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The LGBT Action Plan (2018) represents a significant UK government commitment towards LGBTQI+ equalities, operating in conjunction with cumulative legislative advances. Yet there is room for critique within this Plan, as proposed actions and as celebratory rhetoric of lives ‘getting better’. Using empirical examples, this article examines how ‘progress’ for LGBTQI+ lives is discursively constructed and positioned in the LGBT Action Plan and accompanying politicians’ speeches. We examine the key constructions of progress – across time, place, lifecourses, and normative thresholds – within which LGBTQI+ rights and realities are framed. We draw upon queer theory to illuminate discursive normativities and silences in representing ‘policy problems’ (Bacchi, 2009). While some policy areas are celebrated as signifiers of ‘coming forward’, others are relegated to the too tough in-tray, suspended in enduring stasis. Opposing ‘political time’ with ‘queer time’, this article concludes with the policy challenges posed by intersectional (in)equalities in these ‘new times’.

This chapter is about carving out a pathway in academia or related gender and sexuality (G&S) careers. A panel of academic experts on G&S—including Professor Emeriti and Associate Professors with highly successful careers—answer eight questions about career pathways in research and education. All experts have held or hold academic roles in research-only institutions and teaching faculty roles, professional research roles, related professional/corporate/government roles, and engaged in both theoretical and empirical studies. All questions were submitted by emerging and student researchers, and workers in sexuality and gender in education, from various countries around the world.

Queer youth are positioned as 'at risk', and queer youth in religious settings and communities are seen as especially vulnerable due to the anti-LGBT sentiment assumed to inhere there. Governmental funding has recently been directed towards challenging homophobia, biphobia and transphobia in English faith schools specifically, as the political discourse of 'British values' comes increasingly to include an ostensible commitment to LGBT rights. It is in this context that we present qualitative research with queer religious youth who attended both faith and community schools in England. The lived experience of queer religious youth in faith schools is much more multi-faceted than is commonly represented – this was also the case for pupils in (non-faith) community schools. Rather than locating the problem within religion, attention needs to be paid to the heteronormativity and gender binarism that structures the entire educational experience. Furthermore, in engaging with the experiences of queer youth who are also religious, we explore the ways in which religion can be mobilised as a form of support, and more broadly argue against the tendency to see queer youth exclusively in terms of their queerness.

This book showcases and celebrates the work of Gender and Sexuality Education scholars in order to challenge current negative interpretations of the field, and work towards new shared visions. The editors and contributors call for, affirm and offer examples of pathways towards exciting and dynamic collaborative work in Gender and Sexuality in Education. In doing so, they also acknowledge the various complexities of this field, and detail the context-specific barriers faced by academics and activists. Drawing upon a range of global case studies, this book sets out information and advice from cross-sector experts to set an agenda of mutual supportiveness, and to smooth pathways for future collaboration. Above all, this book is a call to action to uplift the field – and each other – in challenging environments. This ground-breaking book will be of interest and value to scholars of Gender and Sexuality Education research.

This book offers new interdisciplinary analyses of borders and blockages in higher education and how they can be inhabited and reworked. Amidst stratified inequalities of race, gender, class and sexuality, across time and space, contributors explore what alternative academic futures can be claimed. While higher education institutions are increasingly concerned with 'internationalization', 'diversity', and 'widening access and participation', the sector remains complicit in reproducing entrenched inequalities of access and outcomes among both students and staff: boundaries of who does and does not belong are continually drawn, enacted, contested and redrawn. In the contemporary neoliberal, entrepreneurial and 'post'-colonial educational context, contributors critically examine educational futures as these become more uncertain. This wide-ranging collection serves as a call to action for those concerned with the future of higher education, and how alternative futures can be reimagined.

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In this chapter I hope to consider processes of being (or becoming) on the academic map and the emotional disjunctures across time and place felt in occupying academia, in conducting research and in moving through intersecting spaces of research-researched-researcher. The promise of entering and achieving in higher education is at once seductive (CVs produced, academic stars circulated internationally) and disturbing, felt and encountered across the university environment via administrative, teaching and research concerns. These points of arriving, departing and travelling through institutional space intersect with what I feel about occupying academia. The emotional ‘stickiness’ of these contexts contrasts with the vision of the engaged, inclusive institution that now welcomes all through its door, with this rhetoric of arrival and belonging effacing starting points, varied journeys, different labours and divided recognitions. These, I argue, are emotional matters manifest in teaching and research encounters, where a ‘critical pedagogy’ may be read as a failure, mobilised by the angry, emotional feminist academic, rather than her ‘neutral’ ‘objective’ ‘rational’ unemotional counterpart. In arguing for an emotional presence constituted in and through research, I consider the emotional landscape of class and sexuality in particular, asking what is taken with us as we travel through academia, where feminist research in particular has been critical of the travelling subject (or ‘self’), who tells only their own story. The connections that I chart encompass professional and personal passions and pains, as I inhabit research and teaching space.

