Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is an American feminist writer, professor, editor and commentator. She is an associate professor of English at Purdue University, contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
CountryUnited States of America
began call entering
I think it was really entering my 30s that I began to embrace feminism and call myself a feminist.
donald exception people
It's disheartening that people think that Donald Sterling is the outlier and that he's the exception and not the rule.
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This is the real problem feminism faces. Too many people are willfully ignorant about what the word means and what the movement aims to achieve.
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I live in Indiana and teach at Purdue University, a wonderful school with some of the brightest students I have ever had the privilege of working with. My colleagues are powerful and intelligent and kind. The cost of living is low, the prairie is wide, and on clear nights, I can see all the stars in the sky above.
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I want to take the time to think through how I feel and why I feel. I don't want to feign expertise on matters I know nothing about for the purpose of offering someone else my immediate reaction for their consumption.
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Internet outrage can seem mindless, but it rarely is. To make that assumption is dismissive. There's something beneath the outrage - an unwillingness to be silent in the face of ignorance, hatred or injustice. Outrage may not always be productive, but it is far better than silence.
affection demands deserve entirely flawed known love perhaps seen sure utterly
I love, but I am not entirely sure how to be loved: how to be seen and known for the utterly flawed woman I am. It demands surrender. It demands acknowledging that I am not perfect, but perhaps I deserve affection anyway.
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Long walks on the beach are the supposed holy grail of a romantic evening. The beach becomes a kind of utopia - the place where all our dreams come true.
bodies reads simply
In Haiti, beach bodies are simply bodies, and beach reads are simply books, because the beach is all around you.
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Feminism is, I hope, a way to a better future for everyone who inhabits this world. Feminism should not be something that needs a seductive marketing campaign. The idea of women moving through the world as freely as men should sell itself.
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I think that everyone in one way or another has some sort of body issue. There's something about themselves physically that they're not happy with, that they're ashamed of, that they keep constantly trying to change.
public treated
Public intellectuals are often put in the position of having their words, no matter how off-the-cuff, treated as doctrine.
encourages female fragile given ink intensely relationships
A lot of ink is given over to mythologizing female friendships as curious, fragile relationships that are always intensely fraught. Stop reading writing that encourages this mythology.
marriage married
My parents have been married for 42 years. Their marriage has been - from what I can see - a happy one.