Bad Feminist

'Pink is my favourite colour. I used to say my favourite colour was black to be cool, but it is pink – all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.' In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman (Sweet Valley High) of colour (The Help) while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years (Girls, Django in Chains) and commenting on the state of feminism today (abortion, Chris Brown). The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture. Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny and sincere look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

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Play Like a Feminist

"Play Like a Feminist discusses how play, in a general sense, and video games, more specifically, are of vital importance to feminist thinking"--

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Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay Summary

Do you want more free book summaries like this? Download our app for free at https://www.QuickRead.com/App and get access to hundreds of free book and audiobook summaries. Discover Why Being a Bad Feminist is Better Than Not Being a Feminist At All. When you hear the word feminism, what do you think of? In today’s climate, you likely think about the many women’s marches and the #MeToo movement that have taken over the media. All of these fight for the rights of women in every area of life, including equal pay, reproductive rights, and more. But according to Roxane Gay, feminism is flawed. There is no right or wrong way to be a feminist, which is why Gay proudly labels herself as a bad feminist. As a bad feminist, Gay recognizes that humans are flawed, and therefore, their views and opinions don’t always fit perfectly into a neatly wrapped package. For instance, while Gay enjoys going against the grain, her favorite color is still pink and she enjoys reading Vogue, both of which are typical female stereotypes. At the end of the day, feminism looks different for everyone but being a bad feminist is better than not being a feminist at all! As you read, you’ll learn how reality television is harmful to the fight for equality, how racial profiling can end in murder, and how movies like The Help only advance racial stereotypes.

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Am I a Bad Feminist Moments of Reflection and Negotiation in Contemporary Feminist Identity

In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from her position as a Haitian American feminist academic. This work quickly skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences. Representative of the increasingly public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women, Gay's work is a product of its time. For this dissertation, I examine Bad Feminist along with two other also wildly popular autoethnographic works produced in the same decade, Tressie McMillan Cotton's Thick: And Other Essays and Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts. I examine these texts as public-facing, accessible works that communicate their academic feminist authors'; feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory. Utilizing Sara Ahmed's theory of becoming feminist, I analyze the "bad feminist moments" expressed in these texts as moments of feminist crisis to identify what causes them and what functions they might serve. Using qualitative methodological triangulation, better known as mixed-methods research, I employ topic modeling and content analysis across all three texts to identify patterns that reveal not only why and how academic feminists might feel like they are bad feminists, but how and why they choose to share the moments in which they feel like bad feminists with others. Fighting to maintain their feminist identities in a world rife with gendered and raced violence, neoliberal ideals of self sufficiency and individual perfection, rapidly evolving technologies, and intersecting historical structures of oppression, these authors utilize moments of feminist imperfection to create space and time to disarticulate and rearticulate their relationships to feminism, their relationships to other people, and their relationships to academia. In this project, I conclude that bad feminist moments might be reactions to the pressures of both historical and contemporary structures of oppression, but the choice to reflect on them and share with others is based in feminist principles of reflexivity and collective inspiration to resist perpetuating ongoing structures of oppression inside and outside of the academy.

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Contemporary Feminist Life Writing

Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing is the first volume to identify and analyse the 'new audacity' of recent feminist writings from life. Characterised by boldness in both style and content, willingness to explore difficult and disturbing experiences, the refusal of victimhood, and a lack of respect for traditional genre boundaries, new audacity writing takes risks with its author's and others' reputations, and even, on occasion, with the law. This book offers an examination and critical assessment of new audacity in works by Katherine Angel, Alison Bechdel, Marie Calloway, Virginie Despentes, Tracey Emin, Sheila Heti, Juliet Jacques, Chris Krauss, Jana Leo, Maggie Nelson, Vanessa Place, Paul Preciado, and Kate Zambreno. It analyses how they write about women's self-authorship, trans experiences, struggles with mental illness, sexual violence and rape, and the desire for sexual submission. It engages with recent feminist and gender scholarship, providing discussions of vulnerability, victimhood, authenticity, trauma, and affect.

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Antagonizing White Feminism

Antagonizing White Feminism: Intersectionality’s Critique of Women’s Studies and the Academy pushes back against the exclusive scholarship and discourse coming out of women-centered spaces and projects, which throw up barriers by narrowly defining who can participate. Vehement resistance to using inclusive language and renaming scholarly spaces like Women’s Studies and Critical Feminism expresses itself in concerns that women are still oppressed and thus women-only spaces must be maintained. But who is a woman? What are the characteristics of a woman’s lived experience? Do affinity and a history of oppression justify exclusion? This book shows how intersectional feminism is often underperformed and appropriated as a “woke” vocabulary by elite women who are unwilling to do the necessary emotional work around their privilege. As Trans Women, Femmes, Women of Color, Queer Women, Gender Variant, and Gender Non-Conforming scholars emerge, the heteronormative, cisgender, colonial idea of women and the feminine is rapidly under attack. The contributors believe that to engage in the necessary conversations about the oppressed performing oppression is to disrupt the exclusionary basis of monolithic understandings of the feminine. Only then can we advance the coalition needed to forge a multiracial, multicultural, queer-led, anti-imperialist feminism.

