Hunger by roxane gay sparknotes
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I openly embrace the label of bad feminist… I embrace the label of bad feminist because I am human. When these figureheads say what we want to hear, we put them up on the Feminist Pedestal, and when they do something we don’t like, we knock them right off and then say there’s something wrong with feminism because our feminist leaders have failed us… When feminism falls short of our expectations, we decide the problem is with feminism rather than with the flawed people who act in the name of the movement…įeminism, as of late, has suffered from a certain guilt by association because we conflate feminism with women who advocate feminism as part of their personal brand. For whatever reason, we hold feminism to an unreasonable standard where the movement must be everything we want and must always make the best choices. How do we reconcile the imperfections of feminism with all the good it can do? In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed. Gay’s greatest feat is precisely the ability - the willingness - to tune in what we as a culture chronically tune out, to expand the constantly constricting boundaries of our bubbles as we struggle to navigate an increasingly peopled world of growing complexity. “With more people, there are more voices to tune out,” the narrator in Susan Sontag’s short story Debriefing observed with hollowing poignancy. Feminism has helped me believe my voice matters, even in this world where there are so many voices demanding to be heard. Feminism has certainly helped me find my voice. The cultural climate is shifting, particularly for women as we contend with the retrenchment of reproductive freedom, the persistence of rape culture, and the flawed if not damaging representations of women we’re consuming in music, movies, and literature.įeminism is flawed, but it offers, at its best, a way to navigate this shifting cultural climate. These bewildering changes often leave us raw. The world changes faster than we can fathom in ways that are complicated. In the introduction, Gay examines the state of feminism, half a century after Margaret Mead contemplated its future, and justifies her identification as a “bad” feminist:
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She steps firmly ashore in Bad Feminist ( public library) - a magnificent compendium of essays examining various aspects of “our culture and how we consume it,” from race and gender representations in pop culture to the way revolution and innovation can often leave us unfulfilled and unheard to the gaping blind spots of what we call “diversity.” To be sure, Gay isn’t writing to and for women only - what is perhaps her most piercing clarion call to men is made sidewise and subtly, as a comment about privilege in an essay about the class asymmetries of the education system, where she writes: “The notion that I should be fine with the status quo even if I am not wholly affected by the status quo is repulsive.” Illustration from the 1970 book ‘I’m Glad I’m a Boy!: I’m Glad I’m a Girl!’ Click image for more. Roxane Gay, one of my favorite minds, has been swimming against the current in many ways - female, black, large, queer. “Those who swim against the current may never realize they are better swimmers than they imagine.” Agent: Maria Massie, Lippincott Massie McQuilkin.“Those who travel with the current will always feel they are good swimmers,” science correspondent Shankar Vedantam wrote in his excellent exploration of our hidden biases. Mireille’s desperate attempts to wrestle control from her kidnappers by sacrificing her body are deeply felt, but it’s the author’s unflinching portrayal of Mireille’s shattered physical and psychological state once she’s rejoined her husband and infant son that is at once disturbing and frighteningly resonant. Though the opening kidnapping feels like a scene from a particularly stilted thriller, Gay soon finds a more assured footing as she narrows in on the pain each character both endures and inflicts. When Mireille regains her freedom, it’s only the first step in the shaken family’s uncertain recovery. Her captors regularly extract hefty ransoms from their wealthy victims, but in this case, Mireille’s too-proud father refuses to pay up until it’s nearly too late, resulting in his daughter suffering 13 days of increasingly savage sexual torture. Mireille Duval Jameson, a Haitian-born young woman, is on vacation from Miami and visiting her upper-class parents in Port-au-Prince when she is kidnapped at gunpoint.
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Poet and short story writer Gay’s first novel delivers a searing portrait of a politically and economically divided Haiti, as seen through the lens of one family’s nightmare.