AM I A BAD FEMINIST? MOMENTS OF REFLECTION AND NEGOTIATION IN CONTEMPORARY FEMINIST IDENTITY
Elizabeth Ryan Brownlow
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
August 2020
Committee:
Sandra Faulkner, Committee Chair
George Bullerjahn Graduate Faculty Representative
Susana Peña
Jolie Sheffer ii ABSTRACT
Sandra Faulkner, Committee Chair
In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from her position as a Haitian American feminist academic. This work quickly skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences. Representative of the increasingly public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women, Gay’s work is a product of its time. For this dissertation, I examine Bad Feminist along with two other also wildly popular autoethnographic works produced in the same decade, Tressie McMillan Cotton’s
Thick: And Other Essays and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. I examine these texts as public- facing, accessible works that communicate their academic feminist authors’ feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory. Utilizing Sara
Ahmed’s theory of becoming feminist, I analyze the “bad feminist moments,” expressed in these texts as moments of feminist crisis to identify what causes them and what functions they might serve.
Using qualitative methodological triangulation, better known as mixed-methods research,
I employ topic modeling and content analysis across all three texts to identify patterns that reveal not only why and how academic feminists might feel like they are bad feminists, but how and why they choose to share the moments in which they feel like bad feminists with others. Fighting to maintain their feminist identities in a world rife with gendered and raced violence, neoliberal ideals of self sufficiency and individual perfection, rapidly evolving technologies, and intersecting historical structures of oppression, these authors utilize moments of feminist iii imperfection to create space and time to disarticulate and rearticulate their relationships to feminism, their relationships to other people, and their relationships to academia. In this project,
I conclude that bad feminist moments might be reactions to the pressures of both historical and contemporary structures of oppression, but the choice to reflect on them and share with others is based in feminist principles of reflexivity and collective inspiration to resist perpetuating ongoing structures of oppression inside and outside of the academy. iv
For my feminist companions. You forge the paths I stumble along. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No great undertaking can be accomplished alone. I am indebted to my mentors, my
friends, and my family for supporting and guiding me every step of the way through my PhD
program and this dissertation. I have been surrounded by people who inspire and motivate me to
think critically, work intelligently, and articulate carefully.
From the start of this project, nobody has quite understood the purpose and vision behind this study like my committee chair and mentor, Dr. Faulkner. Sometimes I swear she foresaw the
arguments and limitations of this project before I had the slightest inkling about what they would
be. She gently nudged me in fruitful directions without ever mandating or pressuring me. During
times of crippling self doubt and imposterism, Dr. Faulkner made me feel like I could, in fact, do
this. Furthermore, she made me feel like I could do it well. She has been my biggest cheerleader,
reminding me constantly that I am not only allowed to be human, but that I can harness my
humanity to make empathetic, nuanced, powerful contributions to the world. She reminded me
that this project does not stop with the production of this dissertation, but that it extends into my
future as a scholar, as a feminist, as a community member, and as a person. Without her, I would
never have been introduced to qualitative methods, and I certainly would not have felt as
supported and motivated to attempt them. Our chats have always held elements of both the
professional and the personal. Talking to her is always refreshing, always fortifying, and always
a powerful reminder that the professional and the personal are intimately intertwined in this type
of work.
As I wrote this dissertation, I channeled my inner Dr. Jolie Sheffer. Honestly, I channel
my inner Dr. Sheffer for most things. I have yet to meet anyone so careful with their word
choices, so precise in their communications, so detail-oriented, and so committed to excellence vi as Dr. Sheffer. She has taught me countless lessons as a boss, as a mentor, and as a friend. She never turned me away when I randomly popped my head into her office to pepper her with questions. Two out of the three texts I analyzed for this dissertation came from Dr. Sheffer’s recommendations. At every juncture in this process, she has appeared at surprisingly perfectly timed intervals to throw another project-altering idea my way. My time working with her at the
Institute for the Study of Culture and Society shaped my approach to higher education and my subsequent career paths. She modelled professionalism and fruitful collaboration in ways that inspired and challenged me on a daily basis. I will probably never stop pestering her. I still have so much to learn from her.
As I doggedly worked through this program, I have always been able to depend on the unfailing support of CCS director, teacher, and mentor, Dr. Susana Peña. She guides the school with undaunted passion for her students. She has been committed to my professional development, both inside and outside of coursework. Furthermore, she has never hesitated to take the time and space to read a draft, sit down for a chat, or answer a question. She asks the tough, important questions that make me a stronger scholar and a better person. She is the queen of identifying a gap, pointing you in a direction, and then slowly backing away to leave you to ruminate on it. She is a teacher in every sense of the word.
The unsung heroes of any scholastic endeavor are the administrative assistants. I will greatly miss ACS Administrative Assistant, Beka Patterson. I will miss working with her to solve the problems of CCS graduate students. I will miss our long chats in the office. I will miss watching her handle everything we graduate students can throw at her with grace and aplomb.
Without her, I certainly would not be here. She makes our work possible, even when we make it difficult for her. We are so incredibly lucky to have her. vii BGSU faculty and staff aren’t the only ones who contribute to major writing projects like this. I am indebted to my friends and cohort members Kathleen Kollman and Elizabeth Niehaus for helping me take those first initial baby steps toward my dissertation. I had an amazing little group of academic feminists to help me through that first chapter. We took those first steps together, poring over each other’s drafts, taking long walks to discuss our work, and holding each other accountable. I loved getting to work with these intelligent, dazzling women.
Everybody needs a personal support network, and mine is incredible. My cohort has been close knit and supportive from Day One. My memories of BGSU will be peppered with philosophical conversations over beers at the local pubs, vinyl records providing soundtracks for nights of friendship and commiseration, and celebrations of major milestones that brought us all closer together. Shane Snyder and Erin Carlyle always offered me a safe, judgement-free space to just be myself. Naykishia Head never let me become too isolated, forcing me out of the house to remind me that one must play as well as work. Britt Rhuart acted as a writing accountabili- buddy and sounding board as I slogged through chapter after chapter. Tessa Pyles has inspired me with her strength of character and incredible insight. I cannot wait until we can meet up for wine nights again, this time as officially minted PhDs. Marie Carrier has been the most fabulous cheerleader a woman could ask for. Whenever I need motivation, I know I can just give her a call or simply look at the countless motivational tidbits she has sent me over the past four years. As I write this, I can’t help but sneak a glance at her most recent gift, a keychain that reminds me
“You’re Actually Amazing.” Marie, you are actually amazing.
My family has always been supportive of me, even when they are not completely certain what I am doing here. As a first generation college student, I think I frustrated them by constantly coming to them with problems they could not always help with. That has not stopped viii them from trying to help, however, all the way from Texas. My mother has consistently reminded me that every milestone is worth celebrating, even the small ones. My sisters and brother have patiently listened to my breakdowns and offered words of wisdom that make me proud to be their big sister. I have learned so much from each of them as they have grown into inspiring adults.
I am so lucky. I had the best team. I hope my future teammates are just as awesome. ix
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
CHAPTER 1. WHAT ARE BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS, AND WHY SHOULD
WE CARE? ...... 1
Introduction ...... 1
How We Got Here ...... 9
The Influences of Women of Color and Queer Feminisms ...... 17
Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism ...... 24
The Complications of Digital Feminist Activism and Fourth-Wave Feminism ...... 31
Fourth-Wave Feminist Experience and Scholarship ...... 40
Addressing the Limitations of Academic Feminism ...... 49
CHAPTER 2. METHODS AND THEORY ...... 56
Introduction ...... 56
Overview ...... 57
Specialized Terms ...... 60
Theoretical Standpoint ...... 62
Embodied Subjectivity and Standpoint Theory ...... 62
Intersectionality and Assemblage ...... 67
Becoming Feminist ...... 75
Methodology ...... 79
Analysis Process ...... 83
Cycle 1: Topic Modeling ...... 86
Cycle 2: Content Analysis ...... 96 x
Cycle 3: Refining ...... 98
CHAPTER 3. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS TRAUMA-BASED CRISIS ...... 101
Defining Trauma ...... 104
Trauma in Bad Feminist Moments ...... 107
Growing Up Traumatized ...... 109
Embodied Traumas of Objectification ...... 118
Legislated Bodies ...... 122
Public Motherhood...... 125
Danger in the Digital Sphere...... 128
Overlapping Histories of Trauma ...... 131
Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Forced Choice ...... 133
Racialized vs. Feminist Identities of Womanhood ...... 133
Individual Desire vs. Collective Transgression ...... 141
The Limitations of Privilege in Personal Experience ...... 146
Functions of Bad Feminist Moments in Trauma-Based Crisis ...... 151
Feminist Misattunement...... 152
Cruel Pessimism...... 157
Shattering Moments ...... 159
Ambivalence ...... 161
Resignation ...... 164
Conclusion ...... 167
CHAPTER 4. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS RELATIONSHIP-BASED CRISIS ...... 170
Introduction ...... 170 xi
The Family Table Revisited ...... 173
Embodied Imperatives and Desires ...... 176
Feminist Motherhood and “Getting it Right” ...... 194
Problems of Authentic Transgression in Feminist Relationships ...... 205
Bad Feminist Moments as Feminist Self-Assembly ...... 209
Negotiating Desire ...... 213
The Desire to Be Desired ...... 214
The Desire to Belong ...... 222
Conclusion ...... 226
CHAPTER 5. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS OCCUPATION-BASED CRISIS ...... 229
Diversity Work...... 231
Bad Feminist Moments as Academic Disorientation ...... 238
Citational Walls ...... 249
Becoming the Problem ...... 252
Academic vs. Feminist Identity ...... 258
Academic Feminist Shelters ...... 263
Potential for Redirection and Rearticulation...... 264
Public Scholarship as Intergenerational Feminist Snap ...... 271
Collective Snap ...... 280
The Multiple Functions of Collective Snap ...... 287
Conclusion ...... 289
CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS ...... 293
Summary of Findings ...... 295 xii
Limitations & Future Implications...... 300
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 305
APPENDIX A. TOPIC MODEL SAMPLE ...... 328
APPENDIX B. SPREADSHEET SAMPLE ...... 331
1
CHAPTER 1. WHAT ARE BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS, AND WHY SHOULD WE CARE?
