Date: Nov. 15, 2011
Contact: Carol Connelly, Director, Media & Communication Services, ext. 5267, cconnelly@pnc.edu

 

Dr. Carla Pfeffer, assistant professor of Sociology

PNC Faculty Member Earns National Honors

Westville – Dr. Carla Pfeffer, Purdue University North Central assistant professor of Sociology, has been awarded The National Council on Family Relations' (NCFR) Feminism and Family Studies Section prestigious Jessie Bernard Award In Feminist Research Outstanding Contribution to Feminist Scholarship Paper.

The award was presented as part of the 73rd National Council on Family Relations Annual Conference in Orlando. The NCFR is the nation's premier professional association for the multidisciplinary understanding of families. It has a membership of more than 3,500 family researchers, practitioners and educators.

Pfeffer's most recent work has been published in the “Journal of Marriage and Family,” “Journal of Lesbian Studies” and the “Journal of Homosexuality.” She is working on the book, “Postmodern Partnerships: Women, Transgender Men, and Twenty-First Century Queer Families,” under contract with Oxford University Press.

Her research exists at the intersections of burgeoning areas of sociological inquiry connected to contemporary LGBTQ families, gender, and bodies. Pfeffer's work on women's partnerships with transgender and transsexual men considers social actors' disruption of existing sociolegal notions of identities, bodies and families. The families and relationships these partners co-create often cannot be neatly conceptualized as either "same-sex" or "opposite-sex" using existing typologies.

She is also working on a study examining fat and size-acceptance advocates and activists in the era of the "obesity epidemic" to consider how weight management attempts and disclosures about these attempts, simultaneously reflect and fissure notions of "responsible" social citizenship, health, and sociopolitical group membership.