How is sexuality studied methodologically? How are we innovating, methodologically, in the study of sexuality? What impact, if any, has the increase in mixed methodologies had on the study of sexuality? Sexualities Research brings together original contributions by emerging and world-leading scholars of sexuality. Through this volume the authors seek to address how theoretical and methodological choices enable wider dissemination and social impact of sexualities research. Indeed, covering a diverse range of theoretical perspectives and methodologies to provide important new insights into human sexuality, the chapters cover an array of topics from the experience of researching sexuality, to using theories in new and innovative ways. With an international scope, Sexualities Research also builds on the re-emergence of the European Sociological Association Sexuality Research Network and asks important questions about the study of sexuality in contemporary societies against the background of political upheaval and economic troubles. Certainly, this collection shows the importance and vitality of sociological understandings of human sexuality in the twenty-first century. An enlightening volume consisting of a variety of case studies and theoretical research, Sexualities Research will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as postdoctoral researchers who are interested in fields such as Sociology, LGBT/Queer Studies and Gender Studies.

This paper explores the construction of vocational and familial futures, in times of ‘aspiring’, ‘post-welfare,’ or ‘crisis’ youth transitions, as mediated by sexual-religious identification. By considering the intersectional relations of both sexuality and religion in constructing young people's aspirations, the paper highlights pragmatic and caring orientations, including a ‘calling’ to religion as a site of present-future vocational and familial investment. I challenge the separation of religion and sexuality in youth transitions, and in notions of the ‘times we're in’ as compelling certain kinds of future-orientated aspirant (and secular) selves. Overall, the article hopes to contribute to theorising the intersection sexuality and religion in further understanding the subversive – and conservative – potential of religious-sexual values and futures. Such orientations interface with aspects of ‘getting by’ and ‘getting on’ and at once re-inscribe and stretch normative vocational and familial choices.

In this piece I consider processes of being (or becoming) on the academic map and the emotional disjunctures across time and place felt in occupying academia, in conducting research and in moving through intersecting spaces of teaching-research. The promise of entering and achieving in Higher Education is at once seductive (CVs produced, academic stars circulated internationally) and disturbing, felt and encountered across the university environment, via administrative, teaching and research concerns. These points of arriving, departing and travelling through institutional space intersect with what I feel about occupying academia. The emotional ‘stickiness’ of these contexts contrasts with the vision of the engaged, inclusive institution that now welcomes all through its door, with this rhetoric of arrival and belonging effacing starting points, varied journeys, different labours and divided recognitions. These are emotional matters manifest in teaching and research encounters, where a ‘critical pedagogy’ may be read as a failure, mobilised by the angry, emotional feminist academic, rather than her ‘neutral’ ‘objective’ ‘rational’ un-emotional counterpart. In arguing for an emotional presence constituted in and through teaching and research, I consider the emotional landscape of class and sexuality in particular, asking what is taken with us as we travel through academia, where feminist research in particular has been critical of the travelling subject (or ‘self’), who tells only their own story.

The ninth international Gender and Education Association Conference Compelling Diversities, Educational Intersections hosted by the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, London South Bank University engages with key debates surrounding the interplay between dynamics of education, work, employment and society in the context of crisis, upheaval and cutbacks, which reconfigure axes of intersectional inequalities. In considering diversity in education, this conference looks at the relationship between new equality regimes and continued educational inequalities, exploring organisational ambivalence, change and resistance. Participants will be asking important questions about the role of feminist research at a time when education, and its variously placed subjects (academics, pupils, students, and policy-makers), wrestle with the commitments and contentions in doing diversity and being diverse. This brief commentary piece probes at what – and who – is being compelled into, through and for diversity and e...