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Feminist Studies

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Third Wave Feminism

Essays on the current period in feminism known by many as the "third wave". Three sections--genealogies and generations, locales and locations, politics and popular culture--interrogate the wave metaphor and, through questioning the generational account of feminism, indicate possible future trajectories for the feminist movement

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Theorizing Backlash

Contrary to the popular belief that feminism has gained a foothold in the many disciplines of the academy, the essays collected in Theorizing Backlash argue that feminism is still actively resisted in mainstream academia. Contributors to this volume consider the professional, philosophical, and personal backlashes against feminist thought, and reflect upon their ramifications. The conclusion is that the disdain and irrational resentment of feminism, even in higher education, amounts to a backlash against progress.

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Antifeminism and Family Terrorism

Rhonda Hammer's Antifeminism and Family Terrorism presents original and provocative critical feminist perspectives on violence against women and children. Hammer provides a clear and insightful analysis of the current rhetoric produced by antifeminists who would deny the seriousness of the problem and thus undercut important feminist concerns. Dr. Hammer documents the tragic dimensions of the brutalization of women and children in the family, and the larger problem of the increasing poverty and oppression of women and children in the global economy.

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Feminist Collections

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Building Feminist Movements and Organizations

Building Feminist Movements is an international collection of essays and case studies which explores diverse ways in which women and feminist organizations and movements are organizing and it also analyses the important lessons learned in the process. Women's organizations and movements must be stronger than ever to be able to hold the line and continue moving forward the women's rights agenda. In the present context, where many threats to women's rights such as armed conflicts, the advance of HIV/AIDS, raising fundamentalisms and scarce resources for work on women's rights, a revision of the internal dynamics and work done in women and feminist organizations and movements is de rigueur in order to face these challenges effectively.

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Artforum International

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Bad Attitude s on Trial

Bad Attitude(s) on Trial is a critical analysis of pornography in the context of contemporary Canada. The notion that pornography both reflects sexual domination and 'victimizes' women has recently found expression in law in the landmark Canadian Supreme Court decision of R. v. Butler (1992). Many feminists embrace this new law as progressive, but in the post-Butler years, straight, mainstream pornography is still flourishing, while sexual representations that challenge conventional notions of sexuality, such as those centering on gay and lesbian sex and s/m sex, are the focus of censorship. It is the censorship of sexual others that the authors critique from a legal, cultural, gay, and philosophical standpoint. Lise Gotell examines the intervention of the Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) in the Butler decision and provides an overview of socio-legal debates on pornography and censorship. Brenda Cossman examines the Butler decision itself and challenges the dominant reading of this case as a feminist victory. Becki Ross critically examines the expert testimony she delivered in defense of Bad Attitude, an American lesbian sex magazine seized by police from Glad Day Bookshop in Toronto in 1992. She details the difficulties she encountered in explicating and contextualizing the specificities, nuances, and complexities of lesbian s/m fantasy in a court of law. In the final chapter, Shannon Bell advances a conception of pornography that is not distinguishable from philosophy, using philosophy to make pornography. Bad Attitude(s) on Trial provides a new debate on pornography and feminism. It will be of particular interest to students of both women's, and gay and lesbian issues, but will also be relevant for scholars of law, political science, and philosophy, as well as for anyone interested in a different, provocative view of the Butler decision.

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Re thinking Radical Feminism

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The Virginia Quarterly Review

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Reason Papers

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October

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Left History

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Feminist Studies Critical Studies

"This wonderful book does nothing less than to create the next stage of feminist thought." -- Catharine R. Stimpson "De Lauretis provides a way of thinking about feminism that accepts rather than tries to resolve differences, that refuses fixed definitional categories and insists instead on the contradictory and changing meaning of gendered identities." -- The Women's Review of Books "This is not a new collection but it is still one of the best." -- Exceptional Human Experience The essays in this collection represent very recent developments in feminist research and writing in the areas of history, scientific discourse, literary criticism, and cultural theory. The contributors are: Teresa de Lauretis, Linda Gordon, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Ruth Bleier, Evelyn Fox Keller, Jessica Benjamin, Nancy K. Miller, Tania Modleski, Sondra O'Neale, Sheila Radford-Hill, Cherrie Moraga, Biddy Martin, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, and Mary Russo.

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