The queer subject of 'getting on'

This chapter hopes to speaks to the theme of Intersections of Ageing, Gender, Sexualities as matched to – or far from – the particular research projects which I have undertaken, often involving ‘intersections’ of class, gender and sexuality. In considering what to present at the related conference, and write-up in this chapter, I wanted to question (myself), and had to resist (my own), urges to pull data from particular aged research participants, as older or, indeed, younger; certainly I could have done this as my research has usually involved participants across diverse age ranges. In my current project on Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth, I am seeing how young people inhabit particular times, places, bodies as age-d subjects, with certain rememberings of the past and projections for the future (Taylor 2015). To think of these intersections, involves a consideration of the ‘queer subject of ‘getting on’’, as a beneficiary of international Equalities Legislation, and new ‘sexual citizen’.

In this chapter I want to explore three cases, that of ‘queer families’, ‘queer cares’, and the queer spaces of academia, to inflect ideas of ‘moving on’ and becoming as interrupted and interrupting of linear trajectories of, for example, becoming sexual citizenship, becoming adult, and becoming academic. I interweave these examples to explore interruptions to normative career-caring trajectories, highlighting the work-life balances and the effort of ‘getting on’, as applied in research-researched-researcher exchanges, experiences and biographies.