Classed forms of placed personhood increasingly compel future-orientated and self-regulating subjects that 'fit' into contemporary economic and social formation. These forms of personhood, spoken of as moral character and behavioural 'traits', are increasingly attached to placed parenthood: as that which (self)locates in the right moral and material terrain. In this article questions are asked about the entanglement between placed parenthood and wider inequalities, as (dis)located on the gendered practices of mothers' labour. On the one hand, 'tight, white, middle-class mothers', positioned as cultural and national bearers of future, are tasked with bringing forth neo-liberal citizens (Baraitser 2009, Gillies 2006, Parker 2010). On the other, excessive, mis-fitting, workingclass and black mothers are positioned as deficits, responsible for social, cultural and economic crisis where certain femininities flounder and fail. Particular places, as embodied sites of locating 'unrest', 'austerity' and 'rioting', are both condemned for weakening neighbourhoods, communities and, by extension, the country. These assertions of place and people, or placed personhood, are increasingly cast as a global world-ranking of cities coming-forward and taking up more space (Gosling 2008; Paton 2010). 1 These processes are witnessed in the example of and responses to the English Riots of 2011, which provides a case study for this article, casting light on intersections of class, race, gender and sexuality in forms of placed parenthood. There is a (re)generation of new-old 'gender regimes' at play here in locating worth and worthlessness (Walby 2002, 2009; Taylor 2012a). Mothers, charged with rearing a generation of future-citizens, are increasingly expected to take responsibility for their own trajectories, to enterprise their way out of 'traps' (MacDonald et al. 2001) and to assemble a range of efficiencies, networks and capitals in order to envisage and pursue a fulfilling and productive future. They must and do come forward and claim space as theirs (Adkins 2009; McRobbie 2009; Evans 2010).

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Making space for queer-identifying religious youth' 2 (2011-2013) is an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded project, which seeks to shed light on youth cultures, queer community and religiosity. Whilst non-heterosexuality is often associated with secularism, and some sources cast religion as automatically negative or harmful to the realisation of LGBT identity (or 'coming out'), we explore how queer Christian youth negotiate sexual-religious identities. There is a dearth of studies on queer religious youth, yet an emerging and continuing interest in the role of digital technologies for the identities of young people. Based on interviews with 38 LGBT, 'religious' young people, this article examines Facebook, as well as wider social networking sites and the online environment and communities. Engaging with the key concept of 'online embodiment' (Farquhar 2012), this article takes a closer analysis of embodiment, emotion and temporality to approach the role of Facebook in the lives of queer religious youth. Further, it explores the methodological dilemmas evoked by the presence of Facebook in qualitative research with specific groups of young people.

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Categorical career stages offer an institutional framework through which mobilities can be claimed and contested by feminists in academia. Inhabiting career stages uncritically can serve to reproduce neoliberal academic structures that feminists may seek to resist. Collaboration across career stages is a significant empirical case for understanding how feminists occupy academic space. We use auto-ethnographic methods to read career stages and feminist collaboration through each other, analysing the authors' cross-career collaborations and mentoring relationship in a Scottish University. We ask how feminist collaboration can claim and disrupt the neoliberal temporal logics of competitively achieving individuals on upward career trajectories, where academic arrival can feel permanently deferred. As such we argue for more pluralised and fragmented understandings of 'career stages', which as fixed categories work to position academics as either precarious or privileged, and for a messier imaginary of academic work and careers.

Sexuality frequently neglects class studies, just as class analysis ignores sexualities. This special issue of the journal Sexualities aims to open debates on class and sexuality with four original research studies on class and sex, along with four commentaries from leading experts in the field.

This article draws upon my research on working-class lesbians, which explores the relationship between class, sexuality and social exclusion. Research participants were drawn mainly from Scotland (Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Highlands), with smaller samples in Yorkshire and Manchester; in total fifty-three women took part, most being interviewed individually, others as part of three focus groups, and a couple in ‘paired’ interviews. The significance of sexuality and class position is highlighted across various social sites from family background and schooling to work experiences and leisure activities. The women's own identifications, understandings and vivid descriptions point to the continued salience of class as a factor in shaping life experiences. This article focuses primarily on the women's ‘sense of place’ and their relations to the often devalued territories that they inhabit. The relationship between sexual identity and class has received little academic attention - here the ‘gaps’ in the literature pertaining to ‘lesbian and gay’ space, and to (de-sexualised) class space, will be identified. By including empirical data I offer a picture of the ways in which classed spaces is sexualised and sexualised space is classed and suggest that space is constitutive of identity in terms of where it places people, both materially and emotionally.

In this article I consider working-class lesbians' views and experiences of commercialized scene space as these venues change in light of social, economic and political developments. Working-class lesbians both participated in and felt excluded from scene spaces, often criticizing them as 'pretentious' and 'unreal' for their cosmopolitan gloss. In this upgrading a politicized perspective was believed to have been sacrificed or in jeopardy, threatened by gendered and classed consumer-based expectations and inhabitations. The reproduction of such space via regeneration and sophistication mediates the construction of lesbian styles, appearances and identities, demarcating boundaries of inclusion across time and place. Interviewees spoke of scene developments and changes with a sense of loss, even nostalgia; their descriptions frequently conjured up binaries of now/then, political/apolitical, marginal/mainstream, metropolitan/provincial — producing an uneasy situation in and out of place. Such positionings illustrate material, embodied and felt exclusions, and tenuous inclusions, as this space is negotiated, contested and rejected.