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Margaret Speer, Ph.D.

Margaret Speer studies Long-19th-Century literature and culture, histories of whiteness and sexuality, and queer and transgender theory. She has published on materialist feminism, literary cross-gender ventriloquism, film, and situational identity categories. She teaches courses in Anglophone literature and medical humanities at the University of California, Irvine and at the Richard J. Donovan men's correctional facility in San Diego.

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Speer's book project, Suffisaunce, Switching, and Single White Female Sex Panic, historicizes and theorizes English transphobia, lesbianism, white womanhood, and female self-sufficiency,  examining objects from the portraiture of Queen Elizabeth to modernist literature on women's property.

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Speer studied English literature, Visual Culture, and Critical Theory at UCI, where she currently runs the Queer Theory Reading Group event series and serves as an Assistant Course Director in Composition.

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Curriculum Vitae

University of California, Irvine Features

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Selected Queer Theory Reading Group Events

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Spring 2021

Decadently Queer, or Queerly Decadent? Gender, Sexuality, and Narratives of Decay: A Symposium

Resolutely rescheduled after the the Covid-19 shutdown, the Queer Theory Reading Group's "Decadence" symposium sparked conversations both specific and meta-disciplinary.

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Spring 2019

Queer@UCI: A Symposium

In 2019, Margaret and QTRG recruited social scientists, archivists, and scholars in the humanities--as well as students, faculty, and alumni--to speak at a truly interdisciplinary, two-day symposium about the present and history of LGBTQ-focused research and queer studies at UC Irvine. Margaret spent several months with UCI's institutional archive, curating an exhibition of Irvine's activist and scholarly clashes, triumphs, and tragedies.

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Spring 2018

Futures of Queer Theory: A Conference

The first major conference Margaret organized asked, how have considerations of race, class, historicism, trans identity, anachronism, affect, and biopower complicated discussions of queerness, temporal forms, and futurity?

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Spring 2018

"Disturbing Attachments:" A Book Talk by Kadji Amin

In 2018, Margaret Speer and QTRG organized multiple book talks with emerging scholars breaking ground in the fields of queer theory and literary criticism. Kadji Amin's Disturbing Attachments: Genet, Modern Pederasty, and Queer History examines the very foundations of queer theory in problematic idealizations of "non-normative"--or fetishistic--relations of race and age.

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Winter 2018

"The New Woman:" A Book Talk by Emma Heaney

A book talk by Emma Heaney on The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory was followed by a professionalization seminar for graduate students.

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Fall 2017

Affect and Disaffection, Queer and Now: A QTRG Mini-Seminar

Margaret's own first mini-seminar examined Los Angeles-based queer performance art within an increasingly dystopian nationscape.

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