Tamara

Tamara is a spirited activist, writer, educator, and researcher who is dedicated to revealing the hidden big picture behind hot-rod political debates surrounding queerness, children, and families from an intersectional and transnational feminist perspective. Tamara has co-founded and led several intergenerational grassroots efforts that center and prioritize the most societally forgotten youth—including queer/trans, BIPOC, disabled and migrant youth, and children of incarcerated parents, as well as youth impacted by imperialism, violence, and war. In addition to her grassroots experience, she has served as a consultant to organizations including UN Women, the Astrea Lesbian Fund for Justice, and the Global Fund for Women. 

Tamara is an Associate Professor of Queer Studies at Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University and former UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and a Research Fellow at the UC Davis Feminist Research Institute and UC Berkeley’s Beatrice Bain Center for Critical Gender Studies. She is the author of Queering Families: Reproductive Justice in Precarious Times, which excavates the rich history of queer reproductive justice, led by Black, decolonial, and queer of color feminist activists. Her work has appeared in a range of peer-reviewed and popular venues, including Radical History Review, Feminist Theory, Feminist Formations, Boundary2, Identities, Feminist Studies, Nursing Clio, RealLife Magazine, Signs Journal, NACLA Journal of the Americas and more. 

Tamara’s next project addresses contemporary debates surrounding life before birth in a historical context characterized by mass genocide and assault upon live children. She is also working on her first full-length monograph of narrative poetry addressing intergenerational memory, migration, genocide, and the imaginative futures of generations to come. Prof. Tamara is also a queer parent who is willing to pull on her academic expertise and lived experience working to create alternative structures for the next generation that center collectivity, mutual aid, poetry, art, and care. She is especially poised to push readers and audiences past moral panics and societal hysterias surrounding children and youth to challenge the real roadblocks to creating habitable world for future generations and a world befitting of all our children.