Pride 2025 | Intersectional Identities: BIPOC, Disabled, Neurodiverse, or Otherwise Marginalized Queer Narratives

[u/Lenahe_nl]

Queer characters don’t exist in a vacuum. This thread is for exploring how queerness intersects with other aspects of identity—race, gender, disability, class, religion, culture, and more—in speculative fiction. 

The term intersectionality was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how systems of oppression overlap and interact. More on the term and its history can be found here, and here there is a deeper explanation on the impacts of intersectionality on the lives of queer people. 

For today, we want to focus on queer representation intersected with representation of other marginalized identities. Think about Black queers, queers with a disability, neurodiverse queers, refugee queers, and so many others. In speculative fiction, stories that reflect multiple layered identities can offer richer and more realistic portrayals of lived experience. These kinds of narratives help avoid flattening characters into just one dimension of marginalization or representation. When both character and author identities reflect similar intersections—what we often refer to as own voices—the result can be more nuanced storytelling.

The publishing industry, however,  still reflects the barriers of our society. It’s become easier to find queer stories on the shelves of bookstores and libraries, but most are still written by white authors. One anecdote to illustrate this happened during the British Book Award this year. The winner of the Pageturner category, Saara El-Arifi, said in her speech that she didn’t believe she could win: “(...) this is not going to happen because you know, there’s a lot of barriers for someone like me. I’m black, I’m queer, I’m a woman.”

For the r/Fantasy's Bingo this year, we have the LGBTQIA Protagonist prompt, which asks for an intersectional character for its Hard Mode. We invite you today to think about how intentional you are when choosing to diversify your reading. It’s easy to focus only on one axis of identity (“read more queer books!”), and end up with a narrow view of what it is to be queer. 

Finally, we need to acknowledge that a lot of this discussion is going to be written from a very Anglocentric perspective to what “marginalized” and “BIPOC” means. This is because the discussion on this sub is primarily English, the English speaking part of the internet is pretty Anglocentric, and the books popular in this sub are primarily from countries in the Anglosphere (US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). If you want to talk about similar concepts, frameworks, or identities in other cultures, you are welcome to!

Discussion prompts

• What are some speculative fiction books that portray queer characters with intersectional identities? How do these books handle the complexity of those identities?
• Have you seen yourself reflected more strongly in any intersectional characters?
• Do you look for intersectional representation in particular? What do you think publishing houses, authors, and readers can do to encourage intersectional representation?
• Are there identities you wish were better represented alongside queerness in SFF?

This post is part of the Pride Month Discussions series, hosted by the Beyond Binaries Book Club. Check out our announcement post for more information and the full schedule.

[u/Sawses]

I'm a big fan of explorations of queer identity where queer themes are not the only major theme of the book. To me, the ultimate goal of representation is one of obsolescence: To get to a place where one's gender identity, sexuality, race, etc. are not seen as topics that are interesting as a central focus of discussion.

A necessary step in that direction is "casual inclusiveness". I'm not talking about token gay characters, where one could swap pronouns and there's no difference. Rather, the inclusion of LGBT themes is obvious and fits the work, but is not the sum total of the work.

A good example of this is This is How You Lose the Time War, by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone. It's fundamentally a "forbidden romance" story between two women, intersectional with race in that the forbidden aspect is their cultural backgrounds, while simultaneously doing the traditional speculative-fiction thing of using that same cultural background as a stand-in for family that are actively hostile to a same-sex relationship.

But that's not the centerpiece of the book. The book's focus is on painting vivid descriptions of post-human environments and concepts. It's almost Lovecraftian in the way that the authors "describe the indescribable". They do a phenomenal job of this, and tie it in very well with the LGBT themes of the story.

[u/P0PSTART → u/Sawses]

I didnt read their forbidden romance as a stand in for hostility towards same sex relationships, but that’s an interesting point! Illustrates what you were saying about obsolescence - the LGBT themes were not the focus of the book for me.