Monica was born in Chicago in 1966, the same year the National Organization for Women was founded and exactly one week before the debut of the television series Star Trek. Her early years were spent with sister Tanya and a gaggle of girlfriends playing in the alleys and streets of their neighborhood like the latchkey urchins they were. The girls explored the city’s many fine cultural offerings, too—on their own, on school field trips, with their parents, and with their beloved Gramps.
At age 11, Monica moved with her family to a small town (population 1200) in rural Wisconsin, where she learned how to ride (and occasionally crash) dirt bikes and snowmobiles, worked as a newspaper delivery girl and a waitress, fell in love with a blue-eyed jock, and made some good friends. There, however, she remained somewhat in a state of culture shock—always the city girl in a puzzling world of farm animals and summer "lake people" wearing brightly colored Izod shirts—until returning to her hometown in 1984 to begin college at the University of Chicago.
She majored in sociology, convinced that she would eventually attend law school and become a Supreme Court Justice (preferably Chief Justice, of course). But surprisingly, Monica decided against law school in favor of academia. Turns out she quite liked reading, writing, and engaging in critical social analysis. And she adored research from day one, from her first study of a Hyde Park street for Wendy Griswold's course. Monica took to ethnography like a bird to flight, and another “Chicago School” sociologist was born.
After college, she worked for two years in the fundraising/development world, first for the University of Chicago Library and then for a domestic violence shelter in the city—the only Chicago shelter at that time to welcome abused women and their children. Deeply committed to advancing women’s health and reproductive rights, she decided to attend graduate school in sociology at UC San Francisco, renowned for medical sociology, women's health, qualitative methodologies, and health policy.
In 1990, Monica moved to San Francisco and began a lifelong love affair with Northern California: tawny fog-shrouded hills, robust red wines, hand-crafted goat cheese, progressive politics, Armistead Maupin novels, and always the ocean's brine salting the air. Graduate school was a dream: enlightening, challenging, nurturing, and profoundly women-centered. Some of Monica's best and most enduring relationships—with Adele Clarke,Virginia Olesen, and Lisa Jean Moore were developed at UCSF. There she learned not only how to be a passionate and conscientious medical sociologist, but also how to be a feminist mentor.
With Ph.D. in hand, in 1995 she began a postdoctoral fellowship in biomedical ethics at Stanford University, working with anthropologist Barbara Koenig and colleagues on an interdisciplinary project exploring genetic testing for breast cancer. And in 1996, she started her first tenure-track job in sociology, at one of the most beautiful campuses in the country, UC Santa Cruz. Monica published her first book, The Making of the Unborn Patient, in 1998 and was thrilled when it won the C. Wright Mills Award. She was tenured at UCSC a few years later, and then, unconventionally, took a hiatus from academia to pursue another important mission—mothering.
In 2000, on an extended leave of absence from UCSC, she moved to a little yellow bungalow surrounded by lavender, roses, and fruit trees on Whidbey Island in Washington State. Monica gave birth to her lovely first daughter in 2001. Wanting to engage more actively in community-based work, she accepted a job as Executive Director of the Intersex Society of North America. She also published an edited volume, Synthetic Planet, about environmental politics. Monica's work for ISNA was cut short by the enchanting appearance of her second daughter in 2004.
That summer, she relocated with her family to Nashville, Tennessee (“Music City, USA”), where she served as director of Women’s and Gender Studies at Vanderbilt University. She spent four productive years in Nashville, building a program and raising her daughters. But as a northern fish in southern waters, Monica never grew to fully appreciate the place. While she misses her colleagues and friends there (not to mention the delicious barbeque and sweet tea at favorite haunts like the Loveless Cafe), she was in high spirits the day she drove out of Tennessee and headed west.
In 2008, Monica became Director of Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University's New College. She built what was still a new division (with support from a terrific staff) and was responsible for leading some 50 faculty members in the humanities, arts, and performance studies. She delivered the curriculum for numerous degree programs ranging from American Studies to History to Women and Gender Studies and helped to advance New College's agenda through other activities. Currently Professor of American Studies and Women and Gender Studies, she stepped down from her administrative position in June 2011. Click here to read her ASU profile.
Monica is currently researching infant mortality in the United States, specifically why the U.S. has no sustained program of intervention despite high infant death rates. As a feminist scholar and a mom, she's interested in why we make sense of child death in the numeric and abstract measure of "rates" rather than through a more emotional register. And she worries that the global and domestic policy emphasis on maternal/child health, while admirable and potentially successful, detracts from a commitment to women's health in a more comprehensive way by framing women as merely reproductive beings. She is also investigating politics of the HPV vaccine (with Laura Carpenter), traumatic brain injury (with Dan Morrison), and parental child abduction (with SJHR students Anique John-Carter and Alanna Kennedy).
Monica lives in Arizona with her partner Bill Simmons, their lovely daughters, two dogs, and two betta fish. She is available for lectures, workshops, and consulting.
