Working Class Queers

With Pride month just around the corner we're thrilled to welcome Yvette Taylor to the bookshop to launch Working Class Queers & shake up our thinking around queerness and class.

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?

Yvette Taylor's new book focuses on the lives of working-class queers, contextualising 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.

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 commercialisation 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.

'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

'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 City University of New York

Our Author:

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.

Our Host is Maddie Breeze, a Senior Lecturer in Public Sociology at Queen Margaret University. She is author of Seriousness in Women's Roller Derby (2015) and recently co-authored Feminist Repetitions in Higher Education: Interrupting Career Categories (2020), with Yvette. Maddie also co-organised the Feminist  Research Network at the University of Strathclyde.