Taylor, Yvette: Working-class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 220 pp., £50, ISBN 978-0-2300-0871-7
Yvette Taylor's monograph represents an important and timely intervention in sexualities studies. Her qualitative study, based on interviews with over 60 self-identified British working-class lesbians, makes a compelling argument for the need to consider the intersections between socio-economic class and sexuality. This is an important point to make, given the fact that material inequalities are too often glossed over in sexualities studies, chiefly concerned with issues around identity, lifestyle, consumption and intimacy. By showing how her interviewees’ experiences and identifications are deeply shaped by their class positioning, as well as by their sexuality, Yvette Taylor emphasizes the continued relevance of class, and argues for an approach to sexualities that can account for material inequalities.
The book begins with a thorough and nuanced exploration of the literatures on class and sexuality, showing how the two are often disjointed and disconnected. One of the greatest merits of the book lies in its successful attempt to draw together different strands of literature, highlighting gaps and potential links between materialist and queer perspectives on sexuality. Taylor incorporates insights from both into her methodology, drawing on a wide range of theoretical and empirical work, from Bourdieu's work on classed habitus, to Butler's theory on the performativity of identity, to studies on sexuality in space. Her approach is certainly innovative in this respect: it gives a fresh outlook on the intersections between sexuality and class, while opening up new directions for future research.
The book's findings are framed within a well-informed and nuanced discussion of current debates in sexualities studies, focusing on insights from research conducted in Britain and the US. However, Taylor's discussion is never abstracted from the realities of the working-class lesbian women she interviewed, but always firmly grounded in her empirical data. Her writing style is engaging, incisive and to the point, and her approach to her rich data perceptive and sensitive. Her study offers a vivid account of working-class lesbian life: by interspersing her analysis with substantial excerpts from her interviews, she manages to convey the voices of the women who participated in her study.
Taylor's main contention is that class still shapes her interviewees’ experiences and life course in fundamental ways, and that it remains a central aspect of their identities and sense of place. Contra those who emphasize changing patterns of socio-economic stratification in post-industrial societies, and the supposed fragmentation and fluidity of classed identities resulting from them, Taylor shows that their working-class roots were obvious to the women she interviewed, and that even the women who had become upwardly mobile through education and career progress strongly identified as working-class. Going beyond ‘objective’ definitions and determinants of class, in the first empirical chapter of the book Taylor explores the way in which women talked about their class position, exploring the emotional and subjective aspects of women's class identifications and loyalties. The two subsequent chapters explore women's experiences of the family home, education and employment, showing how class was a crucial factor in shaping women's choices, in terms of access to resources, opportunities and expectations. The connections between class and sexuality are teased out from women's accounts: for example, the study effectively illustrates how both affect women's choices and opportunities in terms of education and employment. While access to spaces where it is safe to ‘come out’ is constrained by women's material resources and socio-cultural capital, the study also shows how women had to negotiate a devalued class identity, as well as a stigmatized sexuality, since ‘middle-classness’ is constructed as the benchmark of normality and respectability. This theme is taken up again in a later chapter, which explores how class affects women's intimate relationships, countering the idealization of same-sex relations as progressive ‘families of choice’, based on equality and reciprocity. The study also considers the spatial aspects of women's identifications by exploring women's navigations of their working-class neighbourhood and of the gay and lesbian scene. I found Taylor's focus on women's everyday environments especially valuable, since most of the literature on sexuality and space seems to focus on queer leisure space as a context where non-normative sexual identities can be safely expressed and explored. The study challenges the assumption that lesbian women identify solely or primarily with queer spaces and communities, and shows that they inhabit other spaces too, which may be more mundane and less glamorous, but which are no less significant in shaping their sense of belonging. Taylor's study shows how working-class lesbians remain ‘classed outsiders’ both in their neighbourhoods and in the gentrified gay and lesbian scene. Her interviewees often expressed ambivalent feelings towards the commercial scene, to which they had limited access and where they often felt like outsiders because of their class background. Working-class neighbourhoods were perceived as spaces where their sexuality may not always be expressed, or validated, although their class identity and loyalties, often devalued elsewhere, were strongly tied to these communities.
In highlighting the diversity of lesbian experiences and identifications, and pursuing new paths to explore the intersections between sexuality and class, Taylor's monograph represents a highly original contribution to debates on intersectionality. It makes for a very engaging and thought-provoking read, and it is highly recommended to scholars interested in sexuality, class and the relations between the two.
Francesca Stella, University of Glasgow, UK