This article addresses the negotiation of ‘queer religious’ student identities in UK higher education. The ‘university experience’ has generally been characterised as a period of intense transformation and self-exploration, with complex and overlapping personal and social influences significantly shaping educational spaces, subjects and subjectivities. Engaging with ideas about progressive tolerance and becoming, often contrasted against ‘backwards’ religious homophobia as a sentiment/space/subject ‘outside’ education, this article follows the experiences and expectations of queer Christian students. In asking whether notions of ‘queering higher education’ (Rumens 2014 Rumens, N. 2014. “Queer Business: Towards Queering the Purpose of the Business School.” In The Entrepreneurial University: Public Engagements, Intersecting Impacts, edited by Y. Taylor, 82–104. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.) ‘fit’ with queer-identifying religious youth, the article explores how educational experiences are narrated and made sense of as ‘progressive’. Educational transitions allow (some) sexual-religious subjects to negotiate identities more freely, albeit with ongoing constraints. Yet perceptions of what, where and who is deemed ‘progressive’ and ‘backwards’ with regard to sexuality and religion need to be met with caution, where the ‘university experience’ can shape and shake sexual-religious identity.

This article draws upon research with 60 white lesbian and gay parents from working-class and middle-class backgrounds, to consider the significance of class in the struggle for sexual citizenship in the context of the UK Civil Partnership Act (2004). While parenting is distinct from issues of partnering they are clearly related, not least in the ways that such policies themselves materialise families, offering new possibilities for societal recognition, legal recourse and access to welfare services. The issue of economics is significant, resourcing – or denying – various possibilities; class and sexuality also intersect in the construction of ‘normal’, ‘ordinary’ citizens now ready for inclusion. Many interviewees experienced this shifting terrain ambivalently, though a consequential classing of this figures in the erosion or consolidation of ‘worth’, ‘normality’ and ‘entitlement’, through which claims are made, families are (un)done and citizens are materialised. Both working-class and middle-class inte...

Sexuality frequently neglects class studies, just as class analysis ignores sexualities. This special issue of the journal Sexualities aims to open debates on class and sexuality with four original research studies on class and sex, along with four commentaries from leading experts in the field.

This Special Issue explores how religious identity and practice interplays with sexuality. It deliberately foregrounds attentiveness to a diversity of places and positions, as both ‘early career’, often emerging from PhD research, and as 'international', extending across the UK, Canada, Israel, Malaysia and Belgium. Of course the latter intention of being and doing 'international' arguably always fails, but it hoped that this Issue allows for some new voices within what are often still complicated – and sometimes rather confined – debates.

Here I explore some questions and dilemmas raised by considering social class, gender and sexuality within the same interconnecting research frame-work. I begin with attention to the theoretical development of intersectionality, arising from feminist conceptualisations of ‘differences that matter’, and the ways these are included in or excluded from research agendas. Exploring the limits and possibilities of intersectionality, I ask what counts as ‘intersectional’? Arguing that interconnections between class and sexuality have often been neglected in such moves, I seek to progress beyond intersectionality as a theoretical paradigm, towards understanding intersectionality as a lived experience. I draw upon research on working-class lesbian lives (Taylor, 2007a) and lesbian and gay parenting (Taylor, 2009a) to bridge the gap between theorisation of intersectionality and its research application, where inequalities are seen as more than simply a list of ‘additions’ but as multiply constitutive, complex and complicated. Although an intersectional analysis poses challenges, it remains imperative, where, as Haschemi Yekani et al. (Chapter 4, this volume) have pointed out, the task is to ‘try again’, attempted here in uncovering experiential aspects of intersectionality.

This chapter situates the methods of ‘queer productions’ as an occupation involving the research-researcher-researched (Taylor and Addison, 2014). It contextualises the interviews, diaries, and maps produced by young participants, locating mixed and visual methods as a way of re-engaging representing and even resisting identities and practices based on sexuality and religion.

This chapter explores the role music plays in the worship engaged in by ‘queer-identifying religious youth’, including attitudes to ‘progressive’ and ‘traditional’ musical sounds and styles. It looks at approaches taken by inclusive churches to reconcile the different, and at times conflicting identities of its members. Focusing on ‘spaces of reconciliation’, it brings together the embodied experience of Christian congregational music with the ‘age appropriate’ temporality of modern music, in order to examine the complex relationship between age, music, faith and sexuality.

As points disciplinary dis-orientations, the fields of ‘Youth Studies’, ‘Religion’ and ‘Sexuality’ are often separate, representing other bridges to cross and query (Taylor 2009; Dillabough and Kenelly, 2010; Taylor, Hines and Casey 2010; Johnson and Vanderbeck, 2014). Religion has often been seen, especially within gender and queer studies, as anti-modern (Brown, 2006; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Rasmussen, 2010), as traditional, backward and anti-democratic, as oppressive to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people and to women. Indeed, religion can be cast as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of sexual-gender identities. Such debates on the place of religion and sexuality extend across public commentaries and academic disciplines, and this book hopes to connect religion, youth, and sexuality. It is situated within an empirical Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study 2011–2013, ‘Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth’, utilising diverse methods and thereby providing vivid examples of how queer youth are living their lives in relation to religion.

