Queernorm and Cisnorm Settings in Fiction

One big decision to make when drafting your queer fiction novel is whether to set it in a queernorm or cisnorm world, and I recommend you make this decision with intention, as each option has both advantages and drawbacks.

What is a cisnorm setting or world?

The regular world we live in is, by and large, a cisnorm world. What this means is that heteronormative sexuality and binary gender identity are viewed as “normal” and many people or “society” attach a stigma to nonconforming genders and sexualities.

If you are writing a contemporary or historical novel, it’s highly likely your setting will be cisnorm. Exceptions might include novels set in certain queer subcultural or activist settings.

Take the classic LGBTQ movie, The Birdcage, which is celebrating its thirty-year anniversary. This is set in a gay cabaret club in Miami’s South Beach in 1990s America, so it’s a queer-friendly community in a wider cisnorm setting. The cabaret club owners have carved out a queer-friendly enclave for themselves there, which is complicated when the cabaret club owner’s son plans to marry the daughter of a really conservative US senator. What follows is a farce that reflects on the divide between conservative and liberal America in the 1990s, and the film uses the wider cisnorm setting to illuminate some of the hypocrisies present among America’s conservative right.

Cisnorm worldbuilding

The challenge in a cisnorm world is that fiction aims to illuminate it, by creating an often-hyperreal version of it, and this can easily lead into cliches and strong stereotyping. It can also end up foregrounding sexuality as the central conflict, through topics like discrimination, coming out, secrecy, internalized shame, etc. This can be fine, of course, but there are other stories to tell, where queerness is just an everyday accepted facet of the world, and the queer characters are free to explore other topics.

What is a queernorm setting or world?

A queernorm world is a world in which no stigma is attached to queer sexualities: A world where people are not judged based on the gender of their partner, where gay isn’t a playground insult, and ultimately where LGBTQ+ people live out their lives and do not have to worry about “closets” or “coming out” or holding hands in the street.

Queernorm worlds offer the queer reader or viewer potent wish fulfilment, and wish fulfilment is one of the powerful kinds of narrative glue that keeps people reading a story.

One great TV series set in what I would describe as a partially queernorm world is Teen Wolf. Sadly, it passed me by in the early 2010s: It arrived on MTV in the period just before Netflix became popular. I was living in Croatia at the time, and while Twilight was a massive phenomenon there, Teen Wolf wasn’t as popular.

In the Teen Wolf world, bisexual, homosexual, and pansexual orientations are treated as a regular part of life in the same way that heterosexual orientations are treated in the cisnorm world. At scene level, this shows up when characters discuss their dates. I describe the series as partially queernorm because some stigma does creep in, as I discuss in the next section.

It’s worth pointing out that werewolf and vampire stories like Teen Wolf and Twilight already have a captive LGBTQ audience because they tap into several themes that resonate with this audience: hiding your authentic self from others, transformation, found family, etc., and that’s why I love the executive decision Jeff Davis made to create a (partially) queernorm werewolf series, especially after the relatively conservative messaging of Twilight, amid an appetite for paranormal romance.

Queernorm worldbuilding

The challenge with queernorm fiction can be not to accidentally include encounters or situations where real-world stigmas are present or baked in. This can be harder than it seems, because we are swimming in a culture of cisnorm-related stigma and therefore cannot see every instance of it, even if we try hard to, or deliberately behave in everyday life as if it doesn’t exist.

And it does show up, for example, in Teen Wolf, when at the high school prom in the Season 1 finale, Scott dances with Danny to confuse the high school teacher and prevent him from making a fuss out of their choice to dance together, which implies the existence of a stigma, even if it isn’t acted on. But the queernorm intention is there, and it’s soothing to watch.

The big benefit of setting your story in a queernorm world is that you don’t have to make conflicts around queerness a central problem in the story, leaving the characters free to explore other topics unburdened.

But no approach is inherently better: it’s simply a question of the kind of story you want to tell and the topics and tensions you want to foreground.