Introduction
In 2014 Roxane Gay published Bad Feminist, a collection of personal essays written from
Gay’s position as a Haitian American feminist scholar. 1 By the time I first read this collection in
2016, it had skyrocketed in popularity across both academic and nonacademic audiences, earning
it a spot on the New York Times’s Best Seller list and spurring an avalanche of TED Talks,
interviews, op-eds, blog post responses, and reviews. Academics teaching Women’s Studies and
Feminist Theory started including it in their syllabi as an accessible work of scholarship that
explores the multiple aspects of women’s identity and situates them in relationship to feminist
theory. By March 2018, Iowa State University had developed an entire six-week long syllabus
around Bad Feminist.2 The collection has been noted for its popularity in feminist circles,
leading the satirical site Reductress to publish a story on how a woman was a bad feminist
because she had not yet read Bad Feminist. 3 Inspired by conversations surrounding Bad
Feminist, the feminist journal Signs began an initiative in 2016 referred to as “Short Takes” to
connect the journal to current debates in the feminist world outside the walls of academia by
asking contemporary feminist scholars to discuss issues of feminist identity, popular feminism,
and the conflicts between political and popular feminist identities. The inaugural “Short Takes”
1. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).
2. This syllabus was put together as part of a six-week course in preparation for Gay’s visit to the campus. A publicly accessible version is available on Iowa State University’s Library Guide website at http://instr.iastate.libguides.com/c.php?g=808612&p=5771675.
3. Orli Matlow, “Bad Feminist Still Hasn’t Read Bad Feminist,” Reductress, April 15, 2015, http://reductress.com/post/bad-feminist-still-hasnt-read-bad-feminist/. 2
piece asked contemporary scholars to discuss public feminism in Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. 4
In this piece, well-known feminist scholars and activists such as Jennifer Baumgardner, Brittney
Cooper, Carla Kaplan, Patricia J. Williams, and Naomi Wolf each reflected on one aspect of Bad
Feminist as a form of accessible feminist scholarship. While the responses ranged from Cooper’s discussion of her own work with the Crunk Feminist Collective to Wolf’s exploration of Gay’s rhetorical strategy of speaking to her readership like a “best friend,” one clear theme echoed throughout every response: the need to make feminism relatable and accessible to those who feel disqualified from feminism because they do not embody what they perceive to be feminist ideals or are not well-versed in academic feminist languages.
As a feminist who frequently wonders whether she is doing feminism right, I personally identified with Gay’s claims that feminism can be performative, that not everybody does feminism the same way, and that each feminist is on her own journey. As a white, cisgender feminist, it is voices like mine that have been listened to and credited for the gains of feminism.
However, having been raised by a working-class, mixed Mexican-American family in rural areas of the American South, I frequently come up against barriers to understanding academic feminist language and practice, and sometimes I question or simply disagree with what other feminists are saying, both inside and outside academe. It often leaves me wondering whether I am actually any good at feminism. As passionate as I am about making the world a more equitable place, I often question whether I am feminist enough, and reading Gay’s declaration of “bad” feminism made me wonder just how many of us there were out there, openly feminist women who have secret
4. Jennifer Baumgardner et al., “Short Takes: Provocations on Public Feminism Reflections on Roxanne Gay’s ‘Bad Feminist’,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 41, no. 3 (Spring 2016): 702-12, http://signsjournal.org/bad-feminist/. 3
pleasures, beliefs, and doubts that make us question ourselves. Seeking out other women like me
and my new friend Gay, I started reading the increasing number of blog posts that popped up all
over social media describing and dissecting other women’s “bad feminist” moments, and I
wondered why so many of us identified with this concept. One thing I noted was that many of
the women writing these pieces were not what Gay would refer to as “professional feminists”;
they did not work for feminist organizations, write for feminist publications, or engage in
feminist academic research, but they did still identify as feminist. 5 In contrast, most of the
responses to these blog posts were written by professional feminist writers like Andi Zeisler who
lambasted these women for using valuable feminist space to posit mundane, personal questions
that ultimately detract from the political efficacy of the movement. 6 I could not help but wonder:
were writers like Zeisler right? Is this phenomenon just neoliberal marketplace feminism
distracting us from enacting real social change? In identifying with the concept of bad feminism
and sharing in it, was I part of the problem?
In a course on the history of feminist theory, I noticed threads of similar historical feminist disagreements about who gets to share their experiences and how. I presented a
conference paper on the blog posts I had been reading, suggesting that they may be a form of
modern-day consciousness-raising. An international graduate student approached me after my
presentation and thanked me. She had not felt safe sharing her thoughts with me in front of the
5. Gay, Bad Feminist, x-xi.
6. Andi Zeisler, “Am I a ‘Bad Feminist’? Probably Not, But You’re Asking the Wrong Question,” Washington Post, Jun. 2, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2016/06/02/am-i-a-bad-feminist-probably- not-but-youre-asking-the-wrongquestion/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.f63ea1dea3c1.; Andi Zeisler, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement (New York: Public Affairs, 2016). 4 older, established feminist academics in the room who had suggested I was being overly sympathetic to “bad feminist” writers. “This is me!” she said. “For me, I think it’s because I have two different ideas of what feminism should be: one from my country, and another one from here.” The introduction of the student’s multiple identities conflicting with and influencing her feminist identity intrigued me. After a lot more reading and discussions with multiple women over the course of the next couple of years, I decided to focus my inquiry specifically on the daily lived experiences of “bad feminist moments.”
For this inquiry, I turn to the public-facing authoethnographic scholarship of feminist academic women who share bad feminist moments with their readers. This method of sharing one’s feelings of feminist inadequacy in order to address larger issues of feminist practice and theory is new only in the sense that it centers the feelings associated with not being a good- enough feminist. Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist is the obvious progenitor of this concept, but she is not the only one who uses this method of sharing moments of inadequacy to question and push back against mainstream feminist ideals. Tressie McMillan Cottom, another feminist academic who writes extensively for journalistic and online publications, also shares bad feminist moments in her collection of essays, Thick: And Other Essays. 7 In her 2015 book, The Argonauts, poet, prose writer, and scholar Maggie Nelson also writes about bad feminist moments, focusing on experiences in which she feels she is not transgressive enough as a feminist or a queer woman. 8
These are not the only works in which feminist academics share bad feminist moments, but they are arguably some of the most widely read and discussed works that do so (in both academic and
7. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: and Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019).
8. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015). 5
public spheres). Bad Feminist was not written nor published in a vacuum, and the works of other
feminist academics who also share their bad feminist moments with readers exemplify the
moment in which this kind of work is being published and read.
The concept of “bad feminism,” although having quickly taken hold in academic feminist
discussions and classrooms, has not yet been widely explored in peer-reviewed scholarship. It wasn’t until 2019 that Sarah Conlin et al. published their examination of the barriers to engagement with feminist identification and activism, in which they borrow from Roxane Gay’s usage of the term to define women’s “bad feminist” perceptions as:
a self-belief that they are failing to “live up to certain ideals” about what they believe it means to be feminist. Instead, they may perceive their behaviors, other beliefs, or fund of knowledge to be inconsistent with, or not measuring up to, those of a prototypical feminist...These individuals may strive to live up to their view of an ideal feminist, and feel inadequate if they believe they have failed to do so. 9
Conlin et al. found the perception that one is an unworthy or “bad” feminist who perceives their beliefs and/or actions to be inconsistent with ideal feminism can hinder one’s
engagement with feminism in order to maintain cognitive consistency. However, not all
feminists who experience this cognitive dissonance opt out of engagement with feminism. Some
feminists find other methods of maintaining cognitive consistency, such as sharing these
moments via social media and online blogs or vlogs, examining these moments in personal
essays, and utilizing these moments to negotiate their own relationships with feminism.
Furthermore, Conlin et al. make it clear that one does not have to use the term “bad feminist” in
order to experience this phenomenon, but rather, the term can offer us a language for defining,
expressing, and analyzing perceptions that one’s beliefs and actions are inconsistent with what
9. Sarah E. Conlin et al., “Bad Feminists? Perceived Self-Discrepancy Predicts Differences in Gender Equality Activism,” Gender Issues 36 (2019): 68, doi: 10.1007/s12147-017-9200-2. 6
one perceives to be ideal feminism.10 Other scholars have recently exposed phenomena similar
to the “bad feminist” effect, and their findings have been consistent with those of Conlin et al.,
suggesting that when one perceives inconsistencies between their beliefs in gender equality and
some other aspects of themselves, this can act as a barrier to engagement with feminism.11 One
does not have to refer to themselves as a “bad feminist” to feel like they are one.
To be clear, women who perceive themselves to be bad feminists are not postfeminists.
While postfeminists believe feminism to be obsolete because its goals have already been achieved, contemporary feminists still find further iterations and expansions of the feminist movement to be important, and they largely agree with many tenets of feminism, if not always or entirely. 12 Although many writers have expanded the term “postfeminism” to describe
contemporary backlash against outdated feminist ideals and gender-centric activism, others feel
that the “post” in postfeminism suggests an ending to the movement rather than a shift in values
and ideals, assuming an illusion of achieved equality that does not yet exist. 13 In their 2003
analysis of postfeminism in popular media, Elaine Hall and Marnie Rodriguez identified four
major postfeminist claims: 1) the overall support for the women’s movement has dramatically
10. Conlin et al., “Bad Feminists?,” 83.
11. Conlin et al. draw from Anne Helen Peterson’s book Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Woman (New York: Penguin Random House, 2017), as an example of scholarship that exposes the contradictions in contemporary behavioral expectations for women that can act as barriers to women’s engagement with feminism.
