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Laura
Mamo
Associate
Professor
Ph.D.
University of California, San Francisco, 2002
Office:
3149 Art-Sociology Building
Phone: 301
405-9581
Email: lmamo@socy.umd.edu
Departmental Specialty Areas:
Theory
Additional Research Interests:
Medical Sociology, Science and Technology
Studies
Laura
Mamo
is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and
an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Departments of Women’s Studies
and LGBT Studies. Her teaching areas include contemporary social
theories; feminist social thought; cultural and social studies of
science, technology and medicine and queer theory and sexuality studies.
Her research explores intersections of gender and sexuality with
experiences of health, illness, and the body; processes of
biomedicalization; and new pharmaceutical technologies.
 Her first book, Queering Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of
Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007) begins with a paradox:
Lesbians’ trying to get pregnant have a social problem not a medical
one; they need a substance that is by no means scarce. And the
procedure of insemination is very simple, requiring the simplest of
technologies that can be learned from friends, the internet, and other
media sources. Yet, with increasing frequency lesbians are turning to
biomedicine to become pregnant. Queering Reproduction explores this
paradox through in-depth interviews, cultural history, and theoretical
analysis. The book argues that over the course of the late twentieth
century, most significantly from the early 1990s onward in the U.S.,
medically assisted-conception (reproduction without sex) becomes a
standard for everybody and technoscientific knowledges and applications
enable this standardization.
She has a forthcoming book, Living Green: Communities that Sustain (New
Society Press, 2009) examining the social and health impacts of built
environments. This book joins a current research interest in health and
justice with social and environmental sustainability. She has a National
Science Foundation Grant in progress examining the mechanisms of social
sustainability.
In addition, Mamo is currently researching the development, FDA
approval, and marketing of drugs and devices targeting girls. Two
projects anchor this research. One examines the HPV vaccine Gardasil and
another the menstrual suppression drug (Seasonale®). She examines these “lifestyle drugs” as relatively new pharmacological therapies (along with others for the treatment of baldness, excessive weight or height,
depression, sexual function, general aging, allergies, etc) that
construct gender and produce biomedical subjects by promising a
re-fashioning of the body with transformative, life-enhancing results.
In a second project, financed by the Canadian Institute for Health
Research, she is studying the meanings of aging, anti-aging, memory
loss, and memory enhancement in the context of genetic knowledge and
testing for Alzheimer’s disease. The focus lies with the ways people
interpret and interact with scientific knowledge, in this case uncertain
knowledge of the role of genes and environment in Alzheimer’s disease,
and how these shape their actions.
Mamo has served as council member of the ASA section on Science,
Knowledge, and Technology and is a past-recipient of the 1999 Hacker-Mullins paper award from that section. She received the 2003
Rosenberg Mentor Award from the Department of Sociology, University of
Maryland.
Course Syllabi:
Sociology 621: Contemporary
Social Theory
Sociology
699D: Feminist Theory
Sociology 699E: Theories
of Science, Medicine, and the Body
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