This artist's queer tarot deck is rethinking the gender binary depicted in traditional cards

Multidisciplinary artist and self-proclaimed witch Flossy Roxx is making tarot cards more inclusive by developing a queer deck.

If you look at the Rider-Waite tarot deck, the most common version around, you'll notice the imagery is made up of gender-specific archetypes, including kings, queens, an emperor and a high priestess. "A lot of the cards are portrayed as cisgender white people," Flossy says. "There's a lot of heteronormativity; there's a hierarchy to the characters portrayed in the cards."

As someone who identifies as queer and non-binary, Flossy found this traditional symbolism hard to relate to when they were first learning to read tarot cards. "I didn't see myself in them."

The Queer Tarot Project is a multimedia work of art that reimagines tarot cards from a queer lens by photographing and filming people in the LGBTQ community. Participants select a tarot archetype they would like to see themselves as, and Flossy works with them to create the look and feel of the card. They started the project three years ago and, after photographing more than 80 people, are close to completing a full deck.

In this video, we accompany Flossy as they photograph a subject for one of the final cards and unpack how the project is breaking down tarot's heteronormative symbolism and making it more inclusive. We also learn about the main purpose of the project: developing a spiritual resource for queer folks, and how that was born from Flossy's own experience growing up in a religious household.

"I'm not telling people's stories; I'm elevating their stories," they explain. "I'm facilitating stories of queer people, of trans people, of people [who are] gender non-conforming. That's what I wanted to see in a tarot deck that I needed in my life. So I'm making it."