I will keep writing about these intersections as a writer and a teacher, as a black woman, as a bad feminist, until I no longer feel like what I want is impossible. They cannot be wholly addressed in a single essay or book or television show or movie. “he complexities of race and culture are often irreducible. Gay’s book is less about taking on the world of Feminism as much as it is about accepting what being a feminist means in connection to her personal identity, forcing readers to ask themselves the same difficult question that Gay herself wrestles with: what does it even mean to be a feminist? Gay perfectly sets up the collection with a closing remark to her first essay, “Feel Me.
In the span of a chapter, I was forced to rethink my own conceptions of (F)eminism, race, and most of all, privilege. Each new essay left me with a sense of being gutted. Rather than walking away from the book with answers, I only had more questions. While the language is less than poetic -bordering on plain -the concepts discussed are food for thought. As we follow the catalog of her experiences- tackling being an upper-middle class black woman in academia- we take a journey through cultural shifts and pop culture highlights (or low-lights, depending on where you think Chris Brown and Robin Thicke fall on the musical spectrum). Gay gives an insider’s view of what it means to be an outsider. But the book is more than recollections and reflections, it’s a commentary on Feminism and Feminists, and, as Gay so eloquently puts it, the idea of an “Essential Feminism -one true feminism to dominate all of womankind” (and the lack of existence of such an all-encompassing feminist community). Roxane Gay’s recent book, Bad Feminist-a collection of essays -contains a sassy vigor reminiscent of grade-school war-stories told in ten-year retrospect just enough time has passed to make the nostalgia wane into humor, but all of the details are still there, still potent. “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” -Roxane Gay, “Introduction Feminism (n.): Plural”. English MA student Billi MacTighe recommends Roxane Gay’s nonfiction collection, Bad Feminist.