This chapter continues with the concern surrounding the doing of research and the co-production, entanglement, and collision of research-researcher-researched identities, experiences, and spaces. It further probes at the (mis)placement of such dynamics as a digestible numerical research finding reduced to ‘impact’, sitting awkwardly against public sociology as a process of ‘making space’. There are long-standing efforts and emphases, particularly from feminist researchers, on working with and making research relevant to plural ‘publics’ (Armstrong 2010; Browne and Bakshi, 2014; Conlon et al., 2014; Santos, 2014). Yet some ‘publics’ — or ‘users’ — may be unfamiliar with, sceptical about, or even hostile towards, sexualities subjects and those who define their identities with respect to sexuality.

This article aims to address concerns about schools as locations where students grapple, materially and subjectively, with class‐based notions of femininity, the promotion of heterosexuality and the support of hetero‐normative, middle‐class families against, and in contrast with, their own working‐class families, identities and experiences. Two interconnecting but relatively neglected issues in education, those of sexuality and class, are addressed in order to highlight the interconnections in living out these often analytically separated categories. While the classed, gendered and sexualised aspects of schooling have been explored by several commentators, often these do not combine in such a way to cast light upon the interconnecting inequalities faced by working‐class lesbians, or the outcomes of these. This piece draws upon the findings of an empirical ESRC‐funded project ‘Working‐class lesbians: classed in a classless climate’.

This article makes use of the concept of ‘misrecognition’ to convey the ways that working‐class lesbians are rendered unentitled to occupy commercialized scene space, focussing mainly on the UK cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Manchester. The article is based upon an ESRC funded study of working‐class lesbians, which examines the significance of class and sexuality in the lives of women who self‐identify themselves as working‐class and lesbian. Here, the author points to the need to more thoroughly ‘class’ scene space and suggests that consideration of the experiences of working‐class lesbians furthers this agenda. Devaluations occur through ‘failure’ to display, via appearance, the ‘correct’, ‘gay’ signifiers and so the use of these leisure spaces is rarely experienced as pleasurable reclamations or as equal mixing of identities, appearances, bodies, and lifestyles. However, the women interviewed were far from passive in these processes and in charting their responses the author highlights their...

This collection seeks to encourage new ways of thinking about the connections and tensions between sexual politics, citizenship and belonging by bringing together a diverse range of critical interventions within sexuality and gender studies. The book is organised around three interlinked thematic areas, focusing on sexual citizenship, nationalism and international borders (section 1); sexuality and ‘race ’ (section 2); and sexuality and religion (section 3). In revisiting notions of sexual citizenship and belonging, contributors engage with topical debates about ‘sexual nationalism’, or the construction of western/European nations as exceptional in terms of attitudes to sexual and gender equality vis-a-vis an uncivilised, racialized ‘Other’. The collection explores macro-level perspectives by attending to the broader geopolitical and socio-legal structures within which competing claims to citizenship and belonging are played out; at the same time, micro-level perspectives are utilised to explore the interplay between sexuality and ‘race’, nation, ethnicity and religious identities, both in individuals’ lived experiences and in activism and forms of collective belonging. Geographically, the collection has a prevalently European focus, yet contributions explore a range of trans-national spatial dimensions that exceed the boundaries of ‘Europe’ and of European nation-states. They consider, for example, links between former European imperial powers and their former colonies; the construction of a European ‘core’ and its ‘peripheries’ in discourses on sexual and reproductive rights; and forms of belonging shaped by migration from within and outside ‘fortress Europe’.

This research note aims to address concerns about schools as sites where students wrestle, materially and subjectively, with classed based notions of femininity, the promotion of heterosexuality, and the support of hetero‐normative, middle class families against and in contrast with their own working class families, identities and experiences. Two relatively neglected issues in education, those of sexuality and class, are addressed in order to highlight the interconnections in living out these often analytically separated categories. This piece draws upon the findings of an ESRC funded project ‘Working class lesbians: classed in a classless climate’, which examines the life experiences and identities of self‐identified working class lesbians in the UK.

