Bad Feminist: Essays

by Roxane Gay

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.

I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. I have certain . . . interests and personality traits and opinions that may not fall in line with mainstream feminism, but I am still a feminist.

I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, “You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.” This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds.

Feminism is a choice, 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. I believe feminism is grounded in supporting the choices of women even if we wouldn’t make certain choices for ourselves. I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.

The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.

Privilege is a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor. There is racial privilege, gender (and identity) privilege, heterosexual privilege, economic privilege, able-bodied privilege, educational privilege, religious privilege, and the list goes on and on. At some point, you have to surrender to the kinds of privilege you hold. Nearly everyone, particularly in the developed world, has something someone else doesn’t, something someone else yearns for.

We tend to believe that accusations of privilege imply we have it easy, which we resent because life is hard for nearly everyone.

To have privilege in one or more areas does not mean you are wholly privileged. Surrendering to the acceptance of privilege is difficult, but it is really all that is expected. What I remind myself, regularly, is this: the acknowledgment of my privilege is not a denial of the ways I have been and am marginalized, the ways I have suffered.

We need to get to a place where we discuss privilege by way of observation and acknowledgment rather than accusation.

My mother’s favorite saying is “Qui se ressemble s’assemble.” Whenever she didn’t approve of who I was spending time with, she’d say this ominously. It means, essentially, you are whom you surround yourself with.

In her groundbreaking book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler asserts that gender is a performance, an unstable identity that forms through how it is performed over and over.

In many ways, likability is a very elaborate lie, a performance, a code of conduct dictating the proper way to be.

In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs,

If you’re reading to find friends, you’re in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn’t “Is this a potential friend for me?” but “Is this character alive?”

Some women being empowered does not prove the patriarchy is dead. It proves that some of us are lucky.