description Judith Stacey Overview
Judith Stacey is an American sociologist whose scholarship examines family change, gender, sexuality, and the political debates surrounding intimate life. Her book "Brave New Families" (1990) drew on research in California's Silicon Valley to analyze households that departed from the conventional nuclear-family model. Her work is associated with feminist sociology and the study of how economic and cultural changes reshape family relationships.
help Judith Stacey FAQ
What families did Judith Stacey study in Brave New Families?
Stacey conducted ethnographic research among working- and middle-class households in California's Silicon Valley. The 1990 book follows divorce-extended, matrifocal, evangelical, and other families that did not fit a single nuclear-family model.
Why does Judith Stacey use the term postmodern family?
She uses it to describe the instability and diversity of late-20th-century family arrangements rather than one new universal household type. Brave New Families examines how divorce, feminism, economic change, and religious life reshaped kinship.
What does Unhitched add to Stacey's earlier family research?
Unhitched expands the comparison beyond Silicon Valley to gay parenthood in Los Angeles, polygamous relationships in South Africa, and the Mosuo of southwest China. NYU Press published the book in hardcover in 2011.
Did Judith Stacey only research American families?
No, her scholarship includes socialist transformation in China as well as marriage and kinship across several societies. Her 1983 book Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China preceded Brave New Families.
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