She is careful to note that though she tries to understand things from other points of view, the essays in this collection are meant to be read as someone’s opinion rather than indisputable fact. Gay’s feminism is intersectional she acknowledges that her identity is multifaceted, yet these many layers overlap (and sometimes contradict) to inform her worldview. Gay calls out the faults and biases of mainstream media in “When Twitter Does What Journalism Cannot.“ In the darkly humorous but painfully truthful “Dear Young Ladies Who Love Chris Brown So Much They Would Let Him Beat Them,” Gay talks through the often-times misguided conversations young women have over the Chris Brown/Rihanna incident of 2009.ĭrawing connections between literature, movies, television, politics, and pop culture, Gay guides her readers across a sort of curated anthology of very recent history as seen through her eyes.
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“I Once Was Miss America” contains Gay’s recollections of her love for the Sweet Valley High series as a young Haitian girl in suburban America. The essays in the collection range in topics from gender and sexuality in The Hunger Games to racial profiling in the cases of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Trayvon Martin. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. I am just trying-trying to support what I believe in, trying to do some good in this world, trying to make some noise with my writing while also being myself….I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. I am not trying to say I have all the answers.
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I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. These are the kinds of questions that led me to Roxane Gay’s collection of essays, appropriately titled Bad Feminist. In my own personal experiences, most women couldn’t give a rat’s ass about all this feminist jargon because they either don’t understand it, they don’t have the time and money to understand it, or if they do understand it, it often can’t be reconciled with their daily lives. But I digress.) Am I a “bad feminist” for being slightly obsessed with the fashion industry (#NYFW)? Am I a “bad feminist” for occasionally jamming out to dirty rap? Am I a “bad feminist” for questioning the amount of time feminists spend on theory? (Caveat: I do think it’s important to study theory when coupled with discussions that involve current real-world situations, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw’s coinage of the term intersectionality and its use in academic discourse I’m critical of the study of theory that holds real people and their nuanced life experiences at arm’s length, creating a sort of idealistic, academic circle jerk that ultimately cannot be reconciled with how people live their lives. This line of thinking led to even more self-examination of my possibly less-than-feminist behaviors. I began to wonder if my feminist card should be revoked for loving-or worse yet, feeling empowered by-the album. bell hooks voiced her distaste over Beyoncé’s act as a whole-eventually culminating with hooks calling Knowles an “anti-feminist terrorist” in a panel discussion last May. Mikki Kendall at The Guardian declared that “Beyoncé’s new album should silence her feminist critics.” Black Girl Dangerous wrote on that deeply problematic reference to Whitney Houston and domestic abuse. Feminists everywhere either tried to revoke her feminist card or came to her defense. With the album’s explicit avowal of the basic tenets of feminist (see “***Flawless”), however, the debate between her vocalized beliefs and her hyper-sexual public persona came to a head. Beyoncé has always been a polarizing feminist figure. Not just of the Pitchfork sort, but the cultural pundits as well. It was so empowering for me to hear a young married woman of color (like myself) declare herself a feminist (like myself) and still manage to be this incredible sexual being (like what I really, really hope to be in the bedroom).Ī few days later, the critics emerged.
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As always, the tuneage was excellent, but what got me hooked were the lyrics.
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I mean, I liked Beyoncé a lot before the 13th of December 2013, but the album led me towards a whole new realm of fangirldom. I came to realize that I might be a “bad feminist” around the same time Beyoncé’s surprise album dropped.