CER Educational Conversation:Discourses of progress and LGBTQI+ lives ‘getting better: the LGBT UK Action Plan

The LGBT Action Plan (2018) represents a significant UK Government commitment towards LGBTQI+ equalities, operating in conjunction with cumulative legislative advances. Yet there is room for critique within this Plan, as proposed actions, and as celebratory rhetoric of lives ‘getting better’. Using empirical examples, this article examines how ‘progress’ for LGBTQI+ lives is discursively constructed and positioned in the LGBT Action Plan and accompanying politicians’ speeches. In this paper I’ll examine the key constructions of progress – across time, place, life courses, and normative thresholds – within which LGBTQI+ rights and realities are framed. While some policy areas are celebrated as signifiers of ‘coming forward’, others are relegated to the too tough in-tray, suspended in enduring stasis. Opposing ‘political time’ with ‘queer time’, this article concludes with the policy challenges posed by intersectional (in)equalities in these ‘new times’, and draws upon queer theory to illuminate discursive normativities and silences in representing ‘policy problems’

PRESENTER: Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education and Deputy Head, School of Education, University of Strathclyde and Principal Investigator on the NORFACE-funded research project ‘Comparing Intersectional Life-course Inequalities among LGBTQI+ Citizens in Four European Countries’ (CILIA-LGBTQI+, 2018-2021). Further research projects include the ESRC-funded ‘Making Space for Queer-Identifying Religious Youth’ (2011-13), as well as the British Academy-funded ‘Critical Terrain: Dividing Lines and Lives’ (2013-14). Yvette has published four sole-authored books: Working-Class Lesbian Life: Classed Outsiders (2007), Lesbian and Gay Parenting: Securing Social and Educational Capital (2009), Fitting Into Place? Class and Gender Geographies and Temporalities (2012), and Making Space for Queer Identifying Religious Youth (2016). Her latest co-edited collection is Uplifting Gender and Sexuality Education Research (2019; with Tiffany Jones, Leanne Coll and Lisa Van Leent). Yvette edits the Palgrave Macmillan Gender and Education Series, and co-edits the Routledge Advances in Critical Diversities Series.