She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there. Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. Now that she’s here, it’s impossible to imagine what we ever did without her. Praise Roxane Gay for her big-hearted self-examining intelligence, for her inclusive and forgiving stance, for her courage and determination, for humanizing the theoretical and intellectualizing the mundane, for saying out loud the things we were thinking, for guiding us back to ourselves and returning to us what was ours all along.
Bad Feminist shows this extraordinary writer’s range-in essays about Scrabble, violence, fairy tales, race, The Hunger Games, longing, and Sweet Valley Confidential, Gay is alternately hilarious, full of righteous anger, confiding, moving: Bad Feminist is like staying up agreeing and arguing with the smartest person you ever met. There are writers who can show you the excellence of their brains and writers who show you the depths of their souls: I don’t know any writer who does both at the same time as brilliantly as Roxane Gay.
We should all be lucky enough to be such a bad feminist. In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.' - Roxane Gay (Introduction paragraph 5) Importance: This quote is important because it introduces, within the books first two pages, the idea that feminism is not a perfect movement. With prodigious bravery and eviscerating humor, Roxane Gay takes on culture and politics in Bad Feminist-and gets it right, time and time again. You can either be honest about your feelings or you can lie. Sometimes, your friends will date people you cannot stand. Presidential Endowed Professor of Political Science at Wake Forest University If you feel like it’s hard to be friends with women, consider that maybe women aren’t the problem. How can you help but love this author? Melissa Harris-Perry, Host MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” As a result, we complete this book both more powerful and more vulnerable, just like Gay herself.
Gay gives us permission to take up the sword of feminism while laying down the shield of policed authenticity. This is the text for those of us who constructed our feminism from the pages of teen chick lit as much as from the musings of post-modern theorists.