0000-0001-5201-4808
Tegan is a PhD candidate and Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School. Her thesis explores the ways that shifting concepts of gender, sexuality and mental illness across the 20th century in Australia influence the trials of queer women accused of homicide. Methodologically, she draws on her disciplinary backgrounds in history, law, and queer and feminist theory.
Tegan is an Editorial Board Member of the Australian Feminist Law Journal and served as Editor of the Melbourne Journal of International Law. Tegan is admitted as a solicitor of the Supreme Court of Victoria and has previously worked as a research assistant, paralegal and in hospitality. Her work has been published in the Griffith Law Review, the Australian Feminist Law Journal and the Alternative Law Review. She also written for the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Tegan has a JD from Melbourne Law School, a first-class MA (Global Media Communications) and BA (History and Politics) from the University of Melbourne. She was awarded the 2023 Professor Colin Howard Memorial Prize for JD Published research for her article ‘Murderesses, monsters and madwomen: Gender performance and the assessment of queer culpability in the Australian legal imagining’ in the Griffith Law Review.
Thesis title
‘Circumstances of Peculiar Horror’: Gender, Madness and Monstrous Queerness in the Australian Murder Trial
Thesis summary
Queer women receive longer sentences than cisgender, heterosexual women when convicted of homicide, and are frequently described as monstrous both by the media and in the courtroom in highly publicised trials. This thesis examines the process by which queer female homicide defendants are narratively constructed as monstrous and how this designation produces specific legal outcomes in the criminal law’s assessment of intention, culpability and responsibility. I examine three Australian trials across the 20th century to trace the evolution of ideas of sexuality and gender deviance, psychology and the criminal law itself, and the ways in which these factors interact.
Supervisors
- Criminal Law
- Queer and Post-modern Legal Theory
- Law and Humanities
- Feminist Legal Theory
- Legal History