Intersectionality in Creative Writing in Feminist Narratives

Everyone loves the word “intersectionality” until it actually requires doing something. It sounds good on panels, looks noble on workshop flyers, and earns you applause if you say it slowly and with feeling. But in the hands of many writers, it remains just that—a word. A sticker. A buzz term dipped in theory and left out to dry.

What it’s not is optional.

What is Intersectional creative writing? It is storytelling that reflects the layered realities of people whose identities span multiple axes of oppression—race, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and more. It rejects one-size-fits-all characters and instead writes from a lens that acknowledges how systems of power overlap in everyday life. This kind of writing doesn’t just include diversity—it interrogates it, complicates it, and lets it take up space without apology.

If feminism in fiction still defaults to white, cis, able-bodied, hetero, middle-class women finding themselves through yoga retreats and toxic boyfriends, then we’ve simply built another exclusionary canon. One that praises freedom, but only if it’s soft. One that amplifies women’s stories—but only if the women look the part.

Intersectional creative writing doesn’t need to be perfect. But it does need to exist. Loudly. Awkwardly. Fully.

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The Problem with the Single Story

You know her: the protagonist who’s universally “relatable,” which usually means she’s thin, educated, angsty in a marketable way, and stumbling toward growth. She's the feminist archetype we’ve been sold over and over—traumatized just enough to be interesting, polished enough to be palatable.

And she’s fucking boring.

What about the woman in the margins? The one who doesn’t get to be a main character in anyone’s imagination? A disabled Black girl whose anger isn’t digestible. A trans sex worker in a rural town. A Middle Eastern woman from a Muslim background that runs away from those traditions, an undocumented mother who doesn’t speak in metaphors. They don't fit the "empowerment" algorithm—and that's why they should be on the page.

Writing intersectional feminist narratives is a casting call. It’s acknowledging how systems collide inside bodies. How race, class, gender identity, sexuality, ability, religion, and geography tangle with each other in real lives.

The fiction should reflect that mess. It should never be clean.

Not Just Color, But Texture

Too often, intersectionality is reduced to surface diversity. A dash of melanin here. A name that’s hard to pronounce there. But it’s not just about who you write—it’s about how you write them. Is your disabled character just inspirational furniture? Is your queer character only there to support the straight girl’s glow-up? Are your brown women always sexy, smell like sugar and spice, resilient, or dying beautifully?

Intersectional feminist writing demands more. It asks you to consider cultural texture, historical trauma, power dynamics, and narrative agency. It asks: Who gets to make mistakes? Who gets to survive? Who gets to be ordinary? If the answer is always the same kinda people, you’re not writing a story. You’re reinforcing a hierarchy.

Write Like the World Isn’t Centered on You

To write from an intersectional lens, you have to let go of the myth that your perspective is universal. That your feminism speaks for all women. That your protagonist’s arc is the blueprint for liberation.

It’s not.

Sometimes the most radical thing you can do as a writer is shut up, listen, and complicate the story. Let your protagonist be wrong. Let her be called out. Let her experience the dissonance of being oppressed and complicit. That’s real life. That’s real womanhood.

When I wrote Lust in Paris, I didn’t want to write a clean narrative about a middle eastern married woman's liberation from a bad marriage with a French man nor breaking free from traditional Muslim rules. I wanted to write a story about a woman—Lili—who doesn’t fit. A Middle Eastern woman in Europe, too white to be oppressed, too brown to belong. Educated but broke. Sexual but not sexy. She isn’t a token. She’s a question.

And her narrative doesn’t resolve into clarity. It fractures. Because identity doesn’t behave—it collides.

Intersectionality is not about guilt, ticking boxes or writing trauma porn to win praise. It’s about truth. It’s about letting characters take up space as they are, in all their contradiction, complexity, and discomfort.

It’s not radical to write a Muslim woman in fiction. It’s radical to let her live without explaining herself to her religion nor society.

So write fat girls who aren’t on diets. Neurodivergent women who don’t want fixing. Queers who aren’t accessories. Poor women who aren’t saints. Write women who look nothing like you, and still treat them like someone’s whole universe.

Because if your feminism can’t hold all of us, then your fiction isn’t liberation.

It’s a mirror.

And some of us have been erased from the reflection for far too long.

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