Not on the Reading List: Locating Queer Working-Class Knowledge
Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education, researching class, gender, sexuality, and higher education at the Strathclyde Institute of Education
Reading as a Lifeline
I wasn’t meant to find the book that changed things for me. I discovered Bev Skeggs’ Formations of Class and Gender not through a lecturer’s recommendation, a course syllabus, or a seminar handout—but by chance, while wandering the university library stacks. I was a working-class undergraduate, trying to find the ‘core readings’ for my course. Instead, I found myself sitting on the floor, reading Skeggs’ words with a mix of disbelief and relief. For the first time, I saw my world—myself—in print.
Skeggs writes about how working-class women are often rendered invisible in academic knowledge: dismissed, pathologised, or reduced to outdated stereotypes. As she put it, we’re often ‘deconstructed to irrelevance’. I knew exactly what she meant—not in theory, but in practice.
By then I had already learned to recognise the looks and laughter that met my working-class accent in tutorials. I knew how it felt to sit in classrooms where summer holidays were assumed to involve skiing trips and unpaid internships, not shift work and financial aid applications. I’d heard teachers describe me as having a ‘poor attitude’ in secondary school—and felt that same judgement follow me into lecture halls, as I came in late after a night shift.
I also knew what it meant to be classed in queer spaces: to walk into the LGBTQ+ society and walk right back out again. To feel like you didn’t quite belong in the university’s rainbow-badged campaigns. The book I found in the library helped me make sense of all of it. But more than that, it opened a door.
In gender studies classes, I began reading feminist writers who provided lifelines. I devoured bell hooks’ words —her plain, powerful language, her refusal to separate theory from everyday life. Books like Teaching to Transgress and Where We Stand: Class Matters spoke to me in ways nothing else had. I found the work of Audre Lorde, who described herself as a ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’, and whose famous words—'Your silence will not protect you’—were pinned up on the walls of the feminist spaces I began to move through.
These texts didn’t just describe injustice. They gave it structure. They told me that my confusion had context, that my story had political meaning. In other words, they helped me survive—not just university, but the slow grind of not quite fitting in.
But here’s the thing: none of those books were on the reading list. Not initially.
From Student to Teacher: The Politics of Belonging
Reading lists shape how knowledge is defined. They signal who matters, who gets to speak, and who is seen as worth of studying. For working-class queer people that often means being left out entirely—or showing up only as a ‘case study’, a deviation, or as a problem to be solved. What gets taught and read shapes the way students see the world—and themselves. Updating a reading list isn’t just about representation. It’s about power.
That’s why I keep returning to those early reading moments. They remind me that finding yourself reflected in academic work is not guaranteed. For some of us, it happens by accident. And even then, the door you’ve pushed open can quickly shut behind you. Years later, I became a university lecturer. I now teach and supervise students navigating similar tensions. Many of them come from working-class backgrounds, or are LGBTQ+, or both. They’re bright, committed, thoughtful—and often unsure whether they belong in the university at all.
That feeling isn’t imagined. It’s produced by a system that still centres certain voices and sidelines others. In academia you’re told—sometimes subtly, sometimes not—that your work has to fit a particular mould. That studying sexuality is fine, so long as it’s not ‘too personal’. That writing about class is acceptable, but only if you tone it down or back it up with the ‘right’ theorists. That feminist or queer approaches are ‘interesting’, but not quite rigorous enough.
These messages have real consequences. They can affect who gets hired, who gets published, who gets promoted. They shape the careers of students and scholars alike. And they determine whether queer working-class knowledge is allowed to thrive—or pushed to the edges of legitimacy.
The Queer Working-Class Reading List
So, what would a queer working-class reading list look like? It wouldn’t just be a collection of texts that tick boxes. It could be a living archive of resistance, survival, and creativity. It would include bell hooks and Audre Lorde, but also the care workers, cleaners, and students who tell their own stories. It would name systems—capitalism, racism, patriarchy—but also acknowledge intimacy, love, exhaustion, as sites of analysis. It would be political, and personal.
Above all, it would resist the idea that queer working-class life is a footnote, a side-topic, or a ‘special interest’. It would assert that our lives are central to understanding how power operates, and how it can be undone.
When I first went to university, I believed it was a place where everyone had a fair shot. I still believe that education can be transformative. But I also know that this transformation doesn’t happen automatically. It happens through deliberate inclusion, through critical reflection, and through the constant effort to widen participation – not just in the classroom, but in the curriculum.
For those of us who were never expected to be here—who found our way in through library aisles, through part-time jobs, through feminist bookshops and radical reading groups—higher education is still a contested space. But we’re here. And we’re writing new reading lists.
Working-Class Queers: Time, Place and Politics (Pluto, 2023) is on display in Strathclyde Library for LGBT Pride Month.
Published 17/06/2025
Image - Pixabay