Synopsis This article is based upon my PhD research ‘Working-class lesbians: classed in a classless climate’, (2001–2004) which examined the significance of class and sexuality in the lives of women who self-identified themselves as working-class and lesbian. Here I look specifically at the women's political ‘awareness’ and activism, within a changing political climate that promotes notions of ‘classless’, yet in which classed conflict, processes, activism and responses remain apparent. I interconnect the inequalities of class and sexuality in the sphere of citizenship – both sexual and otherwise – looking at Section 2a/28 as a particular site of contested sexual citizenship, yet where the significance of class was apparent in many ways. For example, the economic resources mobilised by anti-repeal protestors were highly relevant, as was the ownership of social connections and forms of capital, which bestowed confidence and entitlement [Skeggs, Beverly (1995). Women's Studies in the 1990's. Entitlement Cultures and Institutional Constraints. Women's Studies International Forum , 18 (4): 475–485] . This, I suggest, was utilised and actively mobilised by both pro- and anti-repeal protesters, whose members, as potential and actual sexual citizens were able to occupy and argue for social positions legitimated as ‘normal’, as ‘respectable’—and in doing so made their classed investments and forms of protest apparent. I point to the many ways that interviewees were politically aware—they had opinions and beliefs to express, especially around ‘past’ and present class struggles, but rarely did these achieve political credibility; rarely were their concerns easily assimilable or respectably mainstream.

This research note is grounded in the findings of my PhD thesis ‘Working-class lesbians: classed in a classless climate’ (2004), which examines the significance of class and sexuality in the lives of women who self-identify themselves as working-class and lesbian, who are necessarily, unavoidably, painfully and pleasurably, living out the intersection of class and sexuality. I aim to offer an oversight of the project, taking account of the material and subjective inputs into working-class lesbian identity. Drawing on data collected from a series of interviews I will highlight the interconnections between class and sexuality and the role they play in relation to identities and experiences. By drawing on and critically evaluating previous work in the field and related fields I will illustrate the various ways in which working-class lesbians may be seen to constitute a gap in the literature. Hoping to address this gap and this invisibility, I will examine the ways in which class and sexuality are negotiated and represented by my interviewees. I contrast lived experience with notions of a ‘queer identity’ and the material constraints imposed upon the normative expression of identity.

This article draws upon my research on working-class lesbians, which explores the relationship between class, sexuality and social exclusion. Research participants were drawn mainly from Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Highlands), with smaller samples in Yorkshire and Manchester; in total fifty-three women took part, most being interviewed individually, others as part of three focus groups, and a couple in ‘paired’ interviews. The significance of sexuality and class position is highlighted across various social sites from family background and schooling to work experiences and leisure activities. The women's own identifications, understandings and vivid descriptions point to the continued salience of class as a factor in shaping life experiences. This article focuses primarily on the women's ‘sense of place’ and their relations to the often devalued territories that they inhabit. The relationship between sexual identity and class has received little academic attention - here the ‘gaps’ in the literature pertaining to ‘lesbian and gay’ space, and to (de-sexualised) class space, will be identified. By including empirical data I offer a picture of the ways in which classed spaces is sexualised and sexualised space is classed and suggest that space is constitutive of identity in terms of where it places people, both materially and emotionally.

This article is a case-study exploration of Christianity and sexuality in the lives of young lesbians in the United Kingdom. Religion matters as a personal and political force, but secularizing trends arguably obscure its influence on the complex convergence and intersection of personal, political, familial, and institutional realms (Brierley, 2006; Heelas and Woodhead, 2005). While the question of homosexuality has been a central focus in much discussion, highlighting around the presumed discontinuity between sexual identity and Christian identity (O'Brien, 2004), there is still a gap in terms of locating first-hand narratives of self-identified young queer Christians. Rather than assuming that these are separate and divergent paths (Wilcox, 2000), this article explores intersectional convergences and divergences, illustrating how religious participation can convey (de)legitimation within family, community and society. Such (de)legitimation is revealed in unpacking scripts of inclusion and exclusion (Taylor and Snowdon, 2014), which are (re)circulated via hetero-homo normative ideals, and perpetuated and contested in the context of intersectional Equalities legislation (Monro and Richardson, 2010). Here, we examine the highly gendered and heteronormative "role models," "mentors," and (familial) mediations experienced by young lesbian Christians, as intersecting public-private domains in the production of queer religious subjectivity and dis-identification.

