Dr Debra Ferreday
Senior LecturerProfile
I am a feminist cultural theorist working on digital media, film, TV, celebrity culture, performance and popular music. I am particularly interested in the intersections between gender and sexuality studies, race, disability and discourses of mental distress and mental wellbeing in popular media.
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 things we carry, and how media resonate with often hidden aspects of the self to create productive conversations around mental health. My work considers these intersections between trauma and media representation, reception and production: from examining how fans respond to representations 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 the 'mad women' figure in celebrity culture, I am primarily interested in the way popular culture has the power not only to harm, but to engender affirmative, dissident spaces of resistance.
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.
Current Research
My work focusses on the role played by arts and media in shaping lived subjectivities and bodies, and in enabling new ways of thinking about gender, race, queerness and disability. A key focus of my recent work is the absence of mental illness in feminist accounts of intersectionality. My work on mental health aims to expand the way we think about distress, wellness and media representation and spectatorship. By addressing the 'mental illness gap' in media research and the 'media gap' in mental health research, my work centres the creative and intellectual work of 'mad' artists and fans.
Questions of embodiment, power and intimacy have always been central to my work. My current research project, Cannibal Cultures, explores these themes by exploring images of cannibalism in contemporary culture, ranging from queer romance to post-MeToo dating satire to narratives of ecocide, waste and care.
My second project, Figuring The Maligned Nineties Woman, builds on my long-term interests in celebrity, trauma, memory and social haunting. Through contentious figures like Courtney Love, Sinead O'Connor and Britney Spears, I examine how music, fan culture and celebrity culture represent powerful spaces for understanding the impact of mediated trauma.
Current Teaching
I teach and supervise across a wide range of programmes in Media and Cultural Studies and Gender Studies. Currently I convene and teach on: MCS227 Gender and Media; MCS320 Queer Cultures; GEN407 Debates in Gender Studies, and MCS923 Methods in Media & Cultural Studies. I also supervise projects on our UG and PGT dissertation modules, MCS360 and MCS949.
PhD Supervision Interests
I welcome applications from doctoral candidates in: media and/or cultural studies; gender studies; queer theory and queer media; mental health; feminist theory; fan and audience studies; popular music; digital media. Supporting PhD supervisees is a central part of my academic practice. I am a former Doctoral Director for the Gender Studies, Media and Cultural Studies and Gender Studies doctoral programmes and have examined many theses in the UK and overseas. In the past 15 years I have co-supervised 15 PhD students to completion. I have supervised projects in diverse interdisciplinary fields including English, Theatre Studies, Health and Medicine, Music Studies. I welcome applications from students interested in feminist and queer theory working across the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Cannibal Cultures
27/06/2024 → …
Research
Gender, Media and anti-Nostalgia: figuring the 'Maligned Nineties Woman'
01/12/2023 → …
Research
NWSSDTP: Re-Imagining Social Change: Disability Human Rights Activism in Neoliberal Democracies. Poland and the UK as Case Studies (Magdalena Szarota)
01/10/2023 → 15/10/2025
Research
Researching Affect and Affective Communications
15/05/2009 → 26/03/2010
Research
Networked Learning
01/02/2003 → …
Research
Cannibal Cultures
01/01/1900 → …
Research
'Raw, Vulnerable and Fearless?' Sinead O'Connor and Postdigital Bipolar Celebrity
Invited talk
Keynote: 'Raw, Vulnerable and Fearless?' Sinead O'Connor and Digital Narratives of Bipolar Celebrity
Invited talk
Trans-Forming Medicine Conference 2017: Perspectives on Transgender Healthcare
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Screening Rape: the politics of popular culture
Invited talk
Is the Internet Good for Feminism? w/ Caroline Criado-Perez, Shoshana Devora, Polly Davis & Debra Ferreday
Invited talk
Researching DIY Cultures: Towards a situated ethical practice
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Damaging the Body
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Bodies: Flesh, performance, media, disgust and desire
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Visualising the Damaged Body: Anorexia, Haunting, and Futurity.
Invited talk
Manchester Digital Media Network Workshop 2: Methods and Challenges of Researching Social Networking Sites
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Everyday Belongings: Theorising the self, society and change A one-day symposium
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Sage Publications (Publisher)
Editorial activity
Affective fabrics of digital cultures: feelings,technologies, politics
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
AFFECTive and AFFECTing Research: Researching Affect in the Social Sciences
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Onscenity Network
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Ninth Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association: Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Haunted futurities
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Hope: A Workshop on Feminist Theory
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Researching Affect and Affective Communication
Participation in workshop, seminar, course
Body and Society (Journal)
Editorial activity
Home Cultures (Journal)
Editorial activity
6th International Networked Learning Conference
Participation in conference -Mixed Audience
Theory, Culture and Society (Journal)
Editorial activity
Feminist Theory (Journal)
Editorial activity
Feminist Media Studies (Journal)
Editorial activity
- Centre for Gender Studies