Bad Feminist

Last updated
Bad Feminist
Bad Feminist.jpg
First edition
Author Roxane Gay
Country United States
LanguageEnglish
Subject Essays
Genre Nonfiction
Publisher Harper Perennial
Media typePrint, ebook
Pages336 pp
ISBN 978-0062282712

Bad Feminist: Essays is a 2014 collection of essays by cultural critic, novelist and professor Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist explores being a feminist while loving things that could seem at odds with feminist ideology. Gay's essays engage pop culture and her personal experiences, covering topics such as the Sweet Valley High series, Django Unchained , and Gay's own upbringing as a Haitian-American. [1]

Contents

Publication history

Bad Feminist was one of two books published by Gay in 2014, the other being her novel An Untamed State .

Content

The essays in Bad Feminist address a wide variety of topics, both cultural and personal. The collection of essays is broken into five sections: Me; Gender & Sexuality; Race & Entertainment; Politics, Gender & Race; and Back to Me. [2] In a 2014 interview with Time, Gay explained her role as a feminist and how it has influenced her writing: "In each of these essays, I’m very much trying to show how feminism influences my life for better or worse. It just shows what it’s like to move through the world as a woman. It’s not even about feminism per se, it’s about humanity and empathy." [3]

Reception

Bad Feminist was widely reviewed. Gay drew praise for her "wry and delightful voice." [4] TheBoston Globe wrote that "there is much to admire," such as her "insightful" essay "What We Hunger For"; Bad Feminist "signals an important contribution to the complicated terrain of gender politics." [5] TheHuffington Post was more effusive in its praise, writing, "Gay's essays expertly weld her personal experiences with broader gender trends occurring politically and in popular culture," and gave it an 8/10 rating. [6] The Boston Review wrote that "Bad Feminist surveys culture and politics from the perspective of one of the most astute critics writing today." [7] In the United Kingdom's The Guardian , critic Kira Cochrane wrote, "While online discourse is often characterised by extreme, polarised opinions, her writing is distinct for being subtle and discursive, with an ability to see around corners, to recognise other points of view while carefully advancing her own. In print, on Twitter and in person, Gay has the voice of the friend you call first for advice, calm and sane as well as funny, someone who has seen a lot and takes no prisoners." [8] Time dubbed Bad Feminist "a manual on how to be human" and called Gay the "gift that keeps on giving." [3]

The New York Times Book Review wrote that Gay relied too heavily on an "unreasonable strawman" to make her point, [1] and The Independent found that Gay's own contradictions within the book come off as "intellectually flimsy." [9] The Chicago Tribune noted that while "Gay writes incisively, fearlessly, sometimes angrily, often wittily and always intelligently on an incredibly diverse array of issues: race, domestic violence, pop culture, food, social media, child sexual abuse, the Obamas and, of course, feminism" in her columns, Bad Feminist is somewhat lacking: "why, then, is there not more to admire in this collection of Gay's new and previously published essays? One problem is the aforementioned recapitulation of tried and true analyses, opinions and memes, any or all of which might bear reprising if Gay brought to them a new and original take." [10]

The book was noted for its popularity in feminist circles, with the satirical site Reductress publishing a story about how someone was a bad feminist because they hadn't yet read Bad Feminist. [11] A group of feminist scholars and activists analyzed Gay's Bad Feminist for "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism," an initiative of the feminist journal Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. [12]

Related Research Articles

Misandry is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men. Through a series of books published in the 2000s and 2010s, religion scholars Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young argue that misandry is commonly seen in North America in the demonization of men as a result of women exercising power through feminism. Nathanson and Young give as examples many cultural tropes that diminish men.

bell hooks American author and activist (1952–2021)

Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks's writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays and poetry to children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

