisherDOI

• The Politics and Erotics of Mobility Justice: An Introduction

  Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 2015-01-01 · 3 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Opening with a brief overview of recent events across the globe that flash up a host of questions and concerns for academics, activists, and artists concerned with the politics of mobility and immobility today, this introductory chapter sketches out the political and intellectual stakes of calls for mobility justice and asks what becomes methodologically possible when mobilities researchers and mobility justice advocates grapple with feminist, queer, and trans theories of affect and embodiment. Setting the theoretical stage for the rest of the collection, the introduction identifies three distinct but related trajectories informing the critiques to come: (1) feminist theories of embodiment and the politics of location; (2) Foucaultian theories of disciplinary and biopolitical regimes; and (3) theorizations of desire, emotion, and affective governance. This chapter concludes by providing an overview of the innovative methodologies put forth by the essays compiled in the collection.Keywordsaffectbodiesdesiremethodologymobility justicepower

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Melissa White

  3 shared