12. Pamela Abbott, Melissa Tyler, and Claire Wallace, “Postfeminism,” in An Introduction to Sociology: Feminist Perspectives, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 51 – 54.; Abbott, Tyler, and Wallace offer a concise description of Postfeminism and its tenets.
13. Pamela Aronson, “Feminists or ‘Postfeminists’?: Young Women’s Attitudes Toward Feminism and Gender Relations,” Gender & Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 903-02, doi: 10.1177/0891243203257145. 7
declined, 2) women are increasingly antifeminist, 3) women believe the feminist movement to be
irrelevant because social equality between the genders has already been attained, and 4) women
don’t identify as “feminist” due to the negative stigma associated with the term. 14 The concept
of postfeminism is fraught, hotly debated, and often confusing. While women who question
tenets of feminism they consider to be outdated may arguably align with some of the values of
postfeminism, those who perceive themselves to be bad feminists necessarily still align
themselves with what they consider to be core feminist values and guiding principles. Thus,
feminists who question whether they are doing feminism right or being feminist enough do not
meet the criteria of postfeminism both because they still believe the movement to be relevant and
because they still openly identify as feminists. I hypothesize many of these feminists are simply
trying to navigate feminism from their own personal intersections, rather than reject it altogether
or attempt to move past it. Although postfeminism offers women a method of rejecting feminism
as no longer necessary or shifting past feminism into a new type of movement, the feminists who
identify with Gay appear to feel that feminism is still necessary and desire to engage with it. 15
Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune suggest that the desire to reject feminism lies partially in
how feminism is defined, positing that “when people say they are not feminists, it’s often
because they are using a narrow definition rather than a broad one.” 16 I would like to expand this
idea by investigating how women who question their relationships to feminist identity define
14. Elaine J. Hall and Marnie Salupo Rodriguez, “The Myth of Postfeminism,” Gender & Society 17, no. 6 (December 2003): 878-902, doi: 10.1177/089124320327639.
15. Yvonne Tasker and Diane Negra, Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture (London: Duke University Press, 2007), 1 –25.
16. Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune, Reclaiming the F Word: Feminism Today (New York: Zed Books, 2013), 6. 8
ideal feminism, and how those definitions influence their ideas of what it means to be a bad
feminist. I specifically investigate to what extent histories of academic feminism contribute to
these definitions, especially in consideration of the exclusionary traditions upheld by the
academy. Gay, for instance, suggests that academic and mainstream ideals of feminism rooted in racialized and gendered ideals of authority are what have shaped her perceptions that she is not a good feminist. McMillan Cottom also points out issues of academic feminist authority, particularly in regards to its relationship with race and class. Nelson describes the problematic positions that feminist academic women face in fields that are supposed to be transgressive but still rely on sexist and racist citation practices. The authors each focus on different but complementary aspects of academic feminism as it relates to citational traditions, practices of exclusion, and neoliberal values.
I choose to examine these moments of “bad feminist” perceptions within the academy to identify why feminist academics are having these moments, what they are doing with them, and what these moments can teach us about feminist identity in this particular moment. I argue in this
chapter that “bad feminist moments” as they are currently shared are uniquely twenty-first
century products influenced by pervasive neoliberalism, widespread digital communication and
connection, and a Western Fourth-Wave emphasis on experience, inclusion, and subjectivity. As
such, it is worth looking into what bad feminist moments are, what functions they serve for
feminists in this moment, and how they reflect contemporary issues with feminist identity. We
can start with academic feminists since they are the ones generating and educating others on
feminist language and theory. 9
How We Got Here
From feminist consciousness-raising sessions of the 1960s and 1970s to the writings of contemporary online bloggers asking whether they are feminist enough, the ways in which women question their relationship to feminism have evolved as the third and fourth “waves” of feminism have ushered in new concerns about feminist movements and women in general.
Situated within a neoliberal society in which feminism is often coopted and marketed for capitalist gains, contemporary feminist identity is fraught and hotly debated, especially on social media. The rise of social media in the digital age has provided new platforms for marginalized voices and the sharing of feminist experiences. However, it has also brought feminist language and activism to wider audiences, often resulting in confusion regarding feminist identity. This is a relatively new conundrum that we are still figuring out how to deal with, much like the controversies surrounding fake news and polarizing social media hacking. As Sarah Banet-
Weiser states in her 2018 book, Empowerment: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny, “we are living in a moment in North America and Europe in which feminism has become, somewhat
incredibly, popular.” 17 Banet-Weiser explains feminism as being “popular” in three senses: the
ways in which it manifests in popular and commercial media, its condition of being liked by
liked-minded people, and its position as a site of struggle for visibility and priority between
different feminisms.18 The rise of popular feminism, influenced by feminist celebrities like
Beyoncé and Rose McGowan, digital feminist publications like Bitch Media and a massive array of feminist podcasts, and the widespread proliferation of academic feminist language via public
17. Sarah Banet-Weiser, Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 1.
18. Banet-Weiser, Empowered, 1-2. 10
feminist scholarship, has resulted in tensions between those who call for inclusion and unity in
the feminist movement and those who fear the deterioration of the movement’s political efficacy.
The rise in feminism’s popularity has in turn influenced the priorities of feminist
scholars. Increasingly, scholars are prioritizing accessible scholarship that non-academic
feminists can identify with. One of the many approaches to prioritizing accessible scholarship is
the increasingly popular academic feminist personal essay or memoir. Gay’s Bad Feminist is a
collection of personal essays reflecting on her own experiences as they relate to the world around
her. These essays are personal in nature, enabling the work to read like memoir, following a
largely linear autobiographical narrative based on her personal experiences as a black woman, a
feminist, and an academic. The accessibility and approachability of Gay’s work is a major source
of praise in the discussions and reviews of Bad Feminist, and many people have called for more
scholarship like it. As a work that appeals to non-academic audiences, Bad Feminist engages
feminist publics by rendering Gay’s observations autoethnographically, situating personal
experiences within feminist theory and identifying the possibilities of larger implications.
Gay is not the only one to use autoethnographic writing to create accessible feminist
scholarship. In 2015, Maggie Nelson published The Argonauts, a memoir written in stanzas and
punctuated with theoretical references appearing beside them, inviting audiences to investigate the
connections themselves. In 2017, well-known feminist scholar Sara Ahmed used her own life
experiences to demonstrate feminist identity as a never-ending journey of “becoming feminist,” connecting her own daily practices to translate dense feminist theory in a relatable way in Living
a Feminist Life. 19 As I write this chapter in 2019, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s recently published
19. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017). 11
collection of personal essays, Thick, is skyrocketing in popularity due to its personal inquiry into
issues of beauty, gender, race, and the media while contextualizing each within academic theory
rendered accessible and readable for public audiences.
Countless other autoethnographic works written by academic feminists have proliferated
since Bad Feminist was published, and their popularity is staggering. Tressie McMillan Cottom
was the second-highest ranked junior faculty member listed in the 2019 Edu-Scholar Public
Influence Ranking, and she was one of only six to make the top 200 list of faculty with public
influence. Thick has received attention from NBC, The Atlantic, Time, PBS, The New York Times
and more. In spring of 2019, McMillan Cottom premiered her new black feminist podcast that she co-hosts with Roxane Gay, Hear to Slay. 20 Gay and McMillan Cottom are not the only ones to
receive massive public attention. Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has been featured in The New
Yorker, The Guardian, and countless other publications. It won the national Book Critics Circle
Award and the New York Times Notable Book Award. In 2016 (one year after the publication of
The Argonauts), Nelson received the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship for “rendering pressing issues of our time into portraits of day-to-day experience in works of nonfiction marked by
dynamic interplay between personal experience and critical theory.” 21 While Ahmed’s Living a
Feminist Life has received more academic than popular attention, it has not gone unnoticed by popular feminist publishers. Ann A. Hamilton of Bitch Media referred to it as “not just an instant classic, but an essential read for intersectional feminists,” and lauds the ways in which it
20. Tressie McMillan Cottom and Roxane Gay, Hear to Slay, April 2019, produced by Luminary, podcast audio, https://luminarypodcasts.com/listen/roxane-gay-and-dr-tressie- mcmillan-cottom/hear-to-slay/b52dbaee-2243-4230-ac20-8dc36ca6a453?country=US.
21. “Maggie Nelson,” MacArthur Foundation, last modified September 21, 2016, https://www.macfound.org/fellows/962/. 12
“thrillingly builds connections between (at times lofty) feminist theory and everyday practice.” 22
As well, Ahmed’s public blog, feministkilljoys, which she used to write Living a Feminist Life, has
over one million followers globally.23 Feministkilljoys also inspired a public feminist scholarship
podcast, Feminist Killjoys, PhD, hosted by feminist academics Melody Hoffmann and Rachael
Anne Jolie, and focused on discussions of politics and pop culture through a feminist lens. 24 The connections among each of these works are varied and overlapping, but they all have one important aspect in common: they are accessible, popular works of feminist public scholarship centered on personal experience. Furthermore, they were published after extensive rewriting of digital pieces, and in turn were expanded in to other forms of digital public scholarship, demonstrating the unique ways in which Web 2.0 has reshaped feminist scholarship into multi-layered, fluid conversations that take place across a variety of platforms and communities.
Although the reception of these works could be seen as marking a shift in accessible feminist scholarship through public-facing autoethnography made possible by globalized digital connection, these authors are not the only nor the first feminist scholars to think it is important to speak from a place of feminist identity and performance, to question the binaries of feminism/anti-feminism, nor to speak about this issue outside of academic feminist circles. Over
22. Ann A. Hamilton, “Living a Feminist Life: Sara Ahmed,” Bitch Media, Spring 2017, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/living-a-feminist-life.
