Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay (Book Recommendation)

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

Currently, I’ve been reading Roxane Gay’s essay collection, Bad Feminist, and I must say, it is incredible. She is a very talented writer and somehow has the language and skill to articulate a lot of points that I had trouble understanding, as well as bringing up some fascinating new perspectives on pop culture and feminism in writing and literature. My copy of the book, which I bought at the airport before my spring break trip to Costa Rica, is now covered in highlights and underlines and notes at the beginning and end of each chapter. And I’m not even halfway finished!

Bad Feminist conquers issues of race, class, and gender, as well as pop culture, teaching, being a writer, representation, gender expectations, and more. You don’t have to agree with her arguments—there were certainly essays I read that I disliked or found points that I disagreed with, but even with those essays there were perspectives that opened up a new way of thinking about an issue.

A great example of mine for this dynamic is her essay “Not Here to Make Friends”. (You can read it online here: http://www.buzzfeed.com/roxanegay/not-here-to-make-friends-unlikable) This was the first essay of hers I ever read. I also read it during my senior year of high school, while studying Post Modernism, so it had a nice correlation.

“Not Here to Make Friends” examines the issues surrounding unlikeable female protagonists. I went into the essay expecting it to be mainly about gender, which it did examine quite a bit, but it had a strong undertone about what it is like to be a writer and create characters. I will admit I was a little disappointed that it was not more of what I was expecting, but the essay was very powerful nonetheless.  

The essay begins with a personal story of how the author experienced the issues around likeability, and then continues to discuss the popular reality show trope, where a woman on some kind of competition show will declare, “I’m not here to make friends,” as a way of somehow justifying the means she will take to win the prize or competition.

She continues to define what it means to be “unlikeable”, and why we strive for it in our social world. Bringing in multiple examples from popular culture and literature, Roxane Gay examines why we want the characters we read to be likeable. She discusses what it means to be a writer and what readers expect from characters and their development. You should most definitely read the essay on your own, as it has much more depth than I should give here.

This essay is just one example of the kind of writing I found in Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. It’s introspective, thoughtful, thought provoking, and sometimes aggravating. I don’t agree that our protagonists should be unlikable. The characters we read should be human, but should also represent some kind of ideal. Of course, this rule can and should be broken; for example, in a book that is proving some kind of theory or greater meaning about life (The Stranger, Atonement). The idea that characters on the verge of psychopathic should be taken as a literary norm concerns me a bit. Our literature is an extension of our social world. It is both in a separate universe where everything can be altered for the purpose of a story while also representing the very core of everything universal in our modern culture.

Still, the essay was well-written and intriguing, and carried on it some unique takes on the process of writing characters as well as what literature means through the lens of a (bad) feminist author.

I encourage you all to read this essay and the book in general. We could have a little digital book club! If you can, comment your thoughts on this essay or any of the other essays in the book (up to page 96). Or you can email me/help me figure out how Google hangout works at riviwriter@gmail.com

Happy reading!