Kathleen E. Hull
Associate Professor
Ph.D. 2001 Northwestern University
Room 1131 Social Sciences
tel.: 612-624-4339
email: hull@umn.edu
web: http://www.soc.umn.edu/~hull/
Interest Areas
Culture; Law; Social Movements; Family; Gender and Sexuality; Qualitative Methods.
Current Research
"The Construction and Contestation of 'Family' in LGBT Communities." This project draws upon interviews, focus groups, oral histories and archival material to examine the close relationships in the lives of sexual minorities. LGBT people are often invoked as threats to family in “family values” discourses, even as the gay rights movement focuses more than ever on a range of family issues including marriage and parenting rights. But we have little recent evidence about how ordinary LGBT people think about “family,” and whether they agree with the LGBT movement’s increasing family focus. This study will improve on past research on these issues by including a wide range of people within lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities, including people who are single, partnered, parents and non-parents, people from a range of racial/ethnic and class backgrounds, and people living outside of big cities as well as urban residents. The goals of this project are to advance theorizing about so-called nontraditional families and to assess how well the current efforts of the national LGBT movement match the needs and priorities of its constituencies.
"A Discourse Analysis of the American Marriage Movement." An emerging self-proclaimed "marriage movement" seeks to protect and strengthen the institution of traditional (heterosexual) marriage through efforts at legal and cultural change. This project examines the discourses of the national movement, with particular attention to how the movement talks about gender and class in relation to marriage and how the movement makes cultural arguments about threats to marriage.
Recent Publications
Same-Sex Marriage: The Cultural Politics of Love and Law. 2006. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
“Employment Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation: Dimensions of Difference.” 2005. Chapter in Handbook on Employment Discrimination Research: Rights and Realities, Robert L. Nelson and Laura Beth Nielsen, eds. New York: Springer.
“The Cultural Power of Law and the Cultural Enactment of Legality: The Case of Same-Sex Marriage.” 2003. Law & Social Inquiry, 28(3): 629-57.
“The Political Limits of the Rights Frame: The Case of Same-Sex Marriage in Hawaii.” 2001. Sociological Perspectives, 44(2): 207-232.