It is difficult to make sense of how anyone could lose sight of that act, and yet it isn’t.”įrom “Some Jokes Are Funnier Than Others”: “Perhaps rape jokes are funny, but I cannot fathom how. It was an eleven-year-old girl’s life that was ripped apart, not the lives of the men who raped her. This required negotiating a fine balance, and I am a clumsy person.”įrom “How We All Lose”: “We have to be more interested in making things better than just being right, or interesting, or funny.”įrom “The Careless Language of Sexual Violence”: “It was an eleven-year-old girl whose body was ripped apart, not the town. … I was American at school and Haitian at home. This myth is like heels and purses – pretty but designed to SLOW women down.”įrom “I Once Was Miss America”: “I watched the popular kids all the time … They were so American, and therefore, exotic because they had freedoms I did not. Abandon the cultural myth that all female friendships must be bitchy, toxic, or competitive.
Until you can get your hands on a copy (or download to stick in your ear – no one does indignance with such controlled elegance as narrator Bahni Turpin!), allow me to share a few remarks to start you thinking:įrom “How to Be Friends with Another Woman”: 1.
You could find something intriguing to quote on every page, which would be the best reason to read the collection in full (and often). Her teaching, of course, isn’t limited to the curious young minds she calls her students given her “reasonably well published” career (we’ll let that understatement slide) and her exponentially multiplying social media presence, Gay is doing more than her fair share educating readers everywhere.Įnlightenment is here – through poignant memories, embarrassing revelations, graphic anger, goofy observances, joyful moments, and justified diatribes. The child of Haitian American immigrants who “grew up middle class and then upper middle class” in a loving, intact family, Gay unequivocally acknowledges her “privilege.” Her education at elite schools eventually landed her a tenure-track position her “first time out” as an English professor.
Someday soon, I’d like to be just as bad!ĭivided into five sections plus introduction that begin and end with “Me” and “Back to Me,” respectively, these 38 essays form an illuminating treatise on how to think sharper and smarter.
I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions but I also don’t want to be treated like sh*t for being a woman. I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. No matter what issues I have with feminism, I am a feminist. She is completely the self-proclaimed Bad Feminist. Roxane Gay, however, is direct, unwavering, thoughtful.
Without meaning to attribute unintended words to the good Professor, I seem to be hearing some less-than-patient reactions! Me? Delusional? Why, yes. In the midst of this season of amplified insanity (exacerbated by a complicated three-part move), I find myself seeking escape via audible renditions of bestselling novels cross-populating most of the ‘Best-of’ lists too many are not faring particularly well as I dissect with Gay-spectacles firmly perched. If I were to choose the one book that affected me most this year – the one that ran the entire spectrum from giddiest to maddest, from eye-opening in wonder to eye-scrunching in horror – this is it.īad Feminist has forever changed the way I read, because I now find myself obsessively re-examining titles past and present through a Gay-lens.