Queer Presences and Absences

Queer Presences and Absences explores changes and continuations in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer lives, identities and spatial practices in the 21st century. Queer futures are situated across local, national and international spaces including the UK, USA, Italy, Brazil, Russia and the Czech Republic. Queer movements, marginalities and mainstreams are located in legislative changes, institutional locations and in everyday spaces: these are mediated through consumption, possession and entitlement, alongside dispossession, poverty and inequality. Rather than positing a queer arrival or a queer present 'everywhere', care is taken to consider the diversity of queer existence. Using a range of methods, including qualitative interviews, ethnographies, auto-biographical 'fictions' and archival research, authors connect pasts, places and policies with contemporary times, linking individual and social presences (and absences) affectively and materially.

Yvette Taylor is Professor in Social and Policy Studies and Head of the Weeks Centre, London South Bank University, UK. Her published books include Working-Class Lesbian Life (2007), Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capitals (2009) and Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (2012).She has made interventions on debates on 'intersectionality' with Classed Intersections: Spaces, Selves, Knowledges (2010), Theorizing Intersectionality and Sexuality (2010) (with S. Hines and M. Casey) and Educational Diversity (2012).



Michelle Addison is a Visiting Scholar at the Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research, LSBU, UK and has co-authored various publications with Yvette Taylor. She has a chapter in Educational Diversity: the subject of difference and different subjects (2012, Palgrave Macmillan).

1. Against the Dignity of Man: Sexology Constructing Deviance during 'Normalization' in Czechoslovakia; Katerina Lišková
2. Community at the Backstage: Gays and Lesbians in the Czech Republic; Katerina Nedbálková
3. Lesbian Lives and Real Existing Socialism in Late Soviet Russia; Francesca Stella
4. Identities and Citizenship under Construction: Historicising the 'T' in LGBT Anti-violence Politics in Brazil; Jan Simon Hutta and Carsten Balzer
5. Liminal Subjects, Marginal Spaces and Material Legacies: Older Gay Men, Home and Belonging(s); Andrew Gorman-Murray
6. The Meaning of Home for Transgendered People; Youngsook Choi
7. Belonging: Lesbians and Gay Men's Claims to Material Spaces; Mark Casey
8. 'That's not really my scene': Working-class Lesbians in (and out of) Place; Yvette Taylor
9. Queering the Meaning of 'Neighbourhood': Reinterpreting the Lesbian-Queer Experience of Park Slope, Brooklyn, 1983-2008; Jen Gieseking
10. Present Absences: Hidden Geographies of Lesbian Parenting; Karina Luzia
11. 'Queer' and 'Teacher' as Symbiosis? Exploring Absence and Presence in Discursive Space'; Max Biddulph
12. Organisation Studies: Not Nearly 'queer enough'; Nick Rumens
13. Queerying the Public Administration in Italy: Local Challenges to a National Standstill; Chiara Bertone and Beatrice Gusmono