2014 essay collection by roxanne gay
Lessons From a ‘Bad Feminist’
It is a strangely genuine fact that in , it is easier than ever to identify as a feminist. And yet, I doubt even one of us is completely happy with the state of feminism in
Gay is never doctrinaire, never interested in the easy answer to any question and never interested in contrarianism for contrarianism’s sake.
First, the “easy” part. Educating oneself about feminism pre-Internet was no simple task. To access the information, a would-be feminist had to be located near the action, interpretation that you had to hope against hope that your city had a thriving feminist community, or else have the privilege of attending a college with a good women’s studies program. As a teenager in small-town Ohio in the ’90s, my feminist education was mostly gleaned from rock lyrics (many of them from women like PJ Harvey, who denied being feminist when interviewers asked her about it) and secondhand paperbacks I found at a food co-op. Barnes & Noble had a miniscule “women’s studies” section, and ma
Roxane Gay: 'Bad Feminist,' Real Person
Roxane Gay's new collection of essays, Bad Feminist, is littered with defiant, regal I's. "I do not concern for epigraphs." "I was not impressed."
Gay — novelist, essayist and persistent documenter of her possess life — proclaims her I-ness everywhere she goes: On her blog, she describes what she ate for dinner, what made her mad on an airplane, what she's scared of, what she's ashamed of, what makes her lonely.
Everything is about her — and that's how it should be. Gay never obscures her authorial self, never pretends that her writings were birthed immaculately, handed down whole from the mount whence cultural judgments are dispensed. In every sentence, she's there: exposed, doubtful, present.
And Roxane Queer makes me nervous. There's something about the bareness, the unabashed need that oozes out of her words (because that's how we treat need: as if it's seeping and possibly infectious) that makes me feel exposed just reading them, like she's giving up our secrets, us humans with our sadness and weird toes and fear of be
If you follow Roxane Gay on Twitter, you probably already love her as much as I do. She&#;s forthright, unabashed, and gives a microphone to the best and worst of the little voices inside our heads. So, I picked up Bad Feminist &#; her essay collection &#; fully expecting to love it. After all, if she could cram so much into characters, surely this book would be brimming with brilliance.
For those of you who aren&#;t already familiar: Gay was born in Nebraska to Haitian parents, who had moved to the U.S. and worked their way up to middle-class comfort for themselves and their children. Gay has two younger siblings, and grew up in a content, though strict, domesticated. Though she was a lonely and slightly weird infant (as per her own recollection), experienced a terrible sexual assault in her early teens, and had a couple of wayward years in her youth, she is now settled as a respected academic, author, and critic. Plus, she&#;s a total boss.
This collection, Bad Feminist, catapulted her into the limelight. It&#;s a bunch of stand-alone essays, most published individually el
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Praise
This is the communicate for those of us who constructed our feminism from the pages of teen chick lit as much as from the musings of post-modern theorists. Same-sex attracted gives us permission to seize up the sword of feminism while laying down the shield of policed authenticity. As a result, we complete this publication both more powerful and more vulnerable, just like Gay herself. How can you help but love this author?
Melissa Harris-Perry, Host MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry”
Presidential Endowed Professor of Political Science at Get up Forest University
With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist—and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a horrible feminist.
Ayelet Waldman • Love and Treasure and Bad Mother
There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don’t know any author who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane G