Judith Lorber (born November 28, 1931) is professor emerita of sociology and women’s studies at The CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
She was chair of the ASA sex and gender section in 1992–93 and was awarded the Jessie Bernard Award in 1996 “in recognition of scholarly work that has enlarged the horizons of sociology to encompass fully the role of women in society.” Judith Lorber was born in Brooklyn New York, where she attended public elementary and high school.
This perspective analyzes illnesses as social states in which norms and expectations for behavior will emerge from the interaction of patients and health-care workers with each other and with family members, friends, and co-workers.
Lorber’s next research project (with Roberta Satow) was interviewing psychiatric residents, social workers, and indigenous paraprofessionals in a ghetto community mental health center on issues of cultural congruity with patients and the stratification of prestige and work assignments.
[3] The book shows that because gender is embedded in the economy, the family, politics, and the medical and legal systems, it is a major factor in the behavior of patients and health care professionals.
The research she conducted with Lakshmi Bandlamudi and Dorothy Greenfeld found that couples shaped their experiences through their behavior with clinic staff and other caretakers and with each other, creating meaning and some sense of control for themselves.
Judith Lorber applied a feminist analysis to the growing use of IVF in male infertility, where the woman is fertile but the man isn't.
This situation sets the stage for marital bargaining, in which the woman seemingly is in a strong position, but which turns out to the man's advantage because of his dominance in the gender politics of the family.
[6] Lorber’s feminism (and love of science fiction thinking) appeared in print as early as 1975 in "Beyond Equality of the Sexes: The Question of the Children," followed by "Dismantling Noah's Ark" in 1986.
The first chapter, “Night to His Day: The Social Construction of Gender,”[12] has been widely anthologized, as has a paper based on the second chapter, “Believing is Seeing: Biology as Ideology.” The book has impacted not only sociology,[9] but also the fields of anthropology, history, social psychology, sociolinguistics, men's studies, culture studies, and even law.
She co-edited the Handbook of Gender and Women’s Studies, published by Sage UK in 2006 with Mary Evans and Kathy Davis.
In “Crossing Borders and Erasing Boundaries: Paradoxes of Identity Politics,” published in Sociological Focus in 1999, she pulled apart racial and transgender categories.
"[18] She also presented an invited paper, "Toward a World Beyond Gender: A Utopian Vision," with Barbara J. Risman and Jessica Holden Sherwood.
Recently, she has written and given presentations about the heroine of the popular Stieg Larsson trilogy – "The Gender Ambiguity of Lisbeth Salander: Third-wave Feminist Hero?
Lorber argues that “bodies differ in many ways physiologically; but they are completely transformed by social practices to fit into the salient categories of a society, the most pervasive of which are 'female' and ‘male and ‘women’ and 'men'".
[23] Lorber also describes the sense of liberation felt by many women when they first experienced driving, while participating in First World War efforts.
[24] Lorber points out that the diversity of humans could be categorized, regrouped and broken up into different ways of comparison than the traditional sex differentiation that disregards the real issues of who is truly like whom.
In 1997, she held the Marie Jahoda International Visiting Professorship of Feminist Studies at Ruhr University, Bochum, Germany.
[32] She was invited to present her work at international sociology and women’s studies conferences in China, Africa, South Korea, Australia, Canada, Israel, Scandinavia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, and Switzerland.