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Working-Class Queers

Working-Class Queers

Time, Place and Politics

by Yvette Taylor

Highlights the entanglement of British class and sexuality, in a society saturated by the rhetoric of diversity

Who cares about working-class queers in Britain today? Are queers marginal to the study of class, and are the working-classes marginal to queer studies? Yvette Taylor critically engages with the experience of working-class queers through cycles of crisis, austerity, recession and migration to show how they have been underrepresented and demands that this changes.

Drawing on growing academic, radical activism in queer studies and feminism, she critiques the policy, theory and practice that have maintained queer middle-class privilege at the expense of working-class queers.

Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education at the University of Strathclyde. She has worked with the Scottish Government researching LGBTQ+ lives in the pandemic, and with Scottish Ballet on Safe to be Me, exploring inclusive curriculum in schools. She is the author and co-editor of numerous books on queer life and class inequality, recently including Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education, and The Handbook of Imposter Syndrome.

'A much needed and timely deep forensic dive into the underrepresentation of working class queers within our queer structures and concepts'

- Juno Roche, writer

'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' (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021)

'Building on more than two decades of care-ful, engaged research with classed LGBT+ communities, Working-Class Queers makes major intellectual and ethical contributions to queer feminist methods. This book is a must-read for thinkers asking about the how of queer and lesbian studies, not least in that it reflects intimate methods of sharing negotiated by a scholar working in troubled and hopeful times alike.'

- Matt Brim, Professor of queer studies at the College of Staten Island, City University of New York

Introduction 
1. Fighting for the Queer Left
2. Un-Doing Queer-Class Data
3. Queer Life in the Pandemic
4. Queer Provincialisms in (Post)Brexit Britain
5. Queers and Austerity
6. Queer Anachronisms: Working-Class Lesbians out of Time and Place
7. Towards a Queer Working-Class Reading List

Published by Pluto Press in May 2023
Paperback ISBN: 9780745341026
eBook ISBN: 9781786808080

140mm x 216mm