This chapter explores the interconnectedness between queer youth and religious identity. It focuses on the maps produced by young people participating in the project and visual methods as a way of re-engaging, representing and even resisting identities and practices based on sexuality and religion. In a changing socio-political climate, the chapter explores if, where, why and when these identities become more or less prominent. Under what circumstances are (dis)identifications and (dis)associations produced (in more or less religious/sexual spaces)? The chapter situates the methods of 'queer productions' as an occupation involving the research-researcher-researched. A mix of qualitative techniques (interviews, maps and diaries) allowed rich insights into the everyday lives, practices and identities of queer religious youth: these techniques 'make space' to account for young people's experience of being in, or absent from, religious and sexualized spaces. Keywords: queer productions; queer youth; religious identity; sexualized spaces

Introduction Tam Sanger and Yvette Taylor PART I: EMBODIED EXCHANGES: CHOICE, RISK AND VALUE 1. The Ties That Bind: Intimacy, Class, Sexuality Yvette Taylor 2. Transnational Intimacies: Examples from Cambodia Heidi Hoefinger 3. Lesbian Love and the Troublesome Sperm Donor: Intimacy, Normality and Morality in New Stories about Conception Petra Nordqvist 4. Discourses of Female-to-Female STI Transmission: Of the Dent in Identity and Moments of Fixing Anne Rudolph PART II: (DIS)ORDERING RELATIONS: VIOLENCE, VIOLATION, VOLITION 5. On Putting Down and Destroying: Affective Economies of a Women-Only Club in Istanbul Evren Savci 6. Queering Care in Later Life: The Lived Experiences and Intimacies of Older Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults Andrew King and Ann Cronin 7. 'She Expected her Women to be Pretty, Subservient, Dinner on the Table at Six': Problematising the Narrative of Egalitarianism in Lesbian Relationships through Accounts of Woman-to-Woman Partner Abuse Rebecca Barnes 8. Blue Rinse Blues? Older Lesbians' Experiences of Domestic Violence Megan Todd PART III: INTIMACIES: AFFECTIVE PROXIMITIES AND DISTANCES 9. Trans People's Partnerships: Rethinking the Limits of Relating Tam Sanger 10. Queering Polyamory: From One Love to Many Loves and Back Again Meg Barker, Jamie Heckert and Eleanor Wilkinson 11. Intimacy in Times of (De)normalization: Same-Sex Relational Recognition in Portugal Ana Cristina Santos 12. 'Non-normative' Family Lives? Mapping Migrant Youth's Family and Intimate Relationships across National Divides and Spatial Distance Tracey Ann Reynolds and Elisabetta Zontini.

This chapter explores the difference that class makes in same-sex relationships where there has been a tendency to suggest that lesbians ‘do things differently’, freed from normative relational ties (or ‘belonging to’) and living out unconstrained choices and creative intimate biographies (Weeks et al., 2001; Ryan-Flood, 2005; Weeks, 2007; Taylor, 2009). Cathy comments that things are ‘different’ for lesbians and this variance has been widely commented upon, celebrated and contested (Giddens, 1992; Jamieson, 1998; Taylor, 2009; Hines and Taylor, 2012), but often not in the ways that Cathy’s ‘difference’ is complexly articulated. Instead, lesbian relationships are often depicted as examples of ‘pure relationships’, shaped by equality and sameness (Dunne, 1997). Such qualities are seen to transform patterns of intimacy, shaped through a ‘family of friends’ rather than through couple relationships alone (Weston, 1997; Weeks et al., 2001).

Critical attention has been given to the consolidation of classed forms of 'placed personhood', as compelling future-orientated and self-regulating subjects that 'fit' into contemporary economic and social formation. These forms of personhood, spoken of as moral character and behavioural 'traits', are increasingly attached to placed parenthood: as that which (self)locates in the right moral and material terrain. Good subjects – made through good parenting and in particular via 'good mothers' – are tasked with self-optimizing and bringing forward their own futures and those of their families (Allen and Osgood 2009; Armstrong 2010; Evans 2010, Gillies 2007; Lawler 2000; Taylor 2012a; Taylor and Addison 2011). A broader 'public' as concerned with equity, welfare and redistribution is dis-placed and entirely re-placed with a self-orientated 'enterprising' privatized response. This limited response is self-congratulating of its own 'responsibility' and condemning of those who 'fail' heightened efforts (in times of 'cutting back' parent-citizens are told simply to be more 'efficient'). 'Necessity' and 'austerity' are, as the editors of this special issue highlight, invoked to re-do all kind of classed and gendered violence, where the most privileged sections of society are evacuated from blame in times of economic crisis: in contrast, what re-circulates is a stated need for poor, 'failing mothers' to 'step-up' for all our sakes. Those who cannot bring themselves forward and propel into this neo-liberal future are increasingly condemned as the wrong kind of parents. This piece aims to chart some of the 'ugliness of parenting' (Taylor 2009, 2012b) as placed parenthood attaches to specific classed locales and subjects as that which 'fails' and 'troubles' the future. This is witnessed in the example of and responses to the English Riots of 2011, which is placed as a case study casting light on intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in forms of placed parenthood.

