Writers Who Inspire Us: The Class and Boldness of Roxane Gay
I’m going to be real with everyone I did not discover Roxane Gay until her appearance on The L Word: Gen Q. But when I did all bets were off I devoured her work. Her essays are fun, truthful, informative, and sarcastic. She is unapologetically herself. Roxane Gay is a breath of fresh queer air in today’s tumultuous climate. Her book Bad Feminist hit all the right notes, bringing a perspective and saying things that we’ve all worried about or questioned when calling ourselves Feminist or simply wondered if we were doing this whole “Human” thing right.
Before writing Bad Feminist Gay was an assistant English professor at Eastern Ilinois University in 2010, while at EIU she was a contributing editor for Bluestem magazine. She also founded Tiny Hardcore Press. She taught at EIU until 2014. During this time she published a short story collection titled Ayiti (2011), a novel A Untamed State, and the easy collection Bad Feminist. After leaving EIU she was an associate professor of creative writing in the Masters Of Fine Arts program at Purdue University from 2014-2018. As of 2018, she is a guest professor for Yale. In the midst of all this Gay’s writing career has grown. She is a voice that isn’t afraid to tell it like it is. When I first read her book Bad Feminist, I found truth in much of what she said. She touched on points in some essays and these points struck home. In one part Roxane Gay writes:
Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink- all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink.
This line always stood out to me, anyone who has ever considered themselves a feminist has had the thought “ I shouldn’t like typical girly things because (insert reason why) and that’s demeaning to women.” Gay took this idea and confronted it head-on saying.
I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. I am messy.
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.
We are, we are all human and messy. We are not going to do anything perfectly. And yes we are going to fuck up. What draws me to Roxane Gay’s writing is that she doesn’t paint herself in a pretentious light. She doesn’t claim to have the end-all answers. Instead, she shows her wisdom from her experience messing up and of getting back up again. She shows that you can share your own growth and keep learning while still giving solid advice. In a world that values the opinions of white cis men, Gay paves a path and gives a voice to women, lgbtq+, and POC. There is not one ounce of “dutiful female silence” in Roxane Gay, for that I absolutely adore her. She tackles subjects that are often ignored by most in attempts to not acknowledge the difficult subjects. Calling out people on misogyny and rape humor.
When women respond negatively to misogynistic or rape humor, they are “sensitive” and branded as a “feminist”, a word that has, as of late, become a catchall term for “woman who does not tolerate bullshit”.
Confronting these issues is something that is important in our society as we’ve never moved away from these stereotypes of the “sensitive woman” who overreacts and can’t take a “joke”. The whole boys will be boys mentality is a poorly veiled excuse for demeaning women without being called out for it. Roxane Gay throws this excuse back into the faces of those people with this statement. Again showing her I won’t back down attitude.
My appreciation for Gay’s work extends in many directions. First let me say I can not in any way claim to understand the struggles of POC. I grew up in a poor town with a predominantly black population and during my school years I saw many of the things that Roxane Gay speaks about. All of the stereotyping and the limited to non existent resources given to communities such as the one I grew up in. One of the things she does calls out the more privileged members of the black community. She talks about one instance in her book Bad Feminist,
In graduate school I was the adviser of the black student association. There was a negligible black faculty presence on campus (you could count them on one hand), and those folks were either too busy or burnt out or completely uninterested in the job. After four years, I understood. The older I get, the more I understand lots of things. Advising a black student association is exhausting and thankless and heartbreaking. It kind of destroys your faith after a while. A new black faculty member came to campus a couple years in, and I asked why she didn’t work with the black students. She said, “That’s not my job.” That person said, “They’re unreachable.” I hate when people say something is not their job or that something isn’t possible. We all say these things, sure, but some people actually believe they don’t have to work beyond what is written in their job description or that they don’t have to try to reach those who seemingly cannot be reached.
This statement is true in so many ways. The school I went to was written off, everyone from the teachers to the principal to even the school board were “too busy or burnt out or completely uninterested in the job”. The fact that so many people feel it isn’t their job, including white people, is infuriating. Youth and students (the future of our world) should never be written off and Gay bluntly expresses this.
From feminism to misogyny to race, Roxane Gay lays it all out in the open. She continues to tackle political and social issues with a class and boldness that is uniquely her. She is truly a force to be reckoned with. I will continue to devour her work as it gives such a fresh and not often seen perspective that speaks in ways I’ve never experienced.
Recommended Reading
Bad Feminist (2014): A collection of essays about feminism and how we often like things that might be at odds with it.
Hunger (2017): Gay describes her experience of her body, her relationship to food and weight, and her experience as a victim of sexual violence.
Diffcult Women (2017): A collection of short stories that highlight women who have lives that differ from society’s spectrum of a normal life. Each story follows a different character and her journey through either a traumatic experience or what makes her different from societal norms.
About Nena Orcutt
Nena Orcutt is an aspiring author, who thinks too much, Listens to a lot of music. Needs coffee to function. Who thinks Bukowski was a wise man and Hemingway was a genius. And feels romance isn’t dead. She is working on her debut novel “The Crow and The Butterfly” Making her home in Music City she’s ready to conquer the writing world and leave her mark.
