‘Bad Feminist’ and the subversive thinking of Roxane Gay

[theHandpuppet]

Lacking any familiarity with Roxane Gay's writings, I don't feel comfortable commenting on this article. I'd be very interested to hear from others more familiar with her work.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/act-four/wp/2014/08/07/bad-feminist-and-the-subversive-thinking-of-roxane-gay/
The Washington Post
‘Bad Feminist’ and the subversive thinking of Roxane Gay
By Alyssa Rosenberg
August 7, 2014 

One of the great pleasures of social media is that you can use it to watch something good happen to someone else. My most recent experience of this has been on Twitter, where I have followed writer Roxane Gay in a rather remarkable year.

Gay’s novel, “An Untamed State,” released in May, is both an unnerving story of a woman’s recovery from sexual assault during a visit to her native Haiti and an extension of Gay’s critique of what she sees as a pornography of female suffering in many mass-culture depictions of rape. “Bad Feminist,” published this week, collects many of Gay’s previously published essays on subjects ranging from her first year of teaching at the college level to the exhausting experiences of watching movies like “The Help” and “Django Unchained.”

I have read some of these pieces before. Revisiting them all at once was a pleasure and a clarifying experience. “Bad Feminist” is about feminism, but, more broadly, it is about the emotional yearnings that motivate supposedly rational, wide-ranging proposed solutions to big problems.

In “Bad Feminist,” emotional reactions and readings are, if not more reliable than supposedly reasonable ones, at least more honest. “I often think about the danger of a single story, as discussed by Chimamanda Adichie in her TED Talk,” Gay writes, “but sometimes, there actually is a single story and it tears my heart open.”....

MORE at link posted above.

[ismnotwasm]

1. I've been waiting for it to go away

The title, past which most people won't read, will be misinterpreted. Criticizing "trigger warnings" is disingenuous as well as unfair and shows an amazing lack of understanding--although I understand what she's trying to say, it's sounds too academic.

I plan on reading the book for perspective, as I think the author makes salient points. But she quite deliberately created a meme, and I find that irritating. She had little interviews here and there which clarify her points.

I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy. I’m not trying to be an example. I am not trying to be perfect. I am not trying to say I have all the answers. I am not trying to say I’m right. 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: a woman who loves pink and likes to get freaky and sometimes dances her ass off to music she knows, she knows, is terrible for women and who sometimes plays dumb with repairmen because it’s just easier to let them feel macho than it is to stand on the moral high ground.
I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. People who are placed on pedestals are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off.

When I was younger, I disavowed feminism with alarming frequency. I understand why women still fall over themselves to disavow feminism, to distance themselves. I disavowed feminism because when I was called a feminist, the label felt like an insult. In fact, it was generally intended as such. When I was called a feminist, during those days, my first thought was, But I willingly give blow jobs. I had it in my head that I could not both be a feminist and be sexually open. I had lots of strange things in my head during my teens and twenties.

I disavowed feminism because I had no rational understanding of the movement. I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, “You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.” This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds. Anytime I remember how I once disavowed feminism, I am ashamed of my ignorance. I am ashamed of my fear because mostly the disavowal was grounded in the fear that I would be ostracized, that I would be seen as a troublemaker, that I would never be accepted by the mainstream.
I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there. I get angry but I understand and hope someday we will live in a culture where we don’t need to distance ourselves from the feminist label, where the label doesn’t make us afraid of being alone, of being too different, of wanting too much.

a

http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/consider-me-already-knocked-off