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.

'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

'What doesn't kill you makes you stranger': the queer temporalities of survival as superpower in Marvel's Jessica Jones
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