C. M. Rosens

Introduction & Downloadable Slides

This month, I was at the WriteHive Conference (a free online event) talking about creating Queernormative world building in fiction.

Here are the slides from that world building workshop for you to download for personal use only, I’m trusting you:

Please ask permission to use these elsewhere. You can chat with me via my contact page or @ me on social media. Credit me like this:

Credit: C.M. Rosens – cmrosens.com

I used some historical real-world examples of different ways to structure families and naming patterns, taken from Welsh history. (I’m Welsh, and my dad’s side are Turkish).

Please be respectful if you’re pulling from real world examples, and don’t be appropriative. Take a deep dive into your own heritage or culture’s history – see what you can find!

If you’re using other cultures, be respectful of them. Ask someone from that culture to talk you through the aspects that struck you. A sensitivity reader can help point out inaccuracies and problematic aspects of your work, even where none were intended.

Here’s the gist of what I was talking about:

World Building Tip #1: Family is the Key

The family unit is a microcosm of society. Your family unit will reflect, teach, subvert, or perpetuate the structures and norms of its society. If you want to create a queernormative society, start by examining your assumptions about what a family unit looks like.

It’s easy to fall back onto your own cultural and societal norms without even thinking about it, in order to fill in the gaps of your world building with details you haven’t given much thought to.

If a society is queernormative, there is no heteronormativity. There is also no cisgendernormativity, and there is no amatonormativity. Relationships are not automatically sexual or romantic. A family does not automatically consist of a couple and their children. There are no gender roles or gendered expectations.

If we are queering relationships in this way, then various forms of non-monogamy will exist. On the flip side, cheating and jealousy will also still exist: this isn’t a utopia just because it’s queer.

World Building Tip #2: Consider Living Spaces

The family unit is a microcosm of society. The organisation of the normative family unit is also a reflection on the structure of that society. How much space a ‘normal’ family needs impacts housing and settlement planning.

• What living standards are “normal” for this society?
• What type of living space does your family need?
• Is the space they have suitable for their structure and the needs of its members?

Organisation differs between an urban, industrial society with limited living space, a capitalist ideology, and requirements for workers to perform specific tasks around specific schedules, and an agrarian society following the natural cycle of animal husbandry and crop harvest.

• How do you balance these things?
• How might polyamory and other nonmonogamous structures look?
• Is it easier to live within a nonmonogamous family structure in the country, or the city?

Living costs could mean more urban people move to nonmonogamous and extended family structures for pragmatic reasons. These could include childcare, domestic bills and rent splitting, and caring for disabled and elderly family.

• How do people design their urban centres and rural settlements to be more reflective of these hardwired norms?

• What is absent from these spaces?

• Where would families go for relaxation?

• Where would they meet up with each other? What third spaces would exist (e.g. in the UK we have pubs, shops, and cafés with family-friendly gardens and play areas, etc.)

• What is society’s attitude to children, and how does family and public life include, discuss, and accommodate children?

World Building Tip #3: Naming Patterns

If we have a queernormative world, the structure of families would be vastly different depending on their composition. World building depends on the questions you ask, and the paths you explore.

Always ask yourself how things came to be, and why they remain that way. Nothing exists in a vacuum. Why do people have the names they have? Where do those names come from? Why do some people have family names, and why don’t other people have them?

You can look at historical periods as well – history is a great world building resource!

Thinking About Names

Let’s get into it with the first few questions:

• In a queernormative society, especially one where polyamory is normal, would using one parent’s surname over the other parent’s surname, as is common in modern Western society, even make sense?

• What identifying name do they use, and how does it work as an identifier?

• Would there be a concept of a “family name” and if so, what is that concept?

For example:

• Is it based on something in nature, like a constellation or planetary alignment that means something to the family?
• Some natural feature in the landscape they take their name from?
• Something else?

Could it be based on where they are from, the skill sets they have, something abstract and more esoteric, like a name that comes in a dream to one of its members (who, why, how, what?)

Changing & Assigning Names

• What is the process of name adoption or name change?

For example, is it a democratic process of voting for a family name, and if so:

• who gets to vote and when?
• can everyone vote?
• Are there exceptions and exclusions?
• which family member leads and instigates the voting in the first place?
• what are the logistics of getting a scattered family together to vote for things?
• how does this reflect wider society’s political organisation/mainstream ideologies?
• could names work as memorials – recycling names of family members and giving them to your children to keep the memory of that person alive, or to link that child to someone grafted into the family and reinforce their ties?
• would it be possible for adopted or fostered children to retain their original names or not?
• how would things work for adopted or fostered children who retained their original names to link them to their original family, and how would they participate in family life?

