Welcome to our new ‘Author Spotlight’ blog series. For this month’s edition, we’re speaking to Yvette Taylor, author of Working Class Queers (Pluto Press). This was a Pride Month read selected by the Team Perlego Book Club, and we caught up with Yvette for a Q&A to discover more about overcoming barriers as a marginalised author, how to align with the publishers you partner with, and effective allyship.
📖 As a global digital library, Perlego wants to amplify as wide a range of voices as possible, but we recognise that there are still barriers for authors from marginalised communities to be represented in the industry. Have you faced any challenges with being published as a queer academic author?
I think there’s a real appetite – and political demand – now for diverse voices and experiences in books, on the shelves, in reading lists and as necessary curriculum inclusion, and that’s all for the good. But there are still barriers of course. Recently, there’s been writing from and celebration of working-class authors, or those from working-class backgrounds, including as best-sellers or even Booker prize winners, and as part of more mainstream or fringe book festivals, including annual Pride events. For me, I think there are things to keep in mind, in terms of the kind of queer academic author I get to be, and there’s little point in being a writer without a reader! I hope for diverse readers, and to think through how we’re all implicated in reading and recognising value in social and personal stories (or theories!).
But being a queer academic, from a working-class background, might mean having to navigate restricted opportunities and expectations, such as the imagination of being academic, or a writer, and stretching that imagination to a more comfortable fit. I’ve had lots of fantastic opportunities, but I’ve also written long-term on issues of class and sexuality and am hopeful of and curious about what catches a wider audience’s attention, and when. When can marginalised groups speak, as authors’ of their own experiences, of course, but as also speaking back and against mainstreamed norms, and as more that diversity additions: whose appetites are we catering for, and are some things light snacks, or seasonal fashions, rather than main staples?
It’s an enduring question of how to take people with you, when academic or publishing success can be predicted on a successful, achieving, celebrated individual, The Writer or The Academic. The way I remind myself of the barriers and possibilities is to keep researching and writing about class and sexuality inequalities, in particular, as ever emerging, for the better and the worse.
📖 What advice would you give your past self as you were just starting out your career in academia and writing?
I’ve experienced long-term writing – and a return to and forward through long-term writing projects – alongside fast paced publishing pressures. There’s always a question of ‘what next?’ when one book project is complete, and in a way that can be a huge compliment, as a desire for more of your writing. I used to get a bit annoyed by the advice to ‘slow down’, sometimes conveyed to me by well-meaning senior academics, who warned of potential burn-out, exhaustion, and the need to sustain ourselves across a longer-term.
The ‘What next?’ can be necessary – including for a job, or for promotion – and it can be generative. I’m not sure about the advice to be kind or caring to ourselves, which seems to sideline structural barriers, or a collective orientation. I’d tell my younger self to feel entitled – rather than lucky – to be in academia, and I think that entitlement should extend to all, across and between disciplines. And I’d follow with asking more from others, not as far away colleagues who’ve ‘made it’, but as peers, colleagues and friends. I’m still learning about how to make more friends in academia!
📖 Working-Class Queers on Perlego is published by Pluto Press, known for ‘Independent Radical Publishing’. Could you tell us a little more about what it’s like to work with Pluto Press, and the importance of aligning with the publishers you partner with?
I think this alignment is generally important, and it felt particularly so for Working-Class Queers, and in terms of writing for a cross-over academic and popular readership. Pluto has a fantastic catalogue of writers, many of whom I’m familiar with as a reader at least, and whose work I very much respect, use and enter into conversations with, including in my classrooms.
I now have choices that might have been unavailable or more difficult earlier on in my career – our choices always happen in time and place. And for me affordability and accessibility, in price point and in tone, style, content and references, was really key in opening up the realities and resistances of working-class queer life as relevant to wider social and political crises that we’re now all implicated in. It’s important for me to insist on the case of Working-Class Queers, as part of a radical imagination for change, as with other Pluto titles.
📖 In your acknowledgements you share ‘[t]o write this is to acknowledge the times we’re in, as stretching backwards and forwards.’ We’ve just had a learning session on academic censorship, and how censorship figures across the world today have reverted to being closer to those from 1973 than they were in 2006. With ‘the times we’re in’ in mind, could you tell us a little about the importance of your work and the representation of marginalised communities?
I try to situate the ‘times we’re in’ as socially and politically produced – and resisted – rather than just as accidental or exceptions circumstances, or crisis moments. Working-Class Queers is based on two decades of research, interviewing over 250 respondents, and so it covers a lot of crises, which are ever-emerging, as and through, for example, austerity, Brexit, COVID-19, the cost of living crisis, and heightened right-wing movements which censor rights. To say that is to challenge the idea that things ‘get better’ or that we’re inevitably on a progressive path of more LGBTQ+ rights, or more representation and visibility.
One of the contexts I was writing in was the COVID-19 crisis. But the impact on marginalised communities, while a revelation for some, constituted a known repetition for many, as the deliberate ‘business as usual’, as underfunding and underrepresentation. My interviewees aren’t passive in this, and I hope I’ve showcased a variety of voices, able to speak back, but often still frustrated at the necessity of doing so over time. Societies still make similar mistakes – including the mistake of thinking political elites can act in our best interests, or even democratically represent.
📖 You talk about increasing austerity and its impacts on accessing education, especially for the Working Class. What advice would you give students and educators in marginalised communities that are feeling isolated or discouraged by the ongoing challenges?
I see this up close as I now work in the Strathclyde Institute of Education, which is the largest site of teacher training in Scotland, and one of the largest in the UK. So, I definitely would hope for a readership amongst our own students, and as future teachers. When we think back to our own educational experiences, we might have mixed feelings. In the book I talk about being encouraged to leave my home, an infamous council estate in Glasgow, to go to university. On the one hand, I think all young people should have that possibility. But I think we have to be sceptical about individual mobility – or of moving away – as a way to better ourselves, or to escape our past. I think that means dropping the story of meritocracy – or the lucky girl as unexpected university entrant – as solving inequalities. For me that’s a more hopefully and socially sustainable view, but which likely sits in contrast with educational audits and metrics.
I ask my students about the purpose of education, and I’m impressed by their answers, which situate it as more than a job. Yet the pressure is real, as is retention, and the perpetual gendering of school spaces and promotion opportunities. I try to be realistic with students about that, which is not unique to the teaching profession. I think there’s hope in imagining classrooms otherwise, beyond a singular expert or authority figure, and I think young people themselves will always be showing us good expectations and examples of that!
📖 Finally, you talk about the trap of falling into ‘do-gooding outreach’ which I think all allies can be guilty of, even with the best of intentions! We’ve hosted a session this month on how to be a better active ally - what’s one action we can commit to to be accountable to this?"
Yes, I think we can all act as allies across our differences, as occupying positions of advantage and disadvantage, whether that’s in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, age and so on. So allyship is always happening across out differences, rather than as a one-way statement or action from static one group as giver, to another static group as receiver. Sometimes allyship might mean staying quiet and listening, maybe even resisting the desire to do, or to announce allyship, or as a loud statement that’s not followed through. I suppose one thing I’d maybe think about, and try to hold myself accountable to, is how to quietly be an ally? In a time of rainbow lanyards and the mainstreaming of EDI services, can or should allyship resist such a professionalisation? How do we know we’re an ally, with or without the training or credentialism? I suppose it's a bit like asking how we reach out in and beyond the page; we keep doing it over a long-term and, likely, with failures and repetitions. I guess I’m asking about your, and my own, long-term allyship, and how we might commit to this long-term as allies, and in need of allyship.
Author biography:
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.
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