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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 hopes to speaks to the theme of Intersections of Ageing, Gender, Sexualities as matched to – or far from – the particular research projects which I have undertaken, often involving ‘intersections’ of class, gender and sexuality. In considering what to present at the related conference, and write-up in this chapter, I wanted to question (myself), and had to resist (my own), urges to pull data from particular aged research participants, as older or, indeed, younger; certainly I could have done this as my research has usually involved participants across diverse age ranges. In my current project on Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth, I am seeing how young people inhabit particular times, places, bodies as age-d subjects, with certain rememberings of the past and projections for the future (Taylor 2015). To think of these intersections, involves a consideration of the ‘queer subject of ‘getting on’’, as a beneficiary of international Equalities Legislation, and new ‘sexual citizen’. In this chapter I want to explore three cases, that of ‘queer families’, ‘queer cares’, and the queer spaces of academia, to inflect ideas of ‘moving on’ and becoming as interrupted and interrupting of linear trajectories of, for example, becoming sexual citizenship, becoming adult, and becoming academic. I interweave these examples to explore interruptions to normative career-caring trajectories, highlighting the work-life balances and the effort of ‘getting on’, as applied in research-researched-researcher exchanges, experiences and biographies.

Categorical career stages offer an institutional framework through which mobilities can be claimed and contested by feminists in academia. Inhabiting career stages uncritically can serve to reproduce neoliberal academic structures that feminists may seek to resist. Collaboration across career stages is a significant empirical case for understanding how feminists occupy academic space. We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other, analysing the authors’ cross-career collaborations and mentoring relationship in a Scottish University. We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and disrupt the neoliberal temporal logics of competitively achieving individuals on upward career trajectories, where academic arrival can feel permanently deferred. As such we argue for more pluralised and fragmented understandings of ‘career stages’, which as fixed categories work to position academics as either precarious or privileged, and for a messier imaginary of academic work and careers.

This chapter is about how feminist academics make their ways into, and through, academic careers, and the repetitions involved in feminists moving on up an academic career. Recognizing arrivals in higher education (HE), and celebrating feminists’ presences across the career course is one contested strategy for transformations of the academy. Amidst contemporary attention to ‘becoming academic’ this chapter situates feminist educational journeys in relation to historical educational entrances, rather than imagining the pleasures and pains of academic ‘arrival’ as a novel feminist concern. The chapter examines mobilities and stasis, moving on and getting stuck, across (1) institutional hierarchies and (dis)locations, (2) international (im)mobilities, and (3) the fixing in place of queer feminist academic work. We re-think prevailing understandings of academic career categories, asking what is carried in academic arrivals and circulations. We attend to what fragmented stories of feminist educational journeys do as we re-tell them, and as various interlocutors interrupt the telling, rather than simply reciting educational journeys as ends in themselves. We look to the blockages and knots in feminist career journeys that lurk behind public-facing narratives. Such immobilities can interrupt smooth success stories, just as they can be mobilized politically, as claims to resources and recognition, and as a redress of educational injustice. We pause over how recounting getting stuck can reassert the resilient individual subject, and the uneven distribution of possibilities for telling stories of career immobility.

This chapter focuses on how feminists take up academic space via the categorical distinctions of the career course, working to fit into this whilst stretching and unsettling the premises of an academic career. In this chapter we situate our analytic concern with feminist repetitions, thinking about how many aspects of feminist academic work are labouriously repetitive, as insights are glossed over, ignored, and incorporated in the non-feminist university. Feminists encounter the necessity and frustration of repeating themselves, making feminist moves and evidencing feminist arguments over and over again. We situate these repetitions in relation to research that turns methods back towards the university. We then attend to categorical academic career stages themselves, exploring their contested definitions, questioning how precarity and privilege are inscribed, and how career stages are fractured by enduring educational inequalities according to for instance, class, race, and gender. We make the case for our creative and collaborative interruptions, methods which are broadly auto-ethnographic and combine techniques from collective biography and sociological fiction with insights from feminist criticism of the reflexive turn in social science. We argue that interruptions are particularly appropriate for investigating feminist inhabitations of career categories. Throughout we attend to how feminists in the academy repeat themselves, interrupt the non-feminist university, and are themselves interrupted across the career course.