Margaret Speer, Ph.D.
Margaret Speer studies Long-19th-Century literature and photography, 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.
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Speer's book project, Suffisaunce, Switching, and Single White Female Sex Panic, historicizes and theorizes English 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 the University of California, Irvine, where she runs the Queer Theory Reading Group event series.
Selected Queer Theory Reading Group Events
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.
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.
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.