Yvette Taylor

Complexities and Complications: Intersections of Class and Sexuality

I explore some questions and dilemmas raised by considering social class, gender, and sexuality within the same interconnecting research framework. I begin with attention to the theoretical development of intersectionality, arising from feminist conceptualizations of “differences that matter,” and the ways these are included in or excluded from research agendas. Arguing that interconnections between class and sexuality have often been neglected in such moves, I seek to progress beyond intersectionality as a theoretical paradigm, toward understanding intersectionality as a lived experience. I draw on a case study of working-class lesbian lives to bridge the gap between theorization of intersectionality and the research application of this.

'If your face doesn't fit...': the misrecognition of working-class lesbians in scene space

Abstract 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 significant critiques of scene space(s) as ‘middle‐class’, ‘pretentious’ and ‘male’. Such sentiments ultimately affected a sense that it was not really ‘their’ space – even if, fraught and fragmentary, entitlement claims were still made upon it.

Sexualities and class

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.

Negotiation and Navigation - an Exploration of the Spaces/Places of Working-Class Lesbians

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 womens 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 womens ‘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.

Good students, bad pupils: constructions of 'aspiration', 'disadvantage' and social class in undergraduate-led widening participation work

This C‐SAP funded research explores undergraduate student involvement in widening participation initiatives at a traditional university and the ways that students promote and market their university and higher education more generally. It seeks to explore the widening participation messages disseminated by students in their work with pupils and teachers, the ways that these are taken up and/or resisted, and the interactions between university students and “local” school pupils. The idea of peer led discussion, whereby “sameness” is encouraged and endorsed, is positively promoted within student tutoring programmes. However, this study found a sharpening of notions of “us” and “them” amongst many student participants and a vocalization of educational success stories versus educational “failures”. While involvement in such programmes may be a way that students can contribute to their locality and foster career skills, this study interrogates the scope of “all round benefits” in widening participation and suggests that social class is mobilized in constructions of the “good student” as against the “bad pupil”. Widening participation initiatives need to engage with – and beyond – such interpersonal positioning in order to erode continued structured inequalities.

Brushed behind the bike shed: working‐class lesbians’ experiences of school

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’.

Queer youth, Facebook and faith: Facebook methodologies and online identities

‘Making space for queer-identifying religious youth’ (2011–2013) is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded project, which seeks to shed light on youth cultures, queer community and religiosity. While non-heterosexuality is often associated with secularism, and some sources cast religion as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) identity (or ‘coming out’), we explore how queer Christian youth negotiate sexual–religious identities. There is a dearth of studies on queer religious youth, yet an emerging and continuing interest in the role of digital technologies for the identities of young people. Based on interviews with 38 LGBT, ‘religious’ young people, this article examines Facebook, as well as wider social networking sites and the online environment and communities. Engaging with the key concept of ‘online embodiment’, this article takes a closer analysis of embodiment, emotion and temporality to approach the role of Facebook in the lives of queer religious youth. Furthermore, it explores the methodological dilemmas evoked by the presence of Facebook in qualitative research with specific groups of young people.

INTERSECTIONS, DIVISIONS, AND DISTINCTIONS: Exploring widening participation and international students' experiences of Higher Education in the UK

ABSTRACT While there is a growing body of research which explores the dramatic changes of higher education, following recent policies of widening participation and ‘internationalisation’, to date much of the research has focused on discrete ‘non-traditional’ groups. Based on qualitative data gathered from international and widening participation students, we explore the crossovers and parallels of their experiences, which is not to say that both groups are the very same. Indeed, it is the resistance to a ‘fixing’ positioning that this paper charts, negotiating points of sameness and difference. We suggest that there is failure to consider widening participation and internationalisation as two, intersecting, agendas, (re)producing class and race. Theoretically, such an approach offers an insight into contemporary class analysis in the context of mobility and racism, to comprehend how social divisions are complexly lived, where middle-class ‘international’ students may risk losing (and gaining) privilege, in (dis)similar ways to their working-class ‘home’ counterparts.

The Gap and How to Mind It: Intersections of Class and Sexuality (Research Note)

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.

(Re)constituting the past, (re)branding the present and (re)imagining the future: women's spatial negotiation of gender and class

The themes of mobility and transformation occupy centre stage in many sociological accounts, where ‘movement’ references people and places in ‘new’ times, often without situating how movements may actually be embedding or reconstituting inequalities, spatially, culturally and materially. Attention to how gender and class may be reconfigured queries straightforward notions of change, even ‘crisis’, pointing towards the reshaping of exclusions and their intersecting dimensions. Based on interviews in the North-East of England, this article aims to explore younger womens spatial negotiations in the context of change and continuation, where regional efforts on regeneration can be conceptualized against the backdrop of de-industrialization and (urban) rebranding; the ‘past’, ‘present’ and ‘future’ sit uneasily in these (re)imaginings. These reconstitutions force consideration of the different forms and consequences of social transformation, negotiated in the dis-identifications made by women where, for some, their presence was marked as distinctly out of place, as opposed to others who could more easily claim a movement and placement compatible with the sense of regional change and mobility.