<i>Sexual Personae</i> 1990 book by Camille Paglia

Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson is a 1990 work about sexual decadence in Western literature and the visual arts by scholar Camille Paglia, in which she addresses major artists and writers such as Donatello, Sandro Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Emily Brontë, and Oscar Wilde. Following Friedrich Nietzsche, Paglia argues that the primary conflict in Western culture is between the binary forces of the Apollonian and Dionysian, Apollo being associated with order and symmetry, and Dionysus with chaos, disorder, and nature. The book received critical reviews from numerous feminist scholars, and was praised by numerous literary critics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christina Hoff Sommers</span> Writer (born 1950)

Christina Marie Hoff Sommers is an American author and philosopher. Specializing in ethics, she is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. Sommers is known for her critique of contemporary feminism. Her work includes the books Who Stole Feminism? (1994) and The War Against Boys (2000). She also hosts a video blog called The Factual Feminist.

The history of feminism comprises the narratives of the movements and ideologies which have aimed at equal rights for women. While feminists around the world have differed in causes, goals, and intentions depending on time, culture, and country, most Western feminist historians assert that all movements that work to obtain women's rights should be considered feminist movements, even when they did not apply the term to themselves. Some other historians limit the term "feminist" to the modern feminist movement and its progeny, and use the label "protofeminist" to describe earlier movements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Katha Pollitt</span> American poet, essayist and critic (born 1949)

Katha Pollitt is an American poet, essayist and critic. She is the author of four essay collections and two books of poetry. Her writing focuses on political and social issues from a left-leaning perspective, including abortion, racism, welfare reform, feminism, and poverty.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cherríe Moraga</span> American writer and activist

Cherríe Moraga is a Chicana writer, feminist activist, poet, essayist, and playwright. She is part of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the Department of English. Moraga is also a founding member of the social justice activist group La Red Chicana Indígena which is an organization of Chicanas fighting for education, culture rights, and Indigenous Rights.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cathy Young</span> Russian-American writer

Catherine Alicia Young is a Russian-born American journalist. Young is primarily known for her writing about feminism and other cultural issues, as well as about Russia and the former Soviet Union. She is the author of two books, a frequent contributor to the libertarian monthly Reason, and a regular columnist for Newsday. In 2022, she joined The Bulwark as a staff writer. She describes her political views as "libertarian/conservative".

<i>Signs</i> (journal) Feminist academic journal

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society is a peer-reviewed feminist academic journal. It was established in 1975 by Jean W. Sacks, Head of the Journals Division, with Catharine R. Stimpson as its first editor in Chief, and is published quarterly by the University of Chicago Press. Signs publishes essays examining the lives of women, men, and non-binary people around the globe from both historical and contemporary perspectives, as well as theoretical and critical articles addressing processes of gendering, sexualization, and racialization.

Black feminism is a philosophy that centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that [Black women's] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because our need as human persons for autonomy."

Marilyn Frye is an American philosopher and radical feminist theorist. She is known for her theories on sexism, racism, oppression, and sexuality. Her writings offer discussions of feminist topics, such as: white supremacy, male privilege, and gay and lesbian marginalization. Although she approaches the issues from the perspective of justice, she is also engaged with the metaphysics, epistemology, and moral psychology of social categories.

<i>Ninth Letter</i> Academic journal

Ninth Letter is a literary magazine that publishes poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. It is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the School of Art + Design and the Creative Writing Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Ninth Letter exists in two related but distinct forms: a biannual print magazine and a website that features new electronic content on a continuous basis. In 2004, the first issue was published. It included fiction from Pulitzer Prize recipient Robert Olen Butler, Katherine Vaz, and an interview with Yann Martel, the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Camille Paglia</span> American feminist academic and critic

Camille Anna Paglia is an American feminist academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern culture and is the author of Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990) and other books. She is also a critic of contemporary American feminism and of post-structuralism, as well as a commentator on multiple aspects of American culture such as its visual art, music, and film history.

Kira Cochrane is a British journalist and novelist. She is the Head of Features at The Guardian, and worked previously as Head of Opinion. Cochrane is an advocate for women's rights, as well as an active participant in fourth wave feminist movements.

