Melanie Heath is Associate Dean of Graduate Students and Professor of Sociology at McMaster University. She studies the politics of family, sexuality, and gender. Her work has examined the construction of masculinities and femininities in conservative religious families, how the state sought to promote heterosexual marriage as a way to regulate non-normative sexualities and promote conservative gender norms, the politics of straight and same-sex weddings, and the comparative regulation of global polygamies as a forbidden practice.
She is author of Forbidden Intimacies: Polygamies at the Limits of Western Tolerance (2023, Stanford University Press), co-winner of the 2024 Sociology of Sexualities’ Distinguished Book Award. In addition, she is author of One Marriage Under God: The Campaign to Promote Marriage in America (2012, New York University Press) and The How to of Qualitative Research, second edition (with Janice Aurini and Stephanie Howells, 2022, Sage). She co-edited Global Feminist Autoethnographies During COVID-19 (with Akosua Darkwah, Josephine Beoku-Betts, Bandana Purkayastha, 2022, Routledge).
Her current research is a comparative-historical analysis of sexual regimes--the intersection of sexuality and diverse family structures with state policies--in the United States, Canada, and France. This multi-method project explores how intimacies are experienced in different sexual regimes, and how the meanings individuals attribute to their sexual and family choices vary in the United States, Canada, and France, including among LGBTQ+, non-monogamous, and non-white populations? This research contributes to debates on the changing nature of family and sexuality, and offers insights on important social and political issues among understudied populations. It is funded by a four-year SSHRC Insight Grant.
RESEARCH AREAS
Sociology of Gender and Sexualities; Sociology of Family; Political Sociology; Social Inequality; Global and Transnational Sociology; Qualitative Methods
Email: mheath@mcmaster.ca
Twitter: @DrMelanieHeath