Or, let’s think about it another way: let’s say the family an autocratic unit with somebody in charge who is the recognised Head of the Family.

Names & Family Structure

Now we’re asking more questions, and questions are key to your world building:

• Are people named after Heads of the Family as a prestige name?

• Are Heads of the Family too important to have people named after them – would this be considered rude, profane, or overly ambitious and cause rifts and discontent among the family members?

• Would a Head of the Family take over a specific name or title, and discard all previous names once they took on that position?

• Who gets to be the Head of the Family and by what mechanisms and structures?

• Is it the oldest person who is in charge – if so what happens when multiple family members are the same age?

• Is it the strongest family member in charge (how do you define that?) or the cleverest in charge, the wisest in charge (how do you agree on this? Who defines and determines these things?) or something else?

• What does this imply about the structure of the wider society and what this society fundamentally values?

• How would the dynamics look with a trans elder in charge, or a lesbian in charge, or a cishet man in charge, and how would cishet people act if there were no gender roles to conform to?

Naming Ceremonies

There could be a million ways you structure your family, and decide on how they name themselves as an identifier, and their children. So let’s think about that next, and go a bit deeper:

• Would most given names be unisex, and then later on a child picks a gendered name if they want one, or decides to stick with their given name?
• Could that develop into a formalised naming ritual that happens every year, and anyone can attend to pick a new name and make it official for themselves without age restriction?
• Could such a ceremony develop into a prestige thing, where people regardless of their gender or orientation go up and change their name annually to follow cool trends for names, and to make themselves more fashionable?
• What implications does this have for keeping track of people, how is this updated, what does this imply about legal systems, HR systems if they exist, and other ways of keeping track of a person?
• Would that be done by a number or unique code assigned to people which never changes (like a National Insurance number in the UK, or a Social Security number in the US)?

If this is a society that thinks of children as autonomous people, it would make sense to give them a unisex name.

If not, and children are an afterthought for whatever reason, then perhaps they only receive their unique code, and are known by this code until they are old enough to choose their own name.

They may, of course, be given nicknames by the family, or terms of endearment would be used instead, but they wouldn’t have a legal name until they came of age to pick one.

Back to Wider World Building

Now we’re again going back to wider societal norms and values, and we can build out from this concept – in thinking about how individuals and groups identify publicly and officially, we have a basis for bureaucracy and administration, and what systems would be in place for record-keeping and logistics.

We also have an idea of architecture and settlement design based on whether society as a whole values children or not, or if the focus is on adults and able-bodied workers, or if the focus is on quality of life for family groups made up of the elderly and the very young, as well as adults of working age.

Now we can work on the experiences of disabled people in this society, and whether it is set up for them or not, and neurodiverse people in this society, and whether it is set up for them or not.

It’s also possible to look at the family unit, its flexibility, its inclusiveness or exclusiveness, the expectations placed on each of its members, and explore how the religious and political structures, ideologies, norms, cultures and values of this society map onto this family structure and vice versa.

In doing so, you can find holes and logical fallacies in your world building, and try to fix them before they become issues in your story.

World Building Tip #4: Pronouns and Language

For those who like to conlang (construct a language), would that language be gendered, like French or Italian, or would it be genderless, like Turkish or Finnish?

In Turkish, for example, you never know what ‘o’/’onu’/’ona’ is referring to in a sentence as it could be it, he or she. You have to work it out from context, or ask. That means you can’t be misgendered in casual speech – you’ll only ever be referred to as ‘o’ regardless of your gender. Would this be a natural way for language to work in you?

How would you prevent a bias in the way people understand ‘o’, e.g. automatically assume a gender unless stated otherwise? What happens in conversations where no gender is assumed? How does that impact the precision of sentences, the specificity needed, the syntax people adopt to express things?

How does slang develop, and do you have gendered slang or curse words like ‘bitch’ (female dog), ‘gash’ (as in, “that’s gash” [00-10s] in the same way as “that’s gay”[90s+]) and ‘cunt’, (female genitalia), etc? E.g. Turkish curse words revolve around animals and vegetables, like “cucumber” or “donkey” for fool/stupid/idiot etc.

Finally…

Let’s not forget that a queernormative society might still be ableist, racist, and have sexual crimes and other crimes. It doesn’t mean it’s an automatic utopia. Some group may still be oppressed within it – who, how, why? Where is the conflict in the society, where and what are its fault lines and how did they come to be?

We’ve only scratched the surface here, but these will hopefully give you something to think about!

More world building chat can be found here on the podcast, or here in the transcript: