Summary Of Bad Feminist By Roxanne Gay

Roxanne Gay’s 2012 essay, “Bad Feminist” was published in VQR, a National Journal of Literature and Discussion, where she discusses the problems with the current definitions of feminism and how she believes that everyone could help to change them.

Gay begins the piece by discussing all the possible definitions of feminism and why there are problems with each type. She begins by giving the definition of essential feminism, which is that there is a particular way a feminist should act, angry, hate men, do not follow any beauty standards, etc., and that there are consequences for not being like that kind of feminist. Gay used this to show how most people, both male and female, view feminism, which causes many of them, including Gay, to have a negative

Gay even states that other women view feminists as “angry instead of passionate.” Furthermore, Gay suggests that people fear categorizations, so they refuse to even categorize themselves as something as important as a feminist. She uses the example that even a woman in charge of a major media empire, Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, would not succumb to categorizing herself as a feminist because she did not want to be a negative influence in the workplace. This further supported Gay’s point that people have the negative connotations of feminism and will not attribute themselves to it, even though someone, like Mayer, seems to be one. Gay continues to go through a large portion of the article describing the different schools of thought of feminism, from sex-positive feminists to women of color feminists. In particular, woman of color feminists have a great issue because they