Once upon a time, almost a decade ago, a funny, fearless, and frank writer from Nebraska described herself as a bad feminist. “I am failing as a woman,” she wrote. “I am failing as a feminist. I am a mess of contradictions.” The resulting book of essays, Bad Feminist (2014), heralded a more intersectional era in the movement, calling for less essentialism in feminism and more pluralism. It showed what it was like “to move through the world as a woman”: specifically a Haitian-American in her late 30s, who loathed Django Unchained and loved Scrabble. Perhaps, more than anything it was a manifesto of human imperfection. Thus was Roxane Gay propelled into the literary stratosphere and – as such fairytales tend to go – destined to be forever after probed about the current state of feminism.
