Joining the Club? Academia and Working-class Femininities Correspondence : Valerie Hey, Brunel University, Department of Education, 300 St Margarets Road, Twickenham TW 1 1PT, UK. E-mail: Valerie.hey@brunel.ac.uk

Abstract

The feminist working-class academic is an exemplary queer subject, someone whose presence (and practice) questions the norms of the academy without ever being able to completely occupy the 'other' term. She is an archetypal late modern subject of reflexivity and mobility. This article explores some consequences of this position by looking at class as lived as a re/location, reflecting on its pleasures and pains. The author looks principally at autobiographically inspired accounts of class, as well as other auto/biographical material, which have influenced these personal narratives. In doing so she alludes to more research-based texts to point to the cumulative importance of this particular class literature to problematise a sociology without a society.