This edited collection offers a timely and much-needed exploration of the challenges early-career LGBTQ+ scholars face in the often-exclusionary world of academic publishing, but also of the opportunities for building support networks within the community. While academic publishing is challenging for most early-career researchers, LGBTQ+ scholars often face additional pressures linked to structural and epistemic marginalisation. Adopting an international, multidisciplinary, and emic approach, the book brings together the voices of novice researchers to examine the complexities of navigating heteronormative academic cultures and claim a legitimate space for LGBTQ+ scholarship. The book is structured in two main sections: ‘Challenges and solutions’ and ‘Visibility and intersectionality’.
The first section examines the various barriers faced by LGBTQ+ scholars, from the pressure to conform to academic norms to subtle microaggressions in the peer review process, while reimagining publishing as a space of care and solidarity. Micky Ross (chapter 2) foregrounds the emotional and political weight of writing within a heteronormative academic world and being faced with the question ‘Who are you to make theory?’, reflecting on voice, authority, and the struggle to remain authentic while navigating power structures. As Helena Torres-Purroy & Sònia Mas-Alcolea note (chapter 4), these hierarchies are reinforced by authoritarian dynamics in peer-review, which position authors as ‘peripheral actors’. As a countermeasure, they offer supportive models of benevolent reviewing. The compounded precarity faced by LGBTQ+ academics is also exposed in this section, with Jamie David Hopkin & Victoria Barnett-Simpson (chapter 5) highlighting how aggression can also come from within the LGBTQ+ community and Frazer Heritage (chapter 6) warning of exploitative collaborations even among LGBTQ+ scholars. However, as both Luan Carpes Barros Cassal (chapter 3) and Heritage note, collective resilience, community-building, and queer mentorships foster inclusive and high-quality academic work.
The second section shifts the focus to researcher positionality and lived experience, shedding light on the potential challenges and dangers faced by LGBTQ+ scholars conducting research on gender and sexuality. While discussing visibility, ‘the closet’ and ‘coming out’ are problematised by both Arunima Theraja (chapter 7) and Tierney Marey (chapter 8) when balancing the desire of authenticity and the need of safety. The chapters by Theraja, Zanele Nyoni-Wood, and Mabel Encinas are particularly noteworthy, weighing in on the role of ‘queer failure’, language, colonialism, and migration, as they grapple with the complexities of navigating academia as early-career scholars with marginalised identities in diverse contexts. Nyoni-Wood (chapter 9) highlights the issues that scholars in non-Western contexts face when doing research on gender and sexuality and working with marginalised communities, providing insights from across Africa. Finally, Encinas (chapter 10) discusses decolonial empowerment as a tool to tackle issues of self-perception rooted in structural inequality and unstable work conditions affecting LGBTQ+ early-career researchers, including ‘impostor syndrome’ and being regarded as ‘second-class academics’.
As a novice, self-funded, migrant LGBTQ+ scholar from the Global South, seeing some of my own experiences mirrored across different chapters felt validating. Yet this book is not just for those like me. More established scholars will also find it a powerful resource for reflecting on their own roles in either perpetuating or dismantling exclusionary practices.
