Gay’s sharp, idiosyncratic commentary has made her a familiar figure to readers of online publications such as The Rumpus, Salon, Jezebel and Guardian Online.

Gay is a funny, warm writer who embraces this inconsistency her dexterity as a critic is matched by an emotional intelligence alert to the way pop culture makes us feel. The bad feminist who emerges in these essays is an oppositional figure who is fallible, contradictory, and, ultimately, human. She explicitly refuses here to align herself with any particular activist or academic tradition of feminism such that it would be a nonsense to accuse her of being a bad feminist of the ideologically impure variety. Gay grew up in a Haitian–American family and has identified as queer at certain times in her life she has no truck with the orthodoxies of High Church feminism and seeks a much broader constituency for her feminism than heterosexual white women.

Gay sets out by noting that, ‘feminism has, historically, been far more invested in improving the lives of heterosexual white women to the detriment of all others’. Gay’s bad feminism riffs on the adjudicatory streak that has emerged in popular feminism and tends to judge doctrinal lapses, linguistic slips, and certain behaviours and desires very harshly indeed. After all, women can be called bad just because they’re feminists – and they can also find themselves exiled to the naughty corner by other feminists because they’re not feminist enough. It’s a clever manoeuvre, one which allows her to speak both to critics of feminism and to over-zealous policing of women’s behaviour by feminists. Instead, Gay, an American novelist, academic and critic, claims the title ‘bad feminist’ and makes it her own. Who would want to pin that label on their lapel? In the introduction to Bad Feminist – her collection of essays on gender, race, politics and contemporary culture – Roxane Gay writes, ‘I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, “You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.”’ Hag, crone, slut, the fun-police: such terms help stigmatise those rotten feminists who have the temerity to ask for the vote, for reproductive rights, for equal pay, for respectful use of language, for safe streets.

Name-calling has always been a quick and dirty way to enforce the gender status quo, to say, I don’t like who you are, lady. If you call yourself a feminist, you risk getting called a manhater or a humourless prude or a ball-breaker if you do so online, you’ll probably cop a more vicious epithet.

Bad feminist author