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
writing world fiction
I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
mother loneliness teaching
Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it's my mother, especially when I'm not teaching or on break.
sex hate men
I was called a feminist, and what I heard was, 'You are an angry, sex-hating, man-hating victim lady person.' This caricature is how feminists have been warped by the people who fear feminism most, the same people who have the most to lose when feminism succeeds.
calm surrender fingers
My tweeting is cool and calm unless I am riled up about something and then I just surrender to the fury of my fingers.
believe other-cultures looks
I believe women not just in the United States but throughout the world deserve equality and freedom but know I am in no position to tell women of other cultures what that equality and freedom should look like.
people feminism movement
In truth, feminism is flawed because it is a movement powered by people and people are inherently flawed.
past people want
The past is always with you. Some people want to be protected from this truth.
women believe collective-effort
We don't all have to believe in the same feminism. Feminism can be pluralistic so long as we respect the different feminisms we carry with us, so long as we give enough of a damn to try to minimize the fractures among us. Feminism will better succeed with collective effort, but feminist success can also rise out of personal conduct.
self-esteem things-in-life balance
I approach most things in life with a dangerous level of confidence to balance my generally low self-esteem.
self trying use
The other day, I saw a blog post where a woman wrote about why she was unfollowing me and that made me feel incredibly self-conscious and embarrassed about my tweets. I also feel more exposed now that I've become a more visible writer but then I try to get over all that and just use Twitter the way I want.
mean people humanity
Feminism's failings do not mean we should eschew feminism entirely. People do terrible things all the time, but we don't regularly disown our humanity. We disavow the terrible things. We should disavow the failures of feminism without disavowing its many successes and how far we have come.
character literary-merit want
That the question of likability even exists in literary conversations is odd. It implies that we are engaging in a courtship. When characters are unlikable, they don’t meet our mutable, varying standards. Certainly we can find kinship in fiction, but literary merit shouldn’t be dictated by whether we want to be friends or lovers with those about whom we read.
brain alive world
There's certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter.
past looks persons
When you look past the image, a celebrity is merely a person you know nothing about.