The Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice Noted Scholars Series (co-sponsored by Queer and Trans Anti-Fascisms Research Cluster) presents:
Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times
Dr. Tamara Lea Spira (GRSJ Visiting Faculty)
WHEN & WHERE
Wednesday November 19th,
12-1pm
Buchanan Tower, Room 323
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served at 1:00pm
About Dr. Tamara Lea Spira
Dr. Tamara Lea Spira
Tamara Lea Spira (she/her) is an interdisciplinary feminist and queer theorist whose work lies at the intersections of critical race, feminist, and transnational American Studies. Dr. Spira is currently a Professor of Queer Studies and American Studies in the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University. Spira obtained her PhD in the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies Departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was also University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow. She recently served as a “Beyond Health” Fellow at UC Davis’s Feminist Research Institute.
Professor Spira is the author of Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times (University of California Press, 2025) and Movements of Feeling: Feminist Radical Imaginations in Neoliberal Times (University of Washington Press, under contract). Her writings have been widely published in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, including Boundary2, Feminist Formations, Radical History Review, Feminist Studies, Feminist Theory, Identities, Signs, and Abolition Feminisms and popular venues such as Nursing Clio, The Feminist Wire, and LGBTQ Nation. Her new book project, Life Before Conception: Gamete Personhood in Times of Ecocide, examines the backwards creep of white legal personhood that accompanies the intensified forms of premature death that greet the majority of the world’s children—and the planet itself—in a battle over futures. Dr. Spira is also at work on a collection of prose and poetry called Into the Interregnum: Two Deathbeds and the Tending of Fires.
Dr. Spira’s academic work is informed by her longstanding praxis within anti-imperialist, anti-racist, and transnational feminist and queer movements in the Americas. From 2013-2014, she served as a Research Scholar at the Beatrice Bain Research Center at UC Berkeley, where she coordinated the collective project, “Archiving 1960s and 1970s Third World and Anti-Colonial Feminist and Queer Transnational Solidarities.” In addition to working as a grassroots organizer, she has co-founded several parent advocacy organizations and worked with a range of NGOs and movement organizations, including the United Nations, the Astraea Lesbian Fund for Justice, Justice Now, Critical Resistance, the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and Jewish Voice for Peace where she is a member of the Academic Advisory Council.
Queering Families Book Cover