23. “feministkilljoys.com,” Alexa Internet, accessed April 10, 2019, https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/feministkilljoys.com.; This statistic is per the Alexa.com website analytics tool, which calculates the daily average of website visitors over a 3-month period. I obtained this statistic in April 2019, so this statistic is based on the daily average of visitors to feministkilljoys.org in January - March 2019.
24. Melody Hoffman and Rachael Anne Jolie, Feminist Killjoys, PhD, March 2016 - April 2019, produced by Podbean, Podcast audio, https://www.podbean.com/podcast-detail/x95if- 49d21/Feminist-Killjoys-PhD-Podcast. 13
the past several decades, queer feminists and feminists of color have attempted to offer
alternatives to widely accepted linear, wave-based feminist models of the feminist movement and resist public impressions of feminism as monolithic ideology. Rosemarie Tong reminds her readers in her introduction to feminism, “Although all feminist perspectives cannot be equally correct, there is no need here for a definitive final say,” and concludes, “Instead there is always room for growth, improvement, reconsideration, and expansion for true feminist thinkers. This breathing space helps keep us free from the authoritarian trap of having to know it all.”25 This statement suggests flexibility and reflexivity as core feminist values to combat the impulse to have all the answers as feminists. When one believes they have all the answers, they forget they are speaking from subjective positions shaped by the structures of oppression in which they reside. Although many feminists have promoted the idea that feminism has no one-size-fits-all
model and can be adapted and changed, still many women have chosen to either reject feminist
identity in favor of movements considered to be more inclusive, or to adapt the concept of
feminism to emphasize the value of specific feminist movements and schools of thought.
Concepts such as Black Feminism, Womanism, and Crunk Feminism, have been used by women
to embrace some values of mainstream feminism while rejecting others. 26 For instance, in their
1977 statement on “What we believe,” the black feminist lesbian organization, the Combahee
River Collective, emphasized “Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with
progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are
25. Rosemarie Tong, Feminist Thought (Boulder: Westview Press, 2014), 9.
26. Brittney Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection (New York: Feminist Press at CUNY, 2017).; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1991). 14
separatists demand.” 27 In the Combahee River Collective Statement, authors Barbara Smith,
Demita Frazier, and Beverly Smith remind readers of the black women activists that came well
before the white suffragettes, such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Ida B. Wells
Barnett, each of whom, “shared awareness of how their sexual identity combined with their
racial identity to make their whole life situation and the focus of their political struggles
unique.”28 They point out that black women and other women of color were active and integral to the second-wave feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, but their contributions were effectively obscured by “both outside reactionary forces and racism and elitism within the movement itself.”29 Similarly, black women activists’ often sexist experiences with Black
Liberation movements, such as the Civil Rights movement, the Black Nationalist movement, and
the Black Panthers, left them feeling disillusioned with movements that centered only race and
not gender. Several years later, Alice Walker coined the term “womanism” in order to provide
black women distinctions from inapplicable white feminist issues that mainstream feminist
groups prioritized, establishing a black woman-centered ideology from which movements like feminism stem and grow. 30 Walker characterizes this ideology as being “committed to survival
and wholeness of entire people, male and female,” clarifying that, unlike many of the white
feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to be a womanist is not to be a separatist, but rather
27. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, ed. Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor (Chicago: Haymarket, 2017), 19.
28. Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” 16.
29. Combahee River Collective, 16.
30. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (San Diego: Harcourt, 1983). 15
a universalist dedicated to the improvement of the human experience for all, particularly black
communities.31
Black Feminist communities came together out of the need for a movement that was both
anti-racist and anti-sexist, acknowledging that women of color are continuously subject to both
forms of inequality. Given the overrepresentation of black women in impoverished communities,
many black feminist communities also identify as anti-capitalist, adding class-based oppression
to their list of primary concerns. 32 While white feminists like Betty Friedan were making the
case for white middle-class women’s fulfillment outside of the home in the workforce, women of
color were fighting for childcare and building daycares for the women in their communities who
did not have the option of staying in the home as housewives, frequently working in white homes
as domestic workers in order to survive. 33 Differences in experience based on widespread
institutional and social segregation and racial oppressions called for new approaches to feminism
that not only included women of color additively, but centered the multiple struggles of their
daily lives.34
These traditions of establishing new movements and concepts to address the limitations
and gaps of whiteness in feminist thought and activism have shifted over time to accommodate the evolving needs of women of color in Western societies. When Brittney Cooper, Susana M.
Morris, and Robin Boylorn published The Crunk Feminist Collection, for instance, they included
31. Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, xi.
32. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought (New York: Routledge, 2000), 22-25.
33. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publishing, 1963).
34. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 16
a Hip-Hop Generation Feminism Manifesto, situating their “declaration of feminism” that “pays
homage to our feminist foremothers and big sisters,” but is “not just a remix but also a remake
that builds on the beats and rhythms from the tracks already laid down, but with a decidedly new
sound, for a new era. This, in other words, ain’t ya mama’s feminism. This is next generation
feminism.” 35 The concept of hip hop feminism is generationally situated:
We are members of the hip hop generation because we came of age in one of the decades, the 1990s, that can be considered post-soul and post-civil rights. Our political realities have been profoundly shaped by a systematic roll-back of the gains of the civil rights era with regard to affirmative action and reproductive justice policies; the massive deindustrialization of urban areas; the rise and ravages of the drug economy within urban, suburban, and rural communities of color; and the full-scale assault on women’s lives through the AIDS epidemic. We have come of age in the era that has witnessed a past-in- present assault on our identities as women of color, one that harkens back to earlier assaults on our virtue and value during enslavement and imperialism. 36
In their collection of essays, Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn situate what they refer to as “a crunk feminist consciousness,” uniquely belonging to the hip hop generation and influenced by both crunk music and feminist principles: “Crunk music is Southern hip hop filled with bass and hard- driving beats. Feminism is theory and praxis that aims to get us free. Crunk feminism, then, is the partnership of two warring ideals that come together to make a hot beat.” 37 They connect the
work of the Crunk Feminist Collective to the black feminism of the Combahee River Collective, suggesting that this is not merely black feminism for a new generation, but a “home(girl) feminism” that can escape becoming “an overly theoretical concept held hostage by the
35. Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection (New York: Feminist Press, 2017), xxi.
36. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection, xx.
37. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, 1. 17
academy.” 38 Like many black feminist groups before, this group emphasizes collectivity and
support based on difference rather than sameness: “The goal was never to be a homogenous group of feminists with identical views and values…We share some things in common, but in other things we challenge each other, disagree with each other, and at times walk away from each other. In the end, we come back to the table.” 39 They reject the oft-cited feminist
“clickable” concept of unity in favor of a difference-based notion of “collectivity,” or space for feminists to gather, share, and grapple with each other. 40 Debates surrounding feminist unity and
praxis have existed throughout the history of feminism, and women of color and queer feminists
have offered some of the greatest contributions to them.
The Influences of Women of Color and Queer Feminisms
Given the history of feminist consciousness-raising sessions, one could make the
argument that the sharing of bad feminist moments is simply a modern form of digital
consciousness-raising. However, doing so would overlook the influences of women of color and queer feminists who have shared concerns over feminist inclusion and experience, setting the stage and offering models for feminists to question and push back against feminist ideals.41 In
order to understand feminism in this contemporary moment, it is also important to understand the
major shifts and controversies that have taken place within feminist movements over time.
38. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, 2.
39. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, 3.
40. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, 4-5.
41. Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America (New York: William Morrow, 1984).; See Giddings’s work for an excellent overview of the history of women of colors’ interventions into feminist movements. 18
In the early days of second-wave feminist movements, shared experience became the
basis for social change. The Radical Feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s owe many of their insights
into women’s issues to “consciousness-raising” sessions. Kathie Sarachild, a member of New
York Radical Women (NYRW) in 1968, recalled how her thinking about her own experiences
had been changed by listening to the experiences of other women: “I realized I still could learn a
lot about how to understand and describe the particular oppression of women in ways that could
reach other women in the way this had just reached me.” 42 Sarachild and the women of the
NYRW viewed consciousness-raising meetings—with small groups of women sharing their
experiences and listening to each other—as a means of organizing and motivating a mass
movement for women’s liberation. Consciousness-raising gave way to “speakouts,” open, public
testimonials intended to arouse support for feminist causes, based on the assumption that the
people who experience the effects of public policy should be considered the experts on it. For
example, in 1969 the feminist group Redstockings attended a legislative hearing on abortion
reform and demanded a chance to speak as the people whom abortion laws affect. They were not, however, permitted to do so.43 These movements were founded upon the sharing of experiences
to build community and raise awareness. However, by the 1980s, women of color and queer
feminists were questioning whose experiences were really being valued. Most of the experiences
that were valued and dealt with as universal “women’s” experiences were those of white,
cisgender, heterosexual, and mostly middle- to upper-class women. 44
42. Flora Davis, Moving the Mountain: The Women’s Movement in America Since 1960 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), 88.
43. Davis, Moving the Mountain, 88-89
44. Sonia Kruks, “Women’s ‘Lived Experience’: Feminism and Phenomenology from Simone de Beauvoir to Present,” in The SAGE Handbook of Feminist Theory, eds. Mary Evans, 19
As a result, although early feminist groups attempted to unify women through shared
experiences, they often limited that sharing to small, homogenous groups of white, middle-class
cisgender women. Sometimes these limitations were inadvertent, and the women who organized
these groups ignorantly did not consider the needs and experiences of other women. However,
the feminist groups and organizations gaining the most media attention often deliberately
characterized the experiences of women of color and queer women as clouding the issues at
stake and rendering the issues too complicated to generate focused political change. For instance,
in their foundational publication, Feminist Revolution, Abby Rockefeller of the Redstockings
suggested that lesbianism “muddles what is the real issue for women,” and Betty Friedan
famously referred to the lesbian feminist movement as the “lavender menace” at a 1969 meeting
of the National Organization of Women, suggesting they threatened the political efficacy of both
NOW and feminism itself. 45 Issues of racial inequality that affected women were also so alienated from these organizations that black feminists had to establish alternative feminist
organizations, such as the National Black Feminist Organization and the Combahee River
Collective, both of which were founded not only to address issues of gender and race, but of
sexuality as well.
