I have been a fan of Roxane Gay since fifth grade and I don’t actually remember why; I just remember starting sixth grade and when I realized there were Roxane Gay books in the library, I got happy. I held off for a while to read her most famous and influential piece, Bad Feminist, and it was amazing when I finally got around to it.
Bad Feminist was published in 2014 and is a novel about race and gender, topics that make the date of the book glaringly clear over the course of the memoir. The world was far from perfect in 2014: our country was still under the illusion that racism was gone now that there was a Black president in office and that sexism wasn’t a real presence anymore. Much of this book attempts to educate the reader on the full reality of race and gender in America and how there is so much work to do. But reading this in the year 2020 felt like poring over a historical document. If I were to read text from the 1800s describing what life was like then, certain parts of Bad Feminist would seem equally alien, simply because in the last six years, our country’s discussion of race and gender has changed astronomically.
This book was fantastic, page turning, and I was left wanting to hear more of Gay’s opinions, observations, and reflections, but it was also a fantastic commentary on how we’ve changed as a society when talking about race and gender since 2014—and how we haven’t. Reading the essays, I thought a lot about how the Trump presidency has opened white liberal’s eyes—opened anyone’s eyes who wasn’t screaming with their ears plugged in—in a way that Hillary Clinton’s presidency never would have. America has a lot of scars that the government doesn’t want to address because they’re not the ones who are suffering; the open wounds festering from years of mistreatment Trump’s presidency has put every one of those flaws on full and relentless display. Back in 2014, Gay urges us to address the hidden wounds of America. Those wounds are no longer hidden in 2020, thanks to Trump, but they are still very much there. Many Americans needed a presidency as controversial as Trump’s to become aware of the atrocities happening at the border, to notice the realities of women in America, to realize how far away the LGBTQIAP+ community is from full and just human rights, and to even scratch the surface of systemic racism.
Don’t read Bad Feminist for the statistics or the information on how racism and sexism are still prominent issues in America, just look at a modern day news report. Read Bad Feminist for the stories Gay tells and the stories she analyzes. Gay spends the course of the book critiquing novels, movies, and television shows, so often the book reads like Roxane Gay’s goodreads review page. Gay dives deep into feminist fiction and non-fiction from the past twenty years and uses the pros and cons of each piece of work to highlight specific issues in the way gender is portrayed in the media and how this impacts women and girls today. She discusses Kate Zambereno’s Green Girl and Joan Didion’s Play it As it Lays to express the humanism women are often denied both in media and the world around us. She writes about the link between how we respond to and react to characters in a book, and how we treat, stereotype and degrade women and girls around us.
Roxane Gay takes on race, feminism, white feminism, pop culture, scrabble, body weight, sexual assault and sexual violence using her own stories and breaking down over 30 novels and books to explore the specific issues she speaks of. Gay writes fearlessly about her experience being gang-raped as a tween, constantly being the only non-white person in a room, and what it took for her to finally accept the title of feminist. Roxane Gay does have a Goodreads account. And it is everything.