Amanda Roth
Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies at SUNY Geneseo
Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies at SUNY Geneseo
Amanda Roth
Professor of Philosophy and Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies
Coordinator of Gender, Sexuality, & Women's Studies
Interim Director of the Center for Social Justice Studies (Spring 2026)
SUNY Geneseo
contact: rothal@geneseo.edu
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Learn more about Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies (part of the Center for Social Justice Studies) at Geneseo
New in Fall 2024: Queer/Sexuality Studies Minor
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New in 2022/23: Carceral Studies Microcredential
My main academic interests include moral & political philosophy, feminist philosophy, bioethics, and gender & sexuality. I regularly teach courses on ethics, political philosophy, bioethics, introduction to women's and gender studies, gender & sexuality, feminist theory. I have also taught special topics courses on mass incarceration, abortion, pornography, and family & reproductive ethics.
Many of my teaching areas map on to past and current research interests. I have previously published on making sense of ethical progress and ethical objectivity as a pragmatist, gender and Kantian respect, and sports and theories of feminism. My more recent projects focus on abortion, pregnancy loss, reproductive technology, and queer families.
My book LGBTQ+ Family-Making, Reproductive Ethics, and the (Re)Shaping of Family Values was published at the very end of 2025 by Routledge.
I organized a Carceral Studies Learning Community in the 2021-22 academic year for faculty across disciplines and in spring 2026 am teaching for the Bard Prison Initiative.
I have been at Geneseo with a joint appointment in philosophy and women's & gender studies since 2014. Prior to that, I was an Instructor at Bowling Green State University and a Postdoc at the Center for Ethics in Public Life and Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan. Before that, I earned my Ph.D. in Philosophy at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor where I also worked with the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching as a Graduate Teaching Consultant. As an undergraduate I attended Lafayette College where I majored in philosophy and women's studies.
This book examines the ethical issues surrounding assisted reproductive technologies and queer family-making practices. By focusing on LGBTQ+ people and experiences in relation to procreative ethics, this book challenges dominant approaches and views in philosophical bioethics.
In Part 1 of this book, the author introduces the idea of queer epistemic privilege regarding issues of family and reproduction and applies this notion to the bioethical debates around donor conception. In Part 2, the author problematizes the typical philosophical conception of the debate over donor anonymity by centering queer perspectives and experiences. Drawing on social science research, she makes the case for “queer difference” in how donor conception is practiced and then employs this notion to show why the dominant ethical views opposing donor anonymity fail. Whereas most scholars view this issue as an issue of pure procreative/parental ethics, this book instead employs a queer perspective to draw out an alternative framing of the conflict—one between procreative/parental ethics and the moral responsibility to resist unjust social systems and norms, e.g. bionormativity. This broader framing offers a limited defense of some uses of anonymous donor gametes that is tied directly to the nature of ongoing LGBTQ+ family marginalization. Finally, in Part 3, the author draws attention to two aspects of donor conception that are common in the queer community but receive virtually no attention in the bioethical literature—known donation and donor sibling contact/relationships—and shows what we miss philosophically when these queer practices are erased from the bioethical discussions around donor conception.
LGBTQ+ Family-Making, Reproductive Ethics, and the (Re)Shaping of Family Values is an essential resource for researchers or advanced students working in Moral Philosophy—especially Reproductive Ethics, Feminist Philosophy, and LGBTQ+ Philosophy—Bioethics, and Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies.