The Ties That Bind are Not Always Blood: The Importance of the Found Family in Queer, POC-led Narratives

Found families, or chosen families, are often formed by queer individuals who have either lost, cut off, or been ostracised by their biological family unit. The found family exists as a form of deliberate, safe space creation by those who live precarious lives — existences that are considered non-normative by the prevailing hegemonic social order. The racialised queer individual experiences this precarity twice over, as aspects of identity intersect to create layered experiences of marginality that works to bar them from accessing the future. Futurity, the state of being future, is an inheritance that not all people have equal access to. Throughout history racialised people of colour and queers of colour have been left out of discussions that allow them to meaningfully shape the future. This denial of access is entrenched in histories of colonialism that echo through to the present day. This thesis argues that, as historian Robin Kelley writes in his book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, "the black radical imagination […] is a collective imagination engaged in an actual movement for liberation. It is fundamentally a product of struggle, of victories and losses, crises and openings" (150). The denied access to the future creates a space for authors to write into, to imagine radically different worlds. Such a space belongs to the speculative fiction narrative. The speculative fiction narrative allows writers to access a future, or alternate present, that serves as an environment where they explore the nature of different kind of worlds. This thesis considers three novels; Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories, Cadwell Turnbull’s No Gods No Monsters, and Alistair Mackay’s It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. All three novels provide representations of the found family: an unconventional family unit bound together by ties of choice, stepping into a duty of care with the knowledge that the world is hostile to their ways of being, dedicated to shouldering the duty of what it means to keep each other safe. Close analysis of these three texts explores the process of deeming, how this process creates social monsters who find physical expression in the speculative fiction narrative. The discussion this thesis engages with reveals how narratives that choose to depict living with deviance and embracing it allows for a representation of alternative engagement with the normative scripts of life, one that invites access to a normally inaccessible future.

Grantor dc:publisher

Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University

Year dc:date.issued

2026

Author dc:creator

• Bell, Nina Anna

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Oppelt, Riaan

Language dc:language.iso

en

Repository record dc:identifier.uri

https://scholar.sun.ac.za/handle/10019.1/135615

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholar.sun.ac.za:10019.1/135615