Reading can be so impactful. Books can change minds, they can shift perspectives and give people the clarity to understand what is happening in the larger world around them.
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay was one of these impactful books for me. I first read Bad Feminist for a Feminist Philosophy class in my first semester of college. It was the first book that I was assigned in college that I didn’t have to drag myself through.
Bad Feminist is a collection of essays written by Gay about her experience as a Black, LGBTQ woman. In these essays, she comments on all types of issues, from rap lyrics to violence against women. Her waxing prose grips the reader’s attention and makes them feel as if you are getting to know her on such a deeply personal level that many of her pieces don’t feel like an essay, they feel like a letter.
In her essays, “Bad Feminist: Take One” and “Bad Feminist: Take Two”, Gay talks about why she considers herself to be a bad feminist. She explains all the ways that mainstream feminism seems to have holes where many women slip through the cracks.
Gay dives into the issue of race and how white feminists can ignore women of color’s experiences to try to push an agenda that leaves so many POC’s out. “Such willful ignorance”, says Gay, “Such willful disinterest in incorporating the issues and concerns of Black women into the mainstream feminist project, makes me disinclined to own the feminist label until it embraces people like me” (Gay 2014).
Gay seems to be implying here that we need to come to a better understanding of the idea of intersectionality and include it in modern, mainstream feminism before anyone can claim that feminism is about equality for all women.
Intersectionality is a term coined by KimberlĂ© Crenshaw in the 1980s that describes the intersection of gender and other factors of one’s identity that may influence how they are treated by society. For example, while both Black men and Black women may face oppression based on their race, the Black woman would also face oppression based on her gender.
Reading Bad Feminist made me upset at myself for never thinking that feminism didn’t include all women. This was the first time that I stopped to think about who the bigger label of “feminist” may be leaving behind.
Despite this lack of representation in the past, I believe that we all must agree with Gay when she says, “I cannot and will not deny the importance and absolute necessity of feminism. Like most people, I’m full of contradictions, but I also don’t want to be treated like shit for being a woman” (Gay 2014).
Just like Gay, I am a bad feminist. I realize that not all my behavior lines up with this preconceived notion of what a feminist is.
“I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.”
Roxane Gay, “Bad Feminist: Take Two” (2014)
“I care what people think. Pink is my favorite color… I very much like men. They’re interesting to me…” (Gay 2014) and on and on, Roxane Gay lists all of these traits that people have assigned to be very non-feminist.
But that’s the point she’s making: there is no one “feminist”.
And to fight for equality, we, as a community, need to acknowledge where we have let women of color down and figure out how to incorporate their needs and lives into the movement.
“The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman — I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become” (Gay 2014).