Bad feminist roxane gay
It Is Good to Be a “Bad” Feminist
I bristled a little at the title of Roxane Gay’s new collection of essays: Bad Feminist. Was that “bad” a backhanded boast, a Cold Girl’s rejection of all the supposedly militant and humorless “good” feminists out there?
Then I started reading the guide, and I realized the professor cum novelist cum voice-on-the-Internet isn’t proclaiming herself a chiller, smarter, funnier feminist than anyone else. She is exploring imperfection: the power we (we people, and especially we women) wield in spite and because of it. Her essays, which are arresting and sensitive but rarely conclusive, don’t care much for unbroken skin. They are about flaws, sometimes scratches and sometimes deep wounds. Gay studies the cracks and what fills them.
“I am failing as a woman,” she writes, half seriously. “I am failing as a feminist … I am a mess of contradictions.” Gay, the composer of one novel, An Untamed State, which came out in May 2014, despises rape jokes but loves crappy exploitative television. She thinks misogynist songs like “Blurred Lines” are catchy but writes an impassioned letter to the girls who express they would grant Chris Brown strike them. There is no
There aren’t really adequate words for me to detail how much I treasure this book. This is the book about feminism and culture that I’ve been waiting years for. And no one can do it quite prefer Roxane Gay.
I’ll be honest—I’m probably not the most impartial reviewer. I’ve been reading Gay’s work for a while now, on The Rumpus, mostly, but also on Buzzfeed and Jezebel and other sites where her name pops up. I’d search her out because I knew I’d be getting brief, emotive writing and incisive cultural critique. In reality, I’d read some of the essays in this book before, and yet, rereading them in the context of the collection was another experience altogether. In short, I knew I was going to love this book, and it still surpassed my expectations.
In her introduction, Male lover begins by explaining her past trepidation at the word feminist:
I resisted feminism in my late teens and my twenties because I worried that feminism wouldn’t allow me to be the mess of a woman I knew myself to be. But then I began to learn more about feminism. I learned to separate feminism from Feminism or Feminists or the notion of an Essential Feminism—one true feminism to rule all of womankind.
We liv
Lessons From a ‘Bad Feminist’
It is a strangely genuine fact that in 2014, 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 2014.
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, essence 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 major magazines prefer TIME sometimes ran stories about feminism — usually to report that All
“Bad Feminist”: A Summary
By Madison Stech | Academic Summary
In her 2012 article “Bad Feminist,” published by VQR, Roxane Lgbtq+ suggests that many of the tensions and negative connotations that accompany the term feminism can be attributed to a damaging, socially-constructed concept deemed inherent feminism. Gay, an American essayist and commentator, describes essential feminism as “the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist,” leaving those who accomplish not live up to societal expectations feeling unfit or inadequate to distinguish themselves as such (pg. 1).
In her article, Same-sex attracted confronts the reductive—not to mention counterintuitive—nature of necessary feminism and the exclusive stereotypes it produces, while addressing her own reservations towards embracing feminism itself. One of the reasons Gay gives for resisting the notion of crucial feminism is its tendency to overlook issues involving race. As a female of color, Gay criticizes essential feminism for not being more receptive of racial difference (pg. 5). Gay repeatedly insists that feminism needs to grow more receptive and welcoming of all types of women for it to flourish and become as powerfu
Buy the book
IndieBound, Powell’s City of Books, iBooks, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, Amazon
Praise
This is the write for those of us who assembled our feminism from the pages of teen chick lit as much as from the musings of post-modern theorists. Gay gives us permission to obtain up the sword of feminism while laying down the shield of policed authenticity. As a result, we finalize this book both more powerful and more vulnerable, just like Gay herself. How can you help but treasure this author?
Melissa Harris-Perry, Host MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry”
Presidential Endowed Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University
With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Poor Feminist—and gets it right, time and time again. We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist.
Ayelet Waldman • Love and Treasure and Poor Mother
There are writers who can display 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 similar time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist shows this remarkable writer’s range—in essays about Scrabble, v