الإصدار 4 - العدد 12 (2026-03-20)

Race, Gender and Sexuality in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other: A Narrative of Intersecting Identities

Researcher: Haider Jaber Husain

Ministry of Education- Open Educational College- Karbala Study Centre- Iraq

The study brings out the identity in an intersectional approach. It exposes the interaction of race, sex, and sexual orientation and how the interactions affect the lives of both individuals and groups of people as shown by the characters in the novel. The Critical Textual Analysis is an important instrument that can be used to represent race, gender and sexual orientation in the novel, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo. The ideas made based on feminist criticism, Queer theory and polyphonic narrative theory facilitated the analysis. The findings showed that the Black characters live through the complicated experiences of marginalization and exclusion, and femininity and sexuality are introduced as the space of the experience and expression, as the critical outlook of Black feminism and the versatility of identity. The plurality of stories also reflects the role of artistic form as a means of redistribution of power and the empowerment of the voices of the marginalized. At the gendered level; the discussion shows that the novel fails to establish femininity in terms of the monolithic feminists. In terms of sexual orientation, the findings affirm that the novel assumes the fluidity of sexual identity. Moreover, the results proved that polyphony and a lack of classical punctuation in the novel is a unified artistic solution that allows, on a textual level, to reflect an intersectionality in the text, in which the narrative itself is a powerful semantic unit of expression of a variety of experiences.