Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
She's a bad feminist. She makes the case for it anyway.
For you if
you call yourself a feminist but feel like a bad one and need someone to tell you that the contradiction is the point not a disqualification
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Gay opens by confessing that she is a bad feminist — that she likes pink, sometimes forgets to be politically consistent about the pop culture she consumes, and has spent years feeling guilty about the gap between her political ideals and her actual behavior. Then she uses that self-contradiction as the entry point for essays about race, gender, violence, pop culture, and the politics of representation that are funny, honest, and structurally rigorous in equal measure. She names the specific exhaustion of being expected to be a perfect representative of every identity you hold simultaneously — and argues that being an imperfect feminist is infinitely better than not being one at all. The most accessible feminist cultural criticism on the shelf and the best entry point for readers who find hooks or Federici demanding. Gay is doing the same work — connecting personal experience to systemic conditions — with more warmth and more willingness to implicate herself in what she's critiquing.
Where This Book Lives
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Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.
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Le Guin explains her own ideas, in her own words.
A decade-in-the-making portrait of Ursula K. Le Guin, made with her direct participation, tracing her life and the ideas — anarchism, utopia and its opposite, gender — running through Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, and The Dispossessed.
Why it’s here: Le Guin explains her own anarchist and utopian thinking here in her own words, not through a scholar's paraphrase — about as close as film gets to the primary source behind The Dispossessed. Punk in that she spent decades on the margins of 'respectable' literature by choice, refusing to soften the politics to fit in; pedagogical in that watching her reason through an idea is a different kind of teaching than reading the novel it produced.
Same pattern, different era
Different time, different place. The same thing keeps happening.
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For the family bookshelf
Same idea, written for a younger reader. Good for reading together.
