For this latest instalment in my Women Who Inspire Me series, I’m going to focus on someone amazing, contemporary and still working. So far all the women in this series have been deceased (Plath, Lorde, O’Keefe) or fairly elderly (Didion, Bader-Ginsburg).
I am still however, on somewhat of a writers streak (Lorde, Plath, Didion) and now, today, Roxane Gay.
Roxane Gay
I can’t remember where I first encountered Roxane Gay. I think it must have been on twitter. I must have ended up following her because she had tweeted something both insightful and cutting and someone I followed retweeted it. And since then, I’ve eagerly devoured all her writing and was on the waiting list at my local library to be the first to get my hands on “Hunger” when it was released.
Roxane Gay grew up in Nebraska and has gone on to be an incredibly prolific writer and hopefully has many, many, many more things to come. Her debut fiction novel was “An Untamed State” and book of short stories “Difficult Women”. Her non-fiction work “Bad Feminist” and “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body” have been deeply personal and moving. “Bad Feminist” is always towards the top of my recommendation list when people ask for something to read and it was my “book of the year” the year I read it.
And of her work I haven’t read (and only because I hadn’t known it existed – thanks for telling me about it GB!) is “World of Wakanda”, a graphic novel as a spin-off from Black Panther. That made Gay and poet Yona Harvey to be the first black women lead writing for Marvel.
One of the things I love about Gay is how strong her voice is. You can tell you’re reading one of her pieces even if you can’t see her byline. And she’s an incredibly inspirational person. I love that she isn’t afraid to push boundaries and show that she has a powerful voice that needs to be heard.
“In general I write for marginalized people. I start with black women because I think black women are the least respected and least heard voices in the world.” – Roxane Gay in Harper’s Bazaar
She gets so much hate online (especially twitter) because she dares to be a loud, fat black queer woman who expresses an opinion. I find her work about bodies and fatness to be revolutionary. (Though how sad is it that I even have to write that the idea of talking about treating fat people as humans is revolutionary.)
“I have a great following and I love that, but that doesn’t protect me from the asshole at the table next to me in a restaurant, or the guy shouting at me from his car when I’m walking down the street, or the kid on the aeroplane two days ago that stood on his seat and looked back at me and said, “You’re a big guy,” over and over again. These are not things that success can shield you from.” – An interview with Roxane Gay by Lindy West (another favourite of mine) for the Guardian.
Whilst she has been on a non-fiction roll lately, I loved her work of fiction ” An Untamed State” and I look forward from more fictional books from her in the years to come. One of the things that she does so, so well is deconstruct ways that socio-political dehumanise.
“the body is not a problem. The body is not a failure that must be overcome on a path to success. So […] being able to deconstruct fatphobia, being able to reorient your thinking around different kinds of bodies, should be seen as an immense success” – Roxane Gay
“This is what most girls are taught — that we should be slender and small. We should not take up space. We should be seen and not heard, and if we are seen, we should be pleasing to men, acceptable to society. And most women know this, that we are supposed to disappear, but it’s something that needs to be said, loudly, over and over again, so that we can resist surrendering to what is expected of us.” – From “Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body”
Have you read any of Roxane Gay’s work?
****Something I didn’t realise for the longest time was that she was one of the co-founders of PANK Magazine. I was a huge fan of PANK and after I had some bylines in other poetry magazines, I worked up the nerve to submit to them. This would have been circa 2010/2011. I was rejected (very nicely) but I wish I could find that letter somewhere. I would have kept it and framed it and told everyone about my brush with a literary superstar. ******
Read similar posts:
Women Who Inspire Me #1: Joan Didion
A Christmas Gift Guide for Your Favourite Feminist
Women Who Inspire Me #2: Sylvia Plath
Feminist Reads for Every Age
Women Who Inspire Me #3: Georgia O’Keeffe
Women Who Inspire Me #4: Ruth Bader Ginsburg
My Feminism Journey
Women Who Inspire me #5: Audre Lorde
