by Yvette Taylor
Pluto Press
5/20/2023, paperback
SKU: 9780745341026
What does it mean to be working-class and queer in twenty-first-century Britain? How is class experienced under conditions of austerity, while we are told society is classless? Do younger and older queers identify in class terms? How do queers navigate life in a post-feminist and 'post-gay' world?
This book focuses on the lives of working-class queers, contextualizing experiences and identities in changing cultural, social, and legal contexts. Amidst grand statements on LGBTQIA+ equalities as 'diversity rhetoric, ' it shows how struggles for recognition are always material and that class continues to shape queer lives.
Yvette Taylor addresses these lives through a wide range of contexts, including education, employment, family, and queer space. Exploring who is represented and who is excluded within the globalized rainbow acronym; she looks at the commercialization of queer spaces and the political endorsement of a certain type of 'queer subject;' and how employment can act as a barrier and a disadvantage for working-class queers.
Reviews:
"This work holds rich and deep insights into lived experience, the power lines of learning within institutions, how people act on and transform each other in community. Yvette's book opens doors and transforms fault lines. It will be beneficial to thinkers, feelers and doers for years to come." -- Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York
"A much needed and timely deep forensic dive into the underrepresentation of working class queers within our queer structures and concepts" -- Juno Roche, author of Trans Power: Own Your Gender
About the Author:
Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde. She is the author and co-editor of several books, including Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects and The Entrepreneurial University: Engaging Publics, Intersecting Impacts. She edits the Palgrave Gender and Education series and co-edits the Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities series.