octavia_cade's profile picture

octavia_cade 's review for:

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
4.0
challenging informative medium-paced

Interesting and extremely intelligent collection of essays. While there's a broad range of topics covered, a substantial amount of the essays here are closely focused on popular culture, read through a feminist and antiracist lens. Books, television shows, films... Gay is clearly a voracious consumer of culture, and there's a wide variety of texts covered here. An essay on the Sweet Valley High book series contrasts with one on Django Unchained, another on The Help, and another still on The Hunger Games. While I haven't seen or read all the things that Gay writes about, the essays are clear enough, and descriptive enough, that I can easily follow her arguments. 

A repeated refrain, throughout the book, is how it's possible to enjoy pop culture that most assuredly isn't feminist, while still retaining feminist ideals. (Catchy tunes can have dreadful lyrics, for instance.) As Gay says at the end of the book, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all," and I think that's accurate, certainly for me at any rate. There's a difference between enjoying flawed texts while knowing they are flawed, and refusing to recognise those flaws exist. I can do the first, and I hope to avoid the second.