Michael Yarbrough

Michael W. Yarbrough is an interdisciplinary social scientist who studies the intersection of law, culture, and family. He is especially interested in how people define their relationships to each other, and in the ways these definitions reflect and shape struggles for power.

His current book manuscript pursues these questions through research among two groups recently incorporated into South African marriage law: people living in communities that observe African customary law; and people who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender. As the world's only jurisdiction that has recently extended its marriage laws to multiple social groups, South Africa makes possible a novel comparison Yarbrough uses to re-theorize how the official law of marriage translates--or doesn't--into daily practices and understandings. Articles from this project have been published in Social Politics, Law & Social Inquiry, and Sexualities, and earlier versions of the project received the Marvin B. Sussman Dissertation Prize from the Yale Sociology Department and a Fulbright-Hays fellowship. Yarbrough has published other work on South African marriage and family in the South African Review of Sociology and the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism.

Yarbrough has also recently published three co-edited volumes (with Angela Jones and Joseph Nicholas DeFilippis) on queer families and relationships, queer activism, and queer political priorities after the arrival of legal marriage rights. Published with Routledge in 2018 as the After Marriage Equality series, these volumes build on a conference Yarbrough conceived and co-organized that convened 450 scholars, activists, artists, and community members at John Jay to examine how LGBTQ communities and movements are changing after the legalization of same-sex marriage, and to chart future directions for research and activism.

At John Jay, Yarbrough's teaching focuses on the Law & Society major and received a Distinguished Teaching Prize in 2015. Outside of John Jay, Yarbrough serves as a Senior Research Associate of the Department of Sociology at the University of Johannesburg, and is a former member of the Board of Directors for CLAGS: The Center for LGBTQ Studies.