In this chapter I aim to provide some (personal, professional) insights into the negotiation of Higher Education (HE), combining classed, gendered and sexual positionings as significant to this experience. I have been somewhat guarded in writing this piece, in thinking about whether it would be a useful addition or a personalised ‘complaint’, a case of another academic taking up too much space (Taylor, 2010a). In still struggling with (personal and research) articulations, I’d like to explore the ‘critical differentials’ (Gabb, 2004) in processes and experiences of being at and becoming in university (Evans, 2010; Taylor, 2011; Taylor and Scurry, 2011; Evans, this volume). Which versions of ourselves (sexual or classed) get to be, and get to speak: who can have voice and legitimacy within this (Adkins, 2002; Skeggs, 2002)? My concern is in making visible varied stories as well as the absence of (legitimate) tales, where the ordinariness of privilege can also be made evident in such articulations and silences (Taylor, 2009). I aim to focus upon the substantive — and frequently neglected — issue of intersecting sexual and classed lives. Identifying as working-class and ‘queer’ in academia is a fraught and challenging process (Binnie, 2011; Taylor, 2005a, b); such challenges, can never fully be achieved or completed as (only) ‘mine’ if the potential to situate claims beyond the personal (and beyond identity) is taken seriously.

All interviewees had to negotiate the (in)visibility of heterosexuality as a structuring presence in schooling experiences, as well as the formal silencing of lesbian and gay sexuality (Epstein, 1994; Renold, 2000); yet strategies, resources and opportunities to negotiate this do contrast between those in different class circumstances. Sexuality is not the only ground for educational dis-affection, instead class may also solidify or smooth over differences in educational expectations, experiences and knowledges. Yet research highlighting the significance of class in schools (Hanafin and Lynch, 2002; Bettie, 2003; Reay, 2004) often seems separate from research demonstrating inequalities of gender and sexuality (Nayak and Kehily, 1996; Chambers et al., 2004); rare is the attention to intersections between class and sexuality, in the negotiation of identities and experiences within the school setting (Taylor, 2007).

Sexuality and consumption are interlinked in powerful and significant ways, perhaps even more so in contemporary, even postmodern, times, shaping various material and subjective possibilities and impossibilities, as sexuality is displayed and regulated via consumption. Consumption refers to a wide variety of spending patterns and behaviors and is typically equated with choice: what we choose to buy, where and when, and how we choose to use purchasable commodities, ranging from mundane everyday goods and services to extravagant one-off specials, which seemingly reinforce the uniqueness of our own individual consumer choice. Keywords: consumerism; consumption; culture

Throughout this book I have pointed to the continued salience of class in terms of identification, opportunity and constraint, and the ways that class and sexuality connect in the lives of working-class lesbians. In exploring their views and experiences, many relevant theories have been drawn upon, encapsulating the complexity of the intersections between class and sexual identity. Whilst some theorists see ‘ambivalence’ as a key site of renewed class analysis and as an adequate descriptor of current class identifications, whereby people are increasingly felt to make partial, hesitant, ‘complex’ and contradictory class identifications (Bradley and Hebson, 1999; Savage et al., 2001; Walkerdine et al., 2001) I have argued against the applicability of this to my data, given that ‘working-class’ remains a salient identification. Given that powerful, if varied and complex, certainties were made — and that working-class lesbians could point to, name and ‘identify’ class in their lives, I feel there is no need to ‘re-fashion’ or rework the label. Similarly, my data suggests that the idea of ‘dis-identification’, whereby working-class people are seen to actively avoid being named through class (Skeggs, 1997) does not always hold true in all contexts.

This chapter focuses on respondents’ sense of place and their relations to the often undervalued territories that they inhabit, suggesting that space is constitutive of identity in terms of where it places people, both materially and emotionally (Reay and Lucey, 2000; Sibley, 1995; Thrift, 1997). ‘Movements’ through space are fractured by homophobia, as Valentine (1995) points out, but they are also mediated by classed dis/comforts. By re-claiming working-class territories as positive sites of self-identification the women I interviewed challenge the authoritative devaluations of their communities; their struggles for recognition and esteem both within and outwith their localities mirrors, yet differs from, other analysis on the importance of space and place in the reproduction of class (Charlesworth, 2000; Howarth, 2002; Nayak, 2003b). For interviewees, it was the spatialised intersection between class and sexuality which made their occupations in and exclusions from space both painful and pleasurable.