<i>Who Stole Feminism?</i> 1994 book by Christina Hoff Sommers

Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women is a 1994 book about American feminism by Christina Hoff Sommers, a writer who was at that time a philosophy professor at Clark University. Sommers argues that there is a split between equity feminism and what she terms "gender feminism". Sommers contends that equity feminists seek equal legal rights for women and men, while gender feminists seek to counteract historical inequalities based on gender. Sommers argues that gender feminists have made false claims about issues such as anorexia and domestic battery and exerted a harmful influence on American college campuses. Who Stole Feminism? received wide attention for its attack on American feminism, and it was given highly polarized reviews divided between conservative and liberal commentators. Some reviewers praised the book, while others found it flawed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Roxane Gay</span> American writer

Roxane Gay is an American writer, professor, editor, and social commentator. Gay is the author of The New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), as well as the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the short story collection Difficult Women (2017), and the memoir Hunger (2017).

<i>Reductress</i> American feminist satire website

Reductress is an American satire website that parodies the style, tone, and perspective of media targeted towards women, especially women's magazines. Founded in 2013 by comedians Beth Newell and Sarah Pappalardo, the site has received praise from reviewers for its satirical pieces including advice columns, news stories, and listicles.

<i>Girl, Woman, Other</i> 2018 novel by Bernardine Evaristo

Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel to be written by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments. It has received over 30 Book of the Year and Decade honours, alongside recognition as one of Barack Obama's top 19 books for 2019 and Roxane Gay's favourite book of 2019. Its prizes include Fiction Book of the Year at the 2020 British Book Awards, where she also won Author of the Year. It also won the Indie Book Award for Fiction and the Gold Medal of Honorary Patronage. It received many nominations and was finalist for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the Australia Book Industry Awards, and the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Morgan Jerkins is an American writer and editor. Her debut book, This Will Be My Undoing (2018), a collection of nonfiction essays, was a New York Times bestseller. Her second book, Wandering in Strange Lands, was released in August 2020. She is currently an adjunct professor at Columbia University.

Elizabeth Weed is an American feminist scholar, editor and university administrator. She is the cofounder and, from 2000 to 2010, director of the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women, as well as the feminist studies journal differences, cofounded in 1989 with Naomi Schor.

References

  1. 1 2 Gregory, Alice (October 10, 2014). "Daphne Merkin's "The Fame Lunches" and Roxane Gay's "Bad Feminist"". The New York Times. Retrieved June 5, 2015.
  2. "Bad Feminist Summary - eNotes.com". eNotes. Retrieved June 15, 2017.
  3. 1 2 Feeney, Nolan (August 5, 2014). "Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist Is a "Manual on How to Be a Human"". Time. Retrieved March 8, 2016.
  4. Waldman, Katy (August 5, 2014). "It is Good to be a "Bad" Feminist". Slate. Retrieved June 5, 2015.
  5. "Review of "Bad Feminist" by Roxane Gay - The Boston Globe". BostonGlobe.com. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  6. "The Book We're Talking About". The Huffington Post. 5 August 2014. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  7. "Let's Be Real | Boston Review". bostonreview.net. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  8. Cochrane, Kira (August 2, 2014). "Roxane Gay: Meet the Bad Feminist". The Guardian. Retrieved March 1, 2016.
  9. McGill, Hannah (August 21, 2014). "Bad Feminist: Essays by Roxane Gay, book review: Breaking her own rules to be honest". The Independent. Retrieved June 5, 2015.
  10. "Review: 'Bad Feminist' by Roxane Gay". chicagotribune.com. Retrieved December 2, 2015.
  11. Matlow, Orli (April 15, 2015). "Bad Feminist Still Hasn't Read "Bad Feminist"". Reductress . Retrieved June 5, 2015.
  12. "Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay". Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. Retrieved February 2, 2016.