Bluesky

Roxane Gay is one of the most incisive cultural critics writing today. She landed in the center of contemporary American political discourse in 2014 with her New York Times best-selling essay collection Bad Feminist. In 2017, she published the nationally best-selling story collection Difficult Women and the memoir Hunger. She is also a coauthor of the Marvel comic book series World of Wakanda, a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, and writes the popular newsletter The Audacity. Gay’s latest project is The Portable Feminist Reader (to be published this March by Penguin), in which she offers a nuanced look at the evolution of feminist theory, practices, and movements. I spoke with Gay about the new book in early February, just weeks after the inauguration of Donald Trump. —Sara Franklin

SF: Can you tell me about this project and how it came about?

RG: Several years ago, after Bad Feminist had come out, my editor at Penguin asked if I would be interested in editing the next edition of The Portable Feminist Reader. I immediately said yes, even though anthologies are challenging. I thought it would be a great opportunity to rethink the ways in which we present the feminist canon.

SF: What effect has putting this project together had on you personally, ideologically, politically?

RG: I think it has reminded me that the canon is something that should be ever-evolving, that it shouldn’t be something that is static and rigid. Of course there are going to be your mainstays, but there should always be new entries into the canon, and new ways of thinking about feminism and how we apply feminism to our lives and to the world around us. Really being able to put that belief into the selections has been really interesting, and it’s also shown me that we have made more progress than I think we tend to acknowledge. There’s so much work left to do, and especially in the recent years where we’ve seen the erosion of women’s rights and the erosion of reproductive freedom. It’s very easy to believe that we haven’t made progress—but we have. When you look at the writing in a reader like this from the 1400s to today, you do see that even though things are pretty terrible right now, they’ve been worse. That’s not meant to be comforting, but it is meant to show that change is possible, and progress is possible, and that you have to fight not just for making progress, but maintaining progress. And I think somewhere along the way we forgot that.

SF: In your introduction, you talk about how people misconstrued some of the ideas you put forth in Bad Feminist, or how they took up those ideas in a way that was different from what you had intended. Did you do anything differently in the conception or explicit framing of this book that you hope will lead to a different result?

RG: I really tried to be both focused and expansive. What I mean by that is that I recognized it was best to focus on American feminism primarily—not because the rest of the world doesn’t matter, but because I didn’t want to do a disservice to global feminism and the very real issues that women are facing around the world. I did also want to acknowledge that, and so I included pieces like the one from Chandra Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes,” and a couple of others to make clear that, yes, feminism is a global concern, but here are pieces that focus primarily on American feminism. You can’t be everything in every text. I was very mindful of that this time around.

I also wanted to go beyond theory, so I wanted to bring in a lot of applied feminism, like feminism and disability, feminism and race, transfeminism, ecofeminism—because, of course, we live on a planet. Reproductive freedom, of course. I tried to do as much as possible. And, you know, it’s almost 700 pages long. So there’s a lot to say, clearly.

SF: You write that it’s detrimental to us to try to define what feminism is or isn’t, but you also condemn “striving to emulate the worst of men as neither good nor bad feminism, but unacceptable feminism.” How do you see those two assertions coexisting? Where’s the line between an expansive, inclusive feminism and truly unacceptable feminism?

RG: Well, you know, “expansive” and “inclusive” are incredibly important concepts, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a free-for-all. One of the things that was really frustrating after Bad Feminist came out was a bunch of, like, pro-life “feminists” who were like, “I’m a feminist, and I’m pro-life,” and it’s like, “No, ma’am, you really are not.” You cannot be pro-life and pro-feminism. Words mean things! And so many people were like, “Ha ha! I’m a bimbo, but I’m a ‘bad feminist.’” Like, wow! It’s just a lot when you see that.

I think that some of the ideas in the book did invite that kind of response, because I’m talking about the reality that we’re all flawed, we’re human, we are inconsistent. And I stand by that. But if I were to do the book over again, I would focus on accountability—that, yes, it’s well and good that we’re flawed and that we’re human, but then how do we hold ourselves accountable for that and for the inconsistencies in our ideologies? I tried to address that as best I could in this book, and also to make sure that, yes, there are guardrails, there are limits. So much of “girl boss” feminism is about, you know, “men do it, so let’s do it too.” I get where that comes from, but I feel like we can do better. We are better. So let’s give ourselves a different standard. It may feel impossible to reach, and that’s okay. But let’s not just tell ourselves we want to do it simply because men have done it. Men do all kinds of dumb things!

