Suzanna Danuta Walters
walterss@indiana.edu

Professor of Gender Studies
Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Communication & Culture

Courses:

G700 – Sexualized Genders/Gendered Sexuality
GS 498:  The Politics of Gay Visibility

Research:

Suzanna Danuta Walters is Professor and Chair of the Department of Gender Studies at Indiana University, where she also holds appointments in the departments of Sociology and Communications and Culture. Previously, she was a Professor of Sociology and Director of Women's Studies at Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

Her work is centered on questions of gender, sexuality, family, and popular culture and she is a frequent commentator on these issues for the media. Her most recent work - All the Rage: The Story of Gay Visibility in America (University of Chicago Press, 2001) - examined the explosion of gay visibility in culture and politics over the past 15 years and raised pressing questions concerning the politics of visibility around sexual identity. The book was a finalist for numerous literary awards (including the Lambda Literary Award) and was the subject of radio and television interviews and discussions, culminating in a 15 city book tour in the Fall of 2001 and Spring 2002. Her other works include books on feminist cultural theory (Material Girls: making sense of feminist cultural theory), mothers and daughters in popular culture (Lives Together/Worlds Apart: mothers and daughters in popular culture) and numerous articles and book chapters on feminist theory, queer theory and LGBT studies, and popular culture.

She is currently engaged with several research projects, including an extension of the analysis of gay visibility that asks about the construction of sexual communities and identities in a "post-visibility" age. In addition, she continues to investigate questions of family formation and is specifically researching how different modalities of "choice" figure into the decision-making of single mothers.