Women of color and queer women, although conducting the initial organizing in key
feminist events such as the Seneca Falls Convention, often did so invisibly, leading many of
Clare Hemmings, Marsha Henry, Hazel Johnstone, Sumi Madhok, Ania Plomien, and Sadie Wearing (London: SAGE, 2014), 75.
45. Abby Rockefeller, “The Pseudo-Left/Lesbian Alliance,” in Feminist Revolution, eds. Redstockings (New Paltz: Redstockings, 1975), 191.; Stephanie Gilmore and Elizabeth Kaminski, “A Part and Apart: Lesbian and Straight Feminist Activists Negotiate Identity in a Second-Wave Organization,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 16, no. 1 (2007): 98. 20
them to realize that feminist groups did not consider the different experiences of womanhood
when deciding what counted as women’s issues. 46 Queer feminists called for separatism from
feminist groups in an effort to establish their own experiences as valid and useful for generating
change. Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, for instance, claim in their discussion on the
silencing of sexuality and queer people in feminist movements that “the whole notion of ‘the
personal is political’…is suddenly and ironically dismissed when we begin to discuss
sexuality.” 47 In pointing out the hypocritical usage of the popular feminist slogan, “the personal is political,” Hollibaugh and Moraga exposed the silencing of queer women in feminist movements. 48 They suggested the primary limitation of Radical Feminist movements was their
inability to account for the experience of holding multiple marginalized identities at once,
whether those identities be gendered, raced, or classed: “we are all these things rolled into one
and there is no way to eliminate even one aspect of ourselves.” 49 Although many feminists
identify as women, that is not all they identify as, and it never has been. Furthermore, those who
identify as feminist are not only feminist. They hold multiple identities simultaneously, and as
46. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 106-08.
47. Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga, “What We're Rollin’ Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983), 58.
48. This phrase has been attributed to feminist Carol Hanisch’s 1969 essay “The Personal is Political,” as well as the founding members of the feminist organization, New York Radical Women. However, Hanisch and others have denied coining it. It was used as a rallying cry for feminist movements of the 1960s and 70s, emphasizing the connections between women’s personal experiences and larger sociocultural structures that affect them.
49. Hollibaugh and Moraga, “What We’re Rollin Around in Bed With,” 58. 21 we see in the writings of women wrestling with their feminist identities, they often struggle with the salience of these identities as they move throughout time and space.
In order to account for the multiple identities each person experiences, feminist thinkers have approached the limitations of feminist theory and practice by suggesting that feminist movements can be repurposed and shifted to complement and complicate other fields of Identity
Studies, and vice versa. We see an example of this in the work of Patricia Hill Collins. In 1991,
Hill Collins suggested that we cannot consider oppression without considering all of its intersections and the different ways people are affected by them. 50 She popularized Kimberlé
Crenshaw’s theory of Intersectionality when she referred to it in Black Feminist Thought, widening the term to include all women as uniquely affected by individual intersections of race, gender, class, and sexuality, and connecting it to a long history of black feminist thought and action based on a politics of difference. Like Hill Collins, other feminist thinkers such as
Crenshaw, the Combahee River Collective, Jasbir Puar, Donna Haraway, and the Crunk Feminist
Collective have also considered theories and concepts that attempt to argue against binary either/or thinking regarding identity, decentering and de-essentializing singular modes of oppression. As discussed earlier, the Combahee River Collective called for a black feminist consciousness that considers the multiple systems of oppression based on not only gender, but also on race, class, and sexuality. This was primarily in response to their experiences with white feminist groups that emphasized unity based on gender alone and accused them of clouding the issues at stake when attempting to bring issues such as race and class into view. In a 1997 article,
Crenshaw points to the dangers of colorblind rhetoric that suggests talk of race fosters racism
50. Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought. 22
and divides women when she stated, “it is fairly obvious that treating different things the same
can generate as much inequality as treating the same things differently.” 51 This centering of
women’s different experiences based on race and class greatly influenced Janet Helms’s
womanist model of identity formation, which built off the work of Alice Walker and utilized
Crenshaw and Hill Collins’s concept of intersectionality to focus on the internal construction of
the self in relationship to communities of women of color. 52 Feminist movement and thought
based on difference has also greatly impacted the creation of modern feminist movements such
as the Crunk Feminist Collective, which not only situates crunk feminism within differences
based on race, class, and gender, but also situates it within generational experiences and
contemporary political landscapes, calling for collectivity rather than unity. 53
Intersectionality has not only been used to resist binary thought, but also to establish
connections between feminists based on what Audre Lorde refers to as a “politics of difference.”
Lorde uses the concept of Intersectionality to suggest that, while feminists have traditionally
unified around their sameness as women, it is primarily their differences from men that bring
them together. 54 Differences, in Lorde’s mind, can be what create true sisterhood, if only feminists are able to move their focus from their oppression as women to include issues of difference amongst women, based on race, class, age, and sexual preference. Lorde embraces
51. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Color Blindness, History, and the Law,” in The House That Race Built, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 285.
52. Janet E. Helms, Black and White Racial Identity: Theory, Research, and Practice (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).
53. Cooper, Morris, and Boylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection.
54. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984). 23
anger as a tool in this work, encouraging readers to acknowledge negative emotions and use
them to enact change. She points out that feelings of guilt can be used to enact change as well,
but only if one can move beyond that guilt to something greater, rather than making the
conversation about that guilt. Lorde’s work started a lot of conversations about the value of black
feminism and the uses for intersectionality in feminist work. Theories of intersectionality have
been used to identify the complex nature of sorting through and addressing multiple oppressions
and to examine the ways in which feminist identity is filtered through cultural traditions. 55 They
have also been used to explore the roles of queer women in generating collective feminist
action. 56
Roxane Gay’s work in Bad Feminist comes out of longstanding traditions of queer
feminist and feminist of color pushback against mainstream feminist expectations. Her work
shines a light on twenty-first century feminists’ discomforts with feminism and illuminates a
small but marked shift in approaches to unease with feminism. This shift is noticeable in her
choice to discuss moments of discomfort with what self-identified feminists perceive to be ideal
feminism, or internalized models and standards of feminism against which feminists measure
their own feminist performances and beliefs.
55. Bonnie Moradi. “Advancing Womanist Identity Development: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go,” The Counseling Psychologist 33, no. 2 (March 2005): 225–53, doi:10.1177/0011000004265676.; Lisa Y. Flores, Maria D. Carrubba, and Glenn E. Good, “Feminism and Mexican American Adolescent Women: Examining the Psychometric Properties of Two Measures,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 28, no. 1 (February 2006): 48– 64, doi:10.1177/0739986305283222.; Adriana M. Manago, Christia Spears Brown, and Campbell Leaper, “Feminist Identity among Latina Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Research 24, no. 6 (November 2009): 750-76, doi:10.1177/0743558409341079.
56. Carly Friedman and Campbell Leaper, “Sexual-Minority College Women’s Experiences with Discrimination: Relations with Identity and Collective Action,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34, no. 2 (June 2010): 152–64, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2010.01558.x. 24
Feminism in the Age of Neoliberalism
When discussing contemporary feminism, we must consider the relationships of feminist identity to modern neoliberal cultural orders, particularly because a wealth of work has arisen over the last couple of decades to describe and theorize the places of feminists and young women in general within contemporary neoliberal gender orders, especially in regards to the tensions surrounding sexual agency and negotiations of neoliberal values. Neoliberalism is, at its basest, a theory of economic practice. The theory of Neoliberalism proposes to advance the well-being of humans by advancing individual freedoms and skills through institutional systems that promote private property rights and free trade/free markets. In this line of thought, the role of government is to protect those rights and freedoms by establishing and protecting practices that promote the ideals of market freedom such as deregulation and privatization of markets. This theory was first established in the 1970s and rose in popularity with the Reagan administration’s trickle-down economics policy, quickly taking hold in the political and economic practices of Western countries across the globe and eventually morphing into “an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs.” 57 At the core
of Neoliberalism is the belief that, if one protects the market’s ability to freely regulate itself, one
protects people’s individual freedoms, freedoms which have come to be equated with commodity
choice. 58 David Harvey points to Neoliberalism as the rationale behind the rapid rise in Western
57. P. Treanor, “Neoliberalism: Origins, Theory, Definition,” Political Aspects, December 2, 2005, http://web.inter.nl.net/users/Paul.Treanor/neoliberalism.html.
58. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).; See Harvey’s text for an excellent overview of the history of this theory and its effects. 25
societies’ information technologies and globalized marketplaces. 59 This line of thinking has been
adapted over time to emphasize capitalistic personal achievement and competition as the markers
of freedom. Contemporary feminist movements that adopt the values of individual achievement
and competition equate freedom with consumer choice and capitalist contribution. Critics of
contemporary feminist movement such as marketplace and/or choice feminism point to the
effects of these neoliberal values as subsuming the feminist movement and reshaping it.
According to these critics, this reshaping strips the movement of its political efficacy by ignoring
the socioeconomic structures that shape women’s lives in favor of placing the onus for change on
the individual and encouraging women to “lean in” to liberal capitalism in order to empower
themselves.
