I first heard about Bad Feminist in Entertainment Weekly magazine and was very excited to read it. Bad Feminist was to me mostly refreshing. Author Roxane Gay embodies a complexity of perspective that is still, in my eyes, missing from much of the popular feminist discourse. Is Beyonce a bad feminist because she is sexy and provocative? Or is she a good feminist because she uses her celebrity platform to address gender issues? While many scholars discuss the importance of intersectionality, too often the mainstream conversations about feminism are binary… you are either feminine or feminist, advocate or antagonist. This “essentialist feminist,” as Gay refers to it, is little more than a caricature that limits all those who seek gender equality but disavow the simplistic description of what that should look like or be like.
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric