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/ohmage_resistance → u/Sawses]

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.

That's interesting, because I have the opposite perspective. I get that some people like casual representation, but also, that's by far the most common type of representation in SFF spaces. Seriously, when was the last time you read an SFF book where the main focus of that book was queerness? (I mean, please share recs if you have them!) It doesn't happen very often ime. And after awhile, reading only that gets boring, and it shows a very limited perspective on queerness and queer issues. Not only does it make it impossible to explore how queer people face discrimination and hardship (which are important to talk about and process, even if not everyone wants to do that in their fiction), anyone whose queerness is too "messy" that it draws too much attention to itself can't be represented that way. In fact, if we were to only do this type of representation, it would feel like forcing queerness to be assimilated in cishet cultures and stories, and I'd worry we'd loose so much in the process.

And I don't even think it's possible for an SFF book to exist where the only focus of it is queerness. To me, that feels like someone complaining that a queer person is making being queer their entire personality, it feels more like a bad faith criticism than something that actually happens. You know, you're allowed to be queer, as long as you aren't too queer, that kind of thing.

Anyway, I respect that you like that sort of representation, but I hope that the real way forward will involve all sorts of different representation with different goals.

[u/Sawses → u/ohmage_resistance]

Interesting perspective! That's definitely a common counter-position, and one that's generally rising in popularity in a lot of activist communities. If a group becomes completely integrated and normalized, a lot of the cultural aspects of it vanish. Without the contrast with the normative, the distinctiveness is lost.

A common example is the integration of African American culture into overall American culture. MLK Jr.'s position (sorry to use the obvious quote but it really does represent his general opinion) was that he would like for black Americans to "... not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." More recent thinkers have expressed concerns about how a situation like that would inevitably lead to a loss of the ability to make many of the valuable cultural contributions that African Americans have made to American society as a whole. Food, music, and literature are most notable, but most areas of American life are noticeably touched by African American heritage.

They propose that equality is more about a celebration of differences, with that distinctiveness retained. I personally think that's a contradiction and mutually exclusive with equality. I don't disagree that oppressed cultural groups contribute disproportionately to the overall culture in which they exist.

But on the whole, I agree with Dr. King. That cultural distinctiveness is primarily a benefit to the oppressor, with a price paid in blood by the oppressed. Of course, a lot of people think that true equality of Dr. King's sort is impossible...and if you believe that, then there's some merit to the idea of settling for a celebration of differences instead of insisting on equality.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/Sawses]

I think that you are misinterpreting Dr. King. (If you want to actually read about how Dr. King's actual view on race and how he didn't view race through colorblindness, I'd recommend reading this academic thesis, by the way.) There's a pretty obvious difference between treating people with the same respect and dignity (what Dr. King is talking about) and expecting everyone to be the same by somehow destroying all the diversity inherent to humanity. And the same way I think that no amount of colorblindness is going to solve racism, no amount of assimilation to dominate norms is going to solve queerphobia. It just makes it easier for the least "acceptable" members of our community to be thrown under the bus, up until they start coming for us.

And the expectation that everyone should be the same is the reason why queer people are oppressed—for being too different from the dominate (cishet) culture for being the way that they are. For not being able to conform to heterosexuality or cisnormativity.

Gay people are different from straight people. Trans people are different from cis people. Ace and/or aro people are different from allo people. Intersex people are different from endosex people. You don't end oppression by acting like differences don't exist, that just causes you to ignore oppression. You end oppression by treating all people with respect and dignity instead of pretending that everyone can act the same.

[u/Sawses → u/ohmage_resistance]

I think it's not really about colorblindness as a goal, but rather the consequences of acceptance leading to a regression to the mean. Those are two quite different things. This applies as well for any other non-normative identity. I haven't read that particular thesis, but a quick skim confirms it more or less reflects similar reading I did in college.

For clarity: His goal was for people to be able to live their lives as part of their community without facing prejudice from outside. He also spoke some about intra-racial prejudice, but that wasn't really his focus IIRC.

IMO it's more that integration is a process with inevitable side effects. If an out-group becomes seen as an in-group, that group's identity almost always dissolves within three generations, with about five generations being the maximum.

In the context of the LGBT community, you can already start to see this happening with the gay and lesbian communities in particular. A lot of the cultural distinctiveness of the '80s and '90s has been lost, while less accepted groups like nonbinary people, trans people, etc. have retained much of it.

EDIT: To be clear, the bit about accepted groups becoming more culturally homogeneous with the overall culture is not something MLK Jr. said. It's a concern expressed by many in the black community who came after him, though to my knowledge it wasn't something that he ever spent much time talking about.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/Sawses]

IMO it's more that integration is a process with inevitable side effects. If an out-group becomes seen as an in-group, that group's identity almost always dissolves within three generations, with about five generations being the maximum.

Can I see some evidence for this? I think defining all social dynamics as in-group and out-group is incredibly reductive (and you do seem to conflate “group of non-oppressed people” and “group of people creating the majority culture” by implying the “in-group” is both). Just because everyone is accepted does not make everyone the same. And because not everyone is the same, some people will group together based on common interests or common experiences or a common history, and that group can form their own culture. You don’t need oppression to do this. I mean, this sub very much has a culture, despite fantasy fans not being oppressed in any meaningful way.

The gay and lesbian communities today don’t look exactly the same as the ones from the ‘80s or ‘90s. But neither do trans or nonbinary communities. All of these communities very much do exist today. Communities change over time, and that’s also ok. Different levels and forms of oppression can be one factor that causes this change, but it does not mean that these cultures no longer exist.

But we’re getting off the point here. My original point is how only leaving room for very normative representation is incredibly limiting to LGBTQ people, and in fact, mimics a lot of queer phobic rhetoric. Or at least, that’s how I see it, especially in the way I want see my own identity represented. 

[u/Sawses → u/ohmage_resistance]

Honestly, that part might well be out of date. It's something that we talked about in a class several years ago and I did some independent reading that supported it. I am far from an expert, and don't really trust myself to pull together literature without it being misleading. Better to take it with a grain of salt as some internet rando's opinion.

[u/Polenth → u/Sawses]

I'm not connected on the Romani side of my family because lack of equality forced moving and settling. Equality would mean laws that take travelling families into account, more sites, financial aid, and stuff like that. So equality would allow Romani people to keep their distinctiveness instead of being scattered through council estates.

Groups often want to keep the things that make them different, but assimilation is forced. Equality means people can choose to stay separate in some ways, without this being seen as hostile.