By the early 2000s, scholars were critiquing the impacts of neoliberal ideologies on
contemporary feminist movements by comparing them to second-wave feminism, suggesting
feminism had strayed from its anti-capitalist roots. Nancy Fraser, Angela McRobbie, Hester
Eisenstein, and Catherine Rottenberg each offered similar perspectives on how contemporary feminism had morphed into a highly subjective, individualized, commodified form of Neoliberal
Feminism that devalued the labor of mothers, created further racial and ethnic divisions among women, and ultimately failed women as a whole. 60 These scholars became convinced that the
59. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 1990).
60. Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” New Left Review, 56 (2009): 97-117.; Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture, and Social Change (London: Sage, 2009).; Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010).; Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). 26
“fit” between neoliberal global capitalism and liberal feminism had stripped feminism of its once transformative power. 61
In 2009, Nancy Fraser compared contemporary feminism to second-wave feminist movements and found the shift to liberal feminism, focused on identity politics, had diverted attention away from the real problems of neoliberal capitalism, such as growing wage gaps. In her 2013 book she suggested that, although feminism had indeed been co-opted by capitalism, there was still hope for the future. 62 She foresaw a coming revival of radical feminist movements focused on working with other egalitarian movements to address the global economic crisis brought forth by widespread neoliberal ideologies. In the same year, Angela McRobbie published The Aftermath of Feminism, in which she argued the feminist movement had been undermined through popular culture products such as women’s magazines, chick lit, and mainstream pornographic imagery, while simultaneously being paradoxically included in other aspects of the very same culture. McRobbie goes as far as to refer to this process as the “undoing of feminism” dating from the 1990’s when feminism began to reevaluate itself at the same time that popular culture presented feminism as no longer necessary. 63 Building off of American journalist Susan Faludi’s 1990s argument that a backlash against feminist gains had resulted in the commodification of the feminist ethic of economic independence, both Fraser and McRobbie suggested the greatest “undoing” of feminism lies in what they argue is pushed out of the of the
61. Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced.; For example, Hester Eisenstein situates liberal feminism as posing a natural “fit” with neoliberal values that feeds into and perpetuates global capitalism.
62. Nancy Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013).
63. McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism, 11. 27
conversation with the centering of individual identity, agency, and ability. 64 Instead of framing
this commodification as the result of a backlash against feminism as journalist Faludi had,
scholars like McRobbie and Fraser felt it was the values of contemporary feminism that were to
blame for their natural “fit” with neoliberalism. Hester Eisenstein referred to this contemporary
feminist framework as a “free market” model of feminism that centered the virtues of autonomy and choice, ultimately sustaining class-based global capitalism at the cost of exploiting women’s freedoms, particularly those of women with primary caregiving responsibilities.65 Women were being pressured to achieve personal fulfillment by enacting their free choice to work outside of the home and contribute to the project of capitalism without consideration of the women whose work was not offered as form of personal fulfillment, such as domestic workers and caregivers.
Eisenstein argues that these women, primarily women of color and women of lower socioeconomic statuses, are erased by the rhetoric of neoliberal fulfillment in service of the personal success of the women who employ them.
The idea of the fit between feminism and neoliberalism quickly gained steam, and scholars began to identify a form of contemporary feminism that was not only influenced by neoliberalism, but was in fact a form of neoliberalism itself. In 2013, as Fraser was publishing
Fortunes of Feminism and McRobbie was publishing The Aftermath of Feminism, Catherine
Rottenberg published an article suggesting that liberal feminism and neoliberal values do not
64. Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women, First Anchor Books Ed. (New York: Anchor Books, 1992).; Fraser, Fortunes of Feminism.; McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism.
65. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced, 16.; Interestingly, this text deviated from Eisenstein’s previous work in which she argued feminists working within systems of neoliberal governance could, in fact, transform it. 28
only “fit” to serve global capitalism, as Fraser, Eisenstein, and McRobbie had posited.
Rottenberg argued that, in fact, a new sort of “Neoliberal Feminism” was emerging and spawning a new feminist subject to act as a metaphorical foil reflecting the contradictions inherent in liberal democracy. 66 According to Rottenberg, this new feminist subject, produced by
a hyper-individualized brand of feminism, is incited to perceive themselves as human capital,
responsible for investing in themselves in the name of empowerment while disavowing the
socioeconomic and cultural structures that perpetuate women’s disempowerment. These critiques
of contemporary feminism’s relationship to neoliberal ideologies spread widely, not only in
academic scholarship, but in popular media as well. Over the course of the next ten years,
publications like The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, and the Huffington Post
published op-eds and think-pieces by scholars and journalists alike on the various relationships
between feminism and neoliberalism. 67
While most of the initial writing and thinking on feminism’s relationship to neoliberalism focused on how liberal capitalism had stripped the feminist movement of its political efficacy, the 2016 American presidential race marked a noticeable shift in this line of thinking. The rampant misogyny and racism that pervaded the Donald Trump campaign alongside the sexist criticisms of Hilary Clinton contributed to a surge in feminist activism, culminating in the 2017
Women’s March that took place the day after Trump’s inauguration, the largest ever global protest that had been recorded to date. The post-election surges in digital activism, grassroots
66. Catherine Rottenberg, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
67. Aside from journalistic articles, scholars were also writing for popular publications like this. For instance, Rottenberg originally wrote a piece for the Huffington Post in 2013 that later transformed into her book The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. 29
organizing, and nontraditional political candidates running for and getting elected into office in
the 2018 elections forced feminist scholars to ask not only what negative effects modern-day
neoliberalism had on the feminist movement, but also to what extent digital networks mediated,
undermined, and/or heightened these effects. The original scholarship that had accused
neoliberalism of subsuming and twisting feminism was suddenly considered dated and simplistic because it did take into account the ways in which feminists have engaged with new technologies to educate and organize on behalf of and within the movement, particularly following the 2016
U.S. presidential elections. Rottenberg’s 2018 book, The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism, which had grown out of her well-received 2013 article on the dangers of neoliberal feminism, was critiqued as no longer timely by the date of publication, given the new set of issues ushered forth by the 2016 presidential race, and contemporary feminists’ responses to them.68
Feminist scholars have responded to what they consider to be homogenized views of
modern-day feminism by offering more nuanced and complicated analyses of specific feminist groups, examining their complicated relationships with neoliberalism, feminism, and digital activism. Some of these works focus specifically on young women, illustrating the commodification of sexual empowerment in young women, how it relates to the “othering” of non-white and non-Western women, and the effects of shifting sexual norms on the exploitation
68. Michaele L. Ferguson, “Darkness Now Visible: Patriarchy’s Resurgence and Feminist Resistance. by Carol Gilligan and David A. J. Richards. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 172p. $29.99 Cloth. - the Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. by Catherine Rottenberg. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 264p. $29.95 Cloth,” Perspectives on Politics 17, no. 1 (2019): 222-23, doi: 10.1017/S1537592718004358.; For example, in her review, Michaele L. Ferguson referred to Rottenberg’s book as “the book that feminists would have needed in order to survive Hillary Clinton’s presidency,” and suggests the problem lies in “the languid pace of academic publishing,” which she suggests is “no match for the recent acceleration of political time.” 30
of women. 69 Other works focus on how young women respond to contemporary forms of
patriarchy and the effects of neoliberal discourses on women’s agency. 70 Digital feminist
movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp offered even more complicated sites of analysis, and many feminist scholars and writers accepted the challenge to find out what these movements can teach us about modern-day feminism both inside and outside the academy. 71 In 2015, Ruth
Lewis and Susan Marine pointed out that the body of work on contemporary feminist activism
and neoliberalism had broadly focused on women writ large rather than feminists specifically.72
69. Angela McRobbie, The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change (London: Sage Publications, 2009).; Christina Scharff, Repudiating Feminism: Young Women in a Neoliberal World (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2012).; Ammie N. Feijoo, “Trends in Sexual Risk Behaviors among High School Students—United States, 1991 to 1997 and 1999 to 2003,” Advocates for Youth, 2004, https://www.advocatesforyouth.org/wp- content/uploads/storage//advfy/documents/fstrends.pdf.
70. Pamela Aronson, “Feminists or ‘Postfeminists’? Young Women’s Attitudes Toward Feminism and Gender Relations,” Gender & Society 17, no. 6 (2003): 903– 22, doi:10.1177/0891243203257145.; Shelley Budgeon, Third Wave Feminism and the Politics of Gender in Late Modernity (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).; Anita Harris, Next Wave Cultures: Feminism, Subcultures, Activism (New York: Routledge, 2008).; Emma Rich, “Young Women, Feminist Identities and Neo-liberalism,” Women’s Studies International Forum 28, no. 6 (2005): 495–508, doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2005.09.006.; Heather Jacques and Lorraine Radtke, “Constrained by Choice: Young Women Negotiate the Discourses of Marriage and Motherhood,” Feminism and Psychology 22, no. 4 (2012): 443– 61, doi: 10.1177/0959353512442929.
71. Katilenn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls of Challenging Rape Culture Through Digital Feminist Activism,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 25, no. 2 (2018): 236-246, doi: org /10.1177/1350506818765318.; Emma Turley and Jenny Fisher, “Tweeting Back While Shouting Back: Social Media and Feminist Activism,” Feminism & Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 128 – 32, doi: 10.1177/0959353517715875.; Sue Jackson, “Young Feminists, Feminism, and Digital Media,” Feminism & Psychology 28, no. 1 (2018): 32-49, doi: 10.1177/0959353517716952.; These examples are all from 2018 alone.
72. Ruth Lewis and Susan Marine, “Weaving a Tapestry, Compassionately: Towards an Understanding of Young Women’s Feminisms,” Feminist Formations 27, no. 1 (2015): 118-40, https://muse.jhu.edu/. 31
They emphasized the importance of identifying how feminists themselves use their feminist
frameworks to understand, challenge, and resist neoliberal patriarchy. They argued to fully
explore questions about feminist identity and feminist understandings of the world around them,
it is crucial not only to turn to the published writings of feminists, but also to empirical examinations of young feminists’ activities and views.
