Exploring the Intersectional Experiences of Minority Female Authors of Speculative Fiction

This creative thesis seeks to understand how the intersectional experiences and history of minority female authors of speculative fiction have impacted the content, style, and response to the works they produce before incorporating the understanding of that background into a speculative fiction short story. Representing diverse voices through the paradigm of intersectionality, which posits that social identity is a function of multiple, interwoven factors such as race and gender and the relationship of those aspects of social identity with wider social power structures, is a way of acknowledging the role of minority female authors in the speculative fiction genre. The first portion of this thesis describes the historical representation of minority female authors in speculative fiction and its relationship to the emergence of four waves of feminist thought in mainstream American society and how the social forces that facilitated those outbreaks of feminism also infiltrated the genre of speculative fiction from the 1970s to the present day. The background component of this thesis also includes a review of the backgrounds themes of three current authors of speculative fiction, Nalo Hopkinson, N.K. Jemisin, and Benjanun Sriduangkaew, extracting some general themes and examples of intersectionality within their bodies of work. The conclusion of the first section discusses the nature of the creative work which comprises the second component of the thesis