SF: I’ve been rereading Communion: The Female Search for Love by bell hooks, and I was so struck by the almost verbatim similarity between your introductory essay and what she’s saying about how lonely—desperately lonely—and dissatisfying “power feminism” is as an idea and in practice, when it’s just built in emulation of male accomplishment. I want to go back to this notion of accountability. Your phrase around this in the introduction is that you want us to be “held accountable for our choices more than the choices themselves.” Can you say a little bit more about that? And what sorts of expectations, whether real or imagined at this point, are you putting forth as a standard that you want to point folks towards, whether we get there or not?

RG: A lot of times, people focus on the choices. OK, yes, we can focus on the choices that we make, and those choices do matter. But what’s next? What do we do after that? So much of feminist conversation and, quite frankly, all social justice conversation sort of stops at a certain point, as if we don’t have the imagination to take it further, or we don’t have the political will to take it further. And so, yes, we can and should think about our choices, but we also have to think about accountability and then what we do with that accountability. For example, in Bad Feminist, I talk about loving hip hop, which I absolutely do. But as long as we keep consuming the supply of misogynistic music, musicians have no incentive, across all genres, to make better music that doesn’t degrade and diminish women. And so at some point we have to decide what’s more important: that women aren’t consistently diminished across popular culture, or that we enjoy the bop? It’s hard to make the better choice to say, “You know what, I’m actually not going to listen to that music.” But the more that we do that, the more real and sustained change becomes possible. That’s what I mean by focusing on accountability more than the choice itself. That requires sacrifice, and a lot of times people don’t want to hear that. Because again, so many feminist messages have gotten warped by people who just want to be able to do whatever they want to do. And so much feminism tells us that if I’m a woman and I make a choice, then what I’m doing is feminist. And no, that’s not always the case. Oftentimes the choices that we make are decidedly anti-feminist. We have to be able to identify that.

SF: The flip side, though, is that plenty of women and people who fancy themselves as “free” or “liberated” are keen to deny any association with feminism, as you point out in this book. And so for these regressive choices—you point out the “tradwife” phenomenon, for example—to what do you attribute the refusal to associate with feminism? Is it the same old story about wanting to be proximate to patriarchal power?

RG: It really is that simple. It’s about proximity to power. I mean, we just saw that in the 2024 election. We’re seeing that now. A lot of Republican women who are losing their jobs in the federal government are deep in their tears, because they’re saying, “We thought you were only going after Black people.” But no, that’s not really what any of this was about. They want all of us gone from public life and from positions of power. And some people don’t realize there is a price that’s going to be extracted from them for that proximity to power. If you think that they’re not also going to come for you, you are either being delusional or you are right there alongside them, committing these bad acts.

You know, I very much want to embrace women’s choices. I think if you want to stay home and raise your children, and like bake bread and make your own butter—I don’t personally get the romanticizing of all of that— you have to recognize that you are ceding economic power. You are ceding a lot of your own freedom, unless you happen to be lucky enough to be married to—if you’re in a heterosexual relationship—a man who believes in in gender equity. And I think a lot of these women want what they dream their mothers had, or their grandmothers had. But their grandmother couldn’t have a credit card in her own name! She couldn’t buy property! They’re ignoring the challenges. You really think you’re making an empowered decision, but don’t be shocked when it doesn’t end up working out. When you age out of your husband’s range of interests, and you find yourself without any economic power in poverty or close to it, and realize that you have to start your life all over again. All those choices you thought you were making for yourself and for your children are going to be completely taken away from you. There’s no discussion of that. The tradwife model currently makes you believe that these are people who are never, ever going to have marital strife, are never, ever going to have to deal with economic adversity. And there’s a level of judgment, too, for people, for parents, who make different decisions for themselves and for their children. It’s just wild to me. I think that we see what we want to see in some of these situations, and we don’t see the darker side of it. And I do think for some of these women—not all—there is a darker side. And I think that a lot of them don’t realize that some of our mothers and grandmothers were fucking miserable.

SF: Yeah. The real threat to repealing no-fault divorce laws seems to me to poke a giant hole in this. Because if it goes belly-up, these women are fucked.

RG: Yeah. The no-fault divorce thing is incredibly important for women to start paying attention to. Because, you know, go ahead, be a tradwife. Congratulations! I applaud you. But do you want to be a tradwife, and also not have the ability to leave that marriage? That’s prison, actually. If you cannot leave a situation legally, you are being imprisoned.

My feminism means that I will fight for tradwives as much as I’ll fight for anyone else. But it’s just so appalling. Doing away with no fault divorce, for these men, means you can’t hold on to your wife any other way. You are so despicable that you have to force your wife to stay married to you.