The Complications of Digital Feminist Activism and Fourth-Wave Feminism Those who have heeded the call to examine young feminists’ views and activities have primarily turned to the influences of digital activism and social media to better understand the relationships between neoliberalism and feminist activism. As Hester Baer highlights, “The example of hashtag feminism makes clear how the increased use of digital media has altered, influenced, and shaped feminism in the twenty-first century by giving rise to changed modes of communication, different kinds of conversations, and new configurations of activism across the globe, both online and offline.” 73 Many feminist scholars have focused on digital activism
specifically, arguing that it offers a unique departure from conventional feminism, promotes a
dynamic new form of engagement with feminist politics, and provides spaces for feminists to
learn from each other and generate widespread public consciousness about feminist issues.74
Many of these scholars feel that rapidly growing technologies, particularly social media
technologies, have enabled new directions for feminism that have resulted in a new fourth wave
of the movement. The concept of feminist “waves,” or generational feminist movements defined
73. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism: Digital Activism, Body Politics, and Neoliberalism,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 1 (2016): 18, doi: 10.108014680777.2015.10903070.
74. Katilenn Mendes, Jessica Ringrose, and Jessalynn Keller, “#MeToo and the Promise and Pitfalls.”; Emma Turley and Jenny Fisher, “Tweeting Back While Shouting Back.”; Sue Jackson, “Young Feminists, Feminism, and Digital Media.” 32
by their attendant concerns, is contentious in both academic and public spheres. As media
attention on feminist gains has increased, and more and more people identify as feminist, there is
often confusion regarding what constitutes a feminist “wave” and what the difference between
the various waves are. 75 As demonstrated in a 2018 Vox article, in which journalist Constance
Grady explains the differences between the waves of feminism, social media is frequently a
platform for disagreement and confusion regarding feminist waves and their definitions. Since
those definitions are often unclear, so are the understandings of them. Grady humorously
introduces her article on feminist waves with a stream of consciousness-style opening meant to
reflect the common confusion over the wave metaphor:
If one thing’s for sure, it’s that the second-wave feminists are at war with the third-wave feminists. No, wait, the second-wavers are at war with the fourth-wave feminists. No, it’s not the second-wavers, it’s the Gen X-ers. Are we still cool with the first-wavers? Are they all racists now? Is there actually intergenerational fighting about feminist waves? Is that a real thing? Do we even use this metaphor anymore?76
75. Jamie Ballard, “American Women are More Likely to Identify as Feminists Now Than in 2016,” YouGov, August 9, 2018, https://today.yougov.com/topics/lifestyle/articles- reports/2018/08/09/feminism-american-women-2018.; Leonie Huddy, Francis K. Neely, and Marilyn R. Lafay, “Trends: Support for the Women's Movement,” The Public Opinion Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2000): 309-50, www.jstor.org/stable/3078722.; Statista, “Would you define yourself as a feminist - someone who advocates and supports equal opportunities for women?,” https://www.statista.com/statistics/312161/define-self-feminist-advocates-supports-equal- opportunities-women/.; While Huddy, Neely, and Lafay indicate that the average number of people who identified as feminist in the 1990s dropped from 33% to 26%, after 2001 it appears support for feminism rose unsteadily. Many of the most recent polls focus specifically on women’s identification as feminists. A 2018 YouGov poll suggests a slight increases in women who identify as feminist in the U.S rising from 32% in 2016 to 38% in 2018, although a 2017 study conducted by Statista indicates that 61% of Americans in general identify as feminists.
76. Constance Grady, “The Waves of Feminism, and Why People Keep Fighting Over Them, Explained,” Vox, July 20, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/3/20/16955588/feminism-waves- explained-first-second-third-fourth. 33
While many feminist scholars may feel they know the answers to these questions, nonacademic feminists often do not, as is demonstrated by the prevalence of popular media articles like
Grady’s that educate the public on what exactly feminist waves are and how they are or are not useful.
The first known use of the “waves” metaphor for feminist movements was in 1968 and was originally intended to link the women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s (the second wave) to earlier suffrage movements (the first wave), establishing a history of women’s liberation and empowerment.77 According to the traditionally-taught wave model, the “First
Wave” is characterized by women’s struggle to achieve basic political rights. This typically refers to the suffrage era from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920 passing of the Nineteenth
Amendment. The “Second Wave” typically refers to the time period during the 1960s and early
1970s, when feminists pushed for greater equality in all areas of life, including education, the workplace, and at home. 78 The reference to the wave model was intended to draw a direct connection between these two eras, suggesting that feminist activism of the 1960s and 1970s was neither new nor frivolous. There are, however, disagreements regarding the usefulness of this concept today. In 2010, feminist historian Linda Nicholson addressed the attempts to define a third wave of feminism by suggesting the concept of feminist waves had outlived its usefulness:
The wave metaphor tends to have built into it an important metaphorical implication that is historically misleading and not politically helpful. That implication is that underlying certain historical differences, there is one phenomenon, feminism, that unites gender
77. Martha Weinman Lear, “The Second Feminist Wave,” The New York Times (1968), https://www.nytimes.com/1968/03/10/archives/the-second-feminist-wave.html.; Weinman Lear wrote an article on radical feminist movements and their relationship to suffragettes.
78. Noëlle McAfee, “Feminist Philosophy,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Fall 2018), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/feminist- philosophy/. 34
activism in the history of the United States, and that like a wave, peaks at certain times and recedes at others. In sum, the wave metaphor suggests the idea that gender activism in the history of the United States has been for the most part unified around one set of ideas, and that set of ideas can be called feminism.79
Despite the claims of many feminist scholars who agree with Nicholson that the wave metaphor misrepresents feminist movements and the women who lead them, others feel there is value in simply recasting the wave metaphor. For example, Nancy A. Hewitt suggested we consider new types of “waves” to conceptualize a feminist past, such as radio waves. The images of feminist waves as radio waves, according to Hewitt, “not only help us think about how competing versions of feminism coexist at the same period, but they also continue to resonate even in moment of seeming quiescence,” and “recognize explicit hierarchies of power…thus radio waves encourage us to tune into more varied feminist frequencies.” 80 Given that feminist scholars often turn to such convoluted analyses of the wave metaphor, it comes as no surprise that nonacademic feminists often find themselves bewildered regarding its definitions and usefulness.
Not only are there ongoing debates about the usefulness of the feminist wave metaphor, but there are also ongoing disagreements about what constitutes a wave, as well as what wave we are currently in. Although scholars were attempting to define third-wave concerns as late as the
2010s, Jennifer Baumgardner dates the start of a new fourth wave to 2008, and journalist Pythia
Peay was arguing for the existence of a fourth wave as early as 2005. 81 These dates feel arbitrary
79. Linda Nicholson, “Feminism in ‘Waves’: Useful Metaphor or Not?” New Politics 12, no. 4 (2010): 34.
80. Nancy Hewitt, “Feminist Frequencies: Regenerating the Wave Metaphor,” Feminist Studies 38, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 668, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23720198.
81. Jennifer Baumgardner, “Is There a Fourth Wave? Does it Matter?” in F’em: Goo Goo, Gaga and Some Thoughts on Balls, ed. Jennifer Baumgardner (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2011), 35 when we consider that Twitter, a prominent social media platform for feminist activism and the primary site of “hashtag feminism,” an organizing strategy that many use to define fourth-wave feminism, was created in 2006. 82 While the first and second waves of feminism have much clearer definitions and time frames, the rapid rise of Web 2.0 and social media has generated a lot of confusion about what the differences are between the third and fourth waves of feminism.
In fact, some scholars do not feel a fourth wave is yet in existence, although many of those scholars believe it should be. 83
Both the third waves and fourth waves of feminism have been characterized as highly individualized, focused on experience, and concerned with issues of not only gender equality, but also racial and sexual equalities. For instance, in her 1992 landmark essay for Ms. Magazine, “I am Not a Post-feminism Feminist. I am the Third Wave,” Rebecca Walker, daughter of well- known feminist writer and activist Alice Walker, coined the term “third-wave feminist” and offered the foundational ideology of individualized feminism that addressed issues of diversity, sex positivity, and intersectionality. She emphasizes the ways in which personal choices must align with personal definitions of ideal feminism. Differentiating herself from postfeminism, however, she suggests that those personal definitions must be informed by ideologies of equality
243.; Pythia Peay, “Feminism’s Fourth Wave,” UTNE Reader, March/ April 2005, https://www.utne.com/community/feminisms-fourth-wave.
82. The first example of hashtag feminism occurred in 2013, when the hashtag #StandWithWendy was utilized by Twitter users to demonstrate support for Wendy Davis’s 13- hour filibuster in Texas to prevent an anti-abortion bill from passing.
83. Barbara Risman, Where the Millennials Will Take Us: A New Generation Wrestles with the Gender Structure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).; For example, feminist sociologist Barbara Risman argued that we need a new, not yet existent fourth wave of feminism made up of late millennials focused on achieving a genderless utopia. 36
for all. She states that “Each of my choices will have to hold to my feminist standard of justice,” and situates feminism as a search for “personal clarity in the midst of mass destruction.”84 Fast-
forward to over a decade later; in 2016 Hanna Retallack et al. characterized the fourth wave of
feminism as “a sharing of voices, engagement with global politics and a focus on
intersectionality,” a description that sounds awfully similar to definitions of third-wave
feminism. 85 The similarities do not end with the descriptions of the waves, but in the values each
holds and the issues each addresses. Both waves argue for broader, intersectional critiques of
sexuality, race, and class in addition to gender while advancing the theories of performativity and
queerness grounded in the works of queer feminists and feminists of color.
