Joan Nestle, an icon of Second-Wave Lesbian Feminism, calls for us to move forward beyond a gender binary to a place where feminism can and must embrace a multiplicity of intersecting identities. While the border crossings and thrown-open gates she asks us to traverse offer new and expanding forms of feminist as well as queer theory and practice, Nestle could just as easily be pointing us toward new ways of theorising the Gothic. Indeed, ‘queering’ the Female Gothic just opens us all up to a broader understanding of historically marginalised authors in a historically marginalised genre. It is through its treble marginalisation that queer Female Gothic demands that we reconsider and question all of the social and cultural ‘norms’ that we have absorbed.

It has been well established that, for many women authors, Gothic has afforded a proverbial safe space in which to explore numerous and often overlapping social concerns. For women writers, often already dismissed simply because they are female, writing within a liminal genre like Gothic has enabled them to more honestly and thoroughly critique restrictive social and cultural conventions such as: patriarchal and heteronormative family structures; the medical pathologising of cisgender female and trans* bodies; and institutions of racism and sexism within various historic contexts, as well as in contemporary issues surrounding the intersections of sexuality, race, class, ability and gender identity. The authors and their works explored in this chapter offer us an array of queer characters and queer situations – regardless of the author's own sexual orientation or gender identity. All these authors, ultimately, work within what I am calling a queer Gothic to render a much richer reading, particularly if we utilise a broadly defined and ever-changing feminist approach.