In her essay "How to Be Friends with Another Woman," Gay explains, "A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. None of this serves black viewers, and yet, these movies are often framed as being "progressive" and anti-racist.īy recognizing these tropes, we begin to see how embedded we are in a culture that encourages racism, misogyny, fat-shaming, and exclusion.īiased messages from pop culture often strengthen common stereotypes and make it harder for people to break out of racist/sexist behavior in their daily lives. She points out the excessive use of the n-word in Django Unchained, and the gleeful depictions of slave suffering that allows viewers to feast on black people's pain.
ROXANE GAY TUMBLR MOVIE
Gay points out that the dialect in The Help is grossly exaggerated, and she marvels that stereotypes about black people and fried chicken made it into both the movie and the book. Many of these films create an "alternate universe" in which white characters are credited for helping black characters find freedom, love, and fulfillment. They also rely on racist caricatures of black people. She challenges the common (white) interpretation of films featuring black actors and black narratives, such as The Help, Django Unchained, and Twelve Years a Slave.
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Bad Feminist is rife with analyses of TV shows, songs, artists, and writers.
Roxane Gay often examines feminism through the lens of pop culture. One such act is recognizing how sexism and racism weed their way into movies, songs, and books. "Feminism is a choice," she writes in the introduction to Bad Feminist, "and if a woman does not want to be a feminist, that is her right, but it is still my responsibility to fight for her rights." All women, Gay contends, deserve access to reproductive services and healthcare, as well as equal pay and equal opportunities.Ĭhange starts with small acts of individual bravery. Gay asserts that feminists are still accountable when it comes to promoting non-feminist women's human rights. They detect the negative perceptions associated with being feminist, and, understandably, they don't want to adopt such a loaded identity. In her signature TED Talk, "Confessions of a Bad Feminist," Gay tells her audience, "When I was younger, mostly in my teens and twenties, I had strange ideas about feminists as hairy, angry, man-hating, sex-hating women.These days, I look at how women are treated the world over, and anger seems like a perfectly reasonable response." Many women have not come to the same conclusions, though. When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement." Nobody is perfect, but taking small steps as individuals will help us advance feminist aims.Įven though many women disavow feminism, self-identified feminists still have a responsibility to fight for all women's rights. Gay recognizes, "We hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. While she criticizes the feminist cause for its historical exclusivity, she believes that seeing feminism as a composition of imperfect individuals - not infallible icons - can help critics be more forgiving and future-oriented. As a black bisexual woman, she sees all too clearly where feminism has catered to straight, white, upper-class women at the expense of people of color, LGBTQ+ women, and the working class. Her hesitation to claim the feminist label came not only as a result of her personal affinity to rap. Women who don't fit the stereotypical feminist "mold" have historically been abandoned by feminism. "I would rather be a bad feminist," she declares in Bad Feminist, "than no feminist at all." For years, she hesitated to call herself a feminist, because she recognized that she could be called out for hypocrisy. She'd rather have the men in her life do the "masculine" work of killing bugs and taking out the trash.
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I am full of contradictions." She lists some of her "sins": she listens to misogynist rap on the way to work. "Let me be clear," she says. "I'm a mess. Gay doesn't want to be held up as an example. Then, when they make a mistake, when they do one thing that offends other feminists, they get knocked down.
Roxane Gay points out how quickly we put feminists up on a pedestal.