Queer-class repetitions & interruptions

My long-term research has persistently returned to questions of sexuality and class. The Queer Precarities workshop, which this Special Issue reports on, acted as an invite to (re)engage and take forward within, and potentially beyond, geography. But sometimes 'forwards' goes 'backwards'; sometimes we need to go back through archives, including our own data and embodied journeys, as reluctant returns, frustrations and repetitions. This piece is non-linear in its forward-backward movements, between data gathering and being data – including appearing in queer-feminist-academic space, or being the working-class queer in the workshop. I think thorough the situatedness of our academic (re)productions, as always occurring in time and place, when new terms and articulations may repeat or disguise; precarity as a term of now, may act to displace class as a term of then – or ‘them’ – again raising enduring questions about the politics and production of knowledge. I offer up queer-class stories, including dimensions of the personal, political, affective, archival and material, encountered across place and time. In thinking about (inter)disciplinary research productions, I am still compelled by class as a concept and one which still often collides with queer. If 'precarity' takes us closer to queer then what happens to 'class'? In this short viewpoint, I hope to show and share some of the research reflections enabled by the Queer Precarities workshop.