‘Bad Feminist’ and the subversive thinking of Roxane Gay [View all]

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.