There has been increasing recognition of same-sex relationships across Western Europe.1 with the introduction of the Civil Partnership Act in the United Kingdom (December 2005) effectively mainstreaming same-sex rights, some would say, to marry in all but name. With this Act has come the proliferation of new sexual stories, taking up much coverage in the lesbian and gay press and in the international media. Commentaries and controversies then run from the celebration of (monogamous) coupledom which has been extended to same-sex partners, in a thoroughly ‘tolerable’ way, to partial mockery and ironic humour, to outright condemnation, where the featuring of ‘homosexuality’ as a ‘sin’ is endlessly repeated. While some evangelical Christian groups have disapproved of civil partnerships, given that they supposedly parody and make a mockery of traditional heterosexual marriage, others question why lesbians and gays would want to adopt the conservative values of marriage in the first place, given that it places sexuality in its ‘proper’ place: within the private, monogamous, (tax-paying, dual-income) household (Richardson, 2004). For many working-class lesbians and gays, civil partnerships may mean little at best, given that extension of pension rights are less likely to apply, but the implications and consequences of civil partnerships may actually be restrictive and penalising.

Class is not something that was but rather something that very much is. This chapter charts the meanings of class and establishes its relevance to the lives of the women I interviewed, challenging the idea that class no longer has salience. If someone has proven this to be the case, they seem to have neglected to inform most of these women. They are living in a world that is more classed than some of the above theories would allow for. Who do we believe? The writer or the written? Given the absence of the opinions, views and experiences of working-class lesbians in academic literatures and debates, I will foreground interviewees’ everyday sentiments, biographies and stories; their articulated sense of the intersections between class and sexuality which are revealed as both profoundly personal and sociological.

Class, gender and sexuality come together in everyday family life, in the characters, incidents, stories and tensions that characterise, shape and disrupt day by day; a sense of identity and belonging, and a recognition of value and estimation, gradually but often forcibly and vividly emerge. These subjective senses and material realities are based in the home, within the broader ‘community’, the placing of and negotiation between members of households, and the ways in which these hierarchies are confirmed, challenged and refused. Schools also operate as institutions which inform and mediate parenting practices, localised feelings of not/belonging, subjective and material im/possibilities and interactions and distinctions between community peers.

Here I seek to set out the ways that class and sexuality have, or have not, been discussed, suggesting a tendency to deny, abstract, separate, to ‘complicate’, these two categories so that instead of emphasising their relevance, interconnections and urgency, they become detached and disconnected, far removed from inequalities faced by actual people. The actual people I am concerned with are working-class lesbians — I’m not just ‘putting them back in’, filling a ‘gap in the literature’ but asking why they weren’t included in the first place? While this may seem a weighty accusation, I believe it is substantiated by the absences and silences about working-class lesbian lives. I am indebted to previous, and current, academic debate on both class and sexuality — this book has been written from a critique of the in/adequacy of such approaches and it is with respect, which occasionally turns into scepticism, that I make such an intervention. Academic debate often involves ‘abstract’ ‘theorising’ and to engage with this can involve reifying such abstraction. This first chapter provides an overview of academic theories that I deploy and critique in my analysis but this chapter may be passed over; the further six chapters present and deliberately centre the empirical data which lies at the heart of this research.

The negotiation of everyday space is often difficult for lesbian and gay parents across the class spectrum, also complicated by complex child-care arrangements and legalities, negotiated across household, regional and even international borders. The difficulties in being a parent are multiplied manifold by the addition of a sexual-spatial dimension. However, these difficulties are not always cross class constants with many middle-class interviewees frequently attributing homophobia to working-class others, apparently separating out such structuring features in individualising these to a certain sector of society (Moran, 2000; Taylor, 2004). A more complex tale depicted the variously classed forms of homophobia, from a subtle silence to a strident scream, complicated in the geographic structuring of inter and intra rural/urban divides, where more cosmopolitan places were thought of as ‘streets ahead’ in their diverse ‘tolerance’ — such places were both protective and privileged locales, structured through classed inclusions and exclusions. Sex and the city would seem to be more than just escapism, representing instead the belief in the importance of geography: it’s not what you do, it’s the place that you do it (and the group you belong to whilst doing it).