Dr Debra Ferreday

Senior Lecturer

Profile

I am a feminist cultural theorist working on digital media, film, TV, celebrity culture, performance and popular music. My work is intersectional, interdisciplinary, and concerned with complex entanglements between the personal and the political, and with the way power structures are internalised and resisted in relation to media and popular culture. I am interested in the intersections between trauma and media production: from examining the intersection of racialised, queer and generational trauma in Pose and RuPaul's Drag Race to exploring how Rihanna works with images of sexual violence that challenge the commodification of her own lived experience as a Black woman, to my more recent work on female stars, fandom and histories of colonial oppression and Mad activism, I am primarily interested in the way popular culture has the power not only to harm, but to engender affirmative, dissident spaces of queer, Mad and Black joy.

My current work uses concepts of social haunting, queering and critical mental health studies to examine how 'the margins' are reproduced and inhabited through culture, and how the marginal historically operates as a space of creativity and resistance that is eroded by capitalism.

Editing Credits

My latest book New Queer Television: From Marginalization to Mainstreamification (Intellect, 2025), co-edited with Tom Brassington and Dany Girard, explores these dynamics in relation to contemporary queer representation.

Recently I have co-edited two journal special issues: Rethinking Marginality in Queer Popular Television, for Queer Studies in Media and Popular Culture (2022), and a Special Issue of Rock Music Studies on Courtney Love, which will be the first issue of this journal dedicated to a woman artist. This work stemmed from my project, Figuring the Maligned 90s Woman, which looks at nostalgia, temporality and trauma through the lens of older women and music fandom.


27/06/2024 → …
Research


01/12/2023 → …
Research


01/10/2023 → 15/10/2025
Research


15/05/2009 → 26/03/2010
Research


01/02/2003 → …
Research


01/01/1900 → …
Research


Invited talk


Invited talk


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Invited talk


Invited talk


Invited talk


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Invited talk


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Editorial activity


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Participation in workshop, seminar, course


Editorial activity


Editorial activity


Participation in conference -Mixed Audience


Editorial activity


Editorial activity


Editorial activity

  • Centre for Gender Studies