The differences between the two waves can appear muddy at best, and do not become
clear until one addresses the impact of the world wide web. It would appear the primary
difference between people’s understandings of the third and fourth waves of feminism is
globalized digital connection. As Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com, tentatively posited
in an interview with The New York Times Magazine in 2009, “maybe the fourth wave is
online.” 86 Not surprisingly, it is the globalized connections offered by the internet that most of
the scholarship on the fourth wave has focused on. These globalized digital connections of fourth
84. Rebecca Walker, “I am Not a Post-feminism Feminist. I am the Third Wave, ” Ms., 39 (January/February 1992): 41.
85. Hanna Retallack, Jessica Ringrose, and Emilie Lawrence, “ ‘Fuck Your Body Image’: Teen Girls’ Twitter and Instagram Feminism in and Around School,” in Learning Bodies: The Body in Youth and Childhood Studies: Volume 2, eds. JuliaCoffey, Shelley Budgeon, and Helen Cahill (New York: Springer, 2016), 86.
86. Jessica Valenti, “Fourth Wave Feminism,” interview by Deborah Solomon, The New York Times, November 13, 2009, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15fob-q4- t.html. 37 wave feminism are contentious sites of analysis in feminist scholarship. Some critics question the ability of online feminism to effect real social change or engage with “real” feminist politics.87
Others suggest that online feminism has the potential to reshape feminist discourse and agitate for change by successfully mobilizing “networked publics” and nurture new and varied modes of activism.88 These scholars argue digital modes of activism move beyond traditional modes of feminist petition and protest to encompass new activist modes of information sharing, education, and community building.89 These expanded methods of engagement and activism are argued to enable contemporary feminists to engage in micro-level politics of daily life and empower them to situate their identities within feminist politics and their experiences within inequitable social structures based on gender, race, sexuality, and class. 90 Opinions on online feminist activism range anywhere from hopeful arguments for the power of the #metoo movement to expose inequities and empower young women to speak about their personal experiences, to the scathing
87. Henrik Serup Christensen, “Political Activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or Political Participation by Other Means?,” First Monday 16, no. 2 (2011), https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/3336/2767.; Anita Harris, “Young Women, Late Modern Politics, and the Participatory Possibilities of Online Cultures,” Journal of Youth Studies 11, no. 5 (October 2008): 481 – 95, doi: 10.1080/13676260802282950.
88. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism.”; Danah Boyd, “Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications,” in Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2010), 39- 58.
89. Hester Baer, “Redoing Feminism”; Jessalyn Keller, Girls’ Feminist Blogging in a Postfeminist Age (New York: Routledge, 2016).; Julia Schuster, “Invisible Feminists? Social Media and Young Women’s Political Participation,” Political Science 65, no. 1 (June 2013): 8- 24, doi: 10.1177/0032318713486474.
90. Shelley Budgeon, “Emergent Feminist(?) Identities: Young Women and the Practice of Micropolitics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 8, no. 1 (2001): 7-28, doi: 10.1177/135050680100800102.; Harris, “Young Women.” 38
critiques of “slacktivism,” a combination of “slacker” and “activism” that refers to methods of
engaging in “low-cost, low-risk online activism” such as hashtags, “liking” Facebook pages of
political and social groups, and signing online petitions. 91
Maggie Nelson, Roxane Gay, and Tressie McMillan Cottom each obtained their doctoral
degrees during the rapid rise of fourth-wave feminism and the widespread effects of the world wide web. Nelson received her PhD in 2004, the same year Mark Zuckerberg first launched the now widely popular social media site, Facebook. Two years later, Twitter, the site of popular hashtag movements, was launched. Before this time, the Internet had something like 50 million websites (as opposed to the more than 600 million by 2012 and over 1.5 billion by 2020).92
Globalized digital connection was a new and exciting arena, but the potential for sharing
personal experience and educating others through social media and other digital platforms was
still largely unrealized. It was during this period of rapid global expansion and digital connection
in which Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom each came into their academic careers. Gay
received her PhD in 2010, and McMillan Cottom obtained her degree in 2015. 93 In a little over a
91. Gina Masullo Chen, Paromita Pain, and Briana Barner, “ ‘Hashtag Feminism’: Activism or Slacktivism,” in Feminist Approaches to Media Theory and Research, eds. Dusting Harp, Jaime Loke, and Ingrid Bachmann (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 197 – 218, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-90838-0.
92. “Total Number of Websites,” Internet Live Stats, Accessed April 6, 2020, https://www.internetlivestats.com/total-number-of-websites/.; Megan Garber, “The Internet at the Dawn of Facebook,” The Atlantic, May 17, 2012, accessed April 6, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/05/the-internet-at-the-dawn-of- facebook/257342/.
93. “Roxane Gay,” Purdue University, accessed April 6, 2020, https://www.cla.purdue.edu/facultystaff/profiles/new/newfaculty-14/Gay._Roxane.html.; Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Bio,” Tressmc.com, accessed April 6, 2020, https://tressiemc.com/about/.; Maggie Nelson,” University of Southern California, Accessed April 6, 2020, https://dornsife.usc.edu/cwphd/maggie-nelson/. 39
decade, the world and the feminist movement changed significantly, and the works of feminists who embarked on their academic journeys during this period exemplify these changes.
The works of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom I examine in this dissertation are products of this era of global digitization and its subsequent anxieties. McMillan Cottom’s Thick,
for example, is a collection of essays, revised and reworked from their original online
publications. In her revisions, McMillan Cottom addresses feminists’ responses to her digital
writing in order to address the underlying issues at stake. For example, her essay, “On Beauty,”
was derived from a 2013 essay, “Brown Body, White Wonderland,” which she wrote for Slate
magazine’s digital edition. 94 In the revised essay, she not only reworks her arguments about
whiteness and beauty, but she clarifies them by responding to the widespread public backlash to
her article, primarily the backlash from black women. Gay’s Bad Feminist is also a series of
essays that were originally published in blogs and online publications. Nelson’s The Argonauts is
comprised of multiple forms of work Nelson had already produced for wider audiences,
including a graduate talk, a zine, and several magazines. 95 These alternative methods of communication offer feminists new ways of communicating and organizing as well as new ways to conduct and engage with feminist scholarship. For feminists who take to the internet to organize and theorize, gone are the days of simply putting ideas into the world with little feedback from others. When something goes on the internet, those who write it have to engage with other people, as well as their beliefs about whether digital activism and scholarship are
94. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Brown Body, White Wonderland,” Slate, August 29, 2013, https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/08/miley-cyrus-vma-performance-white-appropriation-of- black-bodies.html.
95. Nelson, “Acknowledgments,” in The Argonauts, 144. 40
credible or effective means of engaging with feminism. These texts are prime examples of this
type of engagement.
Fourth-Wave Feminist Experience and Scholarship
To further complicate these debates, scores of feminists have taken to the internet to
discuss their personal experiences in the form of autoethnography. Historically, women have
shared personal experiences to theorize and demonstrate the myriad forms oppression takes and
the various effects it has on people. This sharing for understanding has taken a variety of forms, like the public speech, the personal essay, memoirs, poetry, or the blog. The rooting of social justice thought in personal experience has been central to the development of feminist movements. From the speeches and pamphlets of the mid-nineteenth century abolitionists and suffragists, to the manifestos of the radical feminists of the 1960s and 70s, and still further to the collection of queer women of colors’ essays in works like This Bridge Called My Back, autoethnography has become a site of feminist sharing and a central starting point for feminist theory. 96 In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed suggests that feminist theory arises entirely from
personal experience, beginning in the early moments of feeling something is wrong or “off” with
an unjust situation and blossoming into a journey of feminist discovery that is both
individualized and recursive.
96. You can find many of these early manifestos written by feminist thinkers and organizations like SCUM and Valerie Solanas in the Feminist Press’s open source project, the Equality Archive at https://equalityarchive.com/issues/feminist-manifestos/. You can also read the personal essays of multiple personal essays from queer women of color in Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga’s edited collection, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed. (New York: Women of Color Press, 1983). The original publication was in 1981. 41
This is particularly true for women of color feminists, who are not often provided room in other spaces to speak about their personal experiences. As Tressie McMillan Cottom reminds readers in her introduction to Thick¸ “for us the personal essay genre became a contested point of entry into a low-margin form of public discourse where we could at least appeal to the politics of white feminist inclusion for nominal representation,” and reminds readers that, for black women, personal essays have historically been “the only point of access for telling the creative stories of empirical realities.” 97 Autoethnography is one of the ways in which women of color have been able to push back against the whitewashing of feminism, address the intersections of race and gender, and discuss the complicated relationships they may have with feminism.
Autoethnography has been described as a practice of members of a culture giving accounts of that culture, or a form of “self-ethnography” that privileges personal beliefs and perspectives used by researchers to generate ethnographies of their own people. 98 Through their autoethnographic accounts, woman-identified scholars who also identify as feminists attempt to work through personal issues with feminist ideologies, articulate their own insider experiences within feminist communities, and describe personal moments of daily lived experience that cannot be captured by those outside of feminist communities.
Since feminist identity is rooted in a movement intended to speak out against oppression, these texts are particularly interesting as they attempt to address stereotypes and cultural expectations within feminist communities. In their history of autoethnography, Adams, Ellis, and
97. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 17.
98. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, “Autoethnography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, eds. Jörg Matthes, Christine S. Davis and Robert F. Potter (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 1, doi:10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011. 42
Holman Jones assign key purposes to autoethnographic work: a) to speak against or provide
alternatives to “dominant, taken-for-granted, and harmful cultural scripts, stories, and
stereotypes,” b) to articulate insider knowledge of cultural experiences, particularly aspects of
those experiences other researchers may not have personal access to (such as experiences of
institutional oppression), c) to demonstrate how researchers are implicated by their observations
and conclusions in an effort to encourage writing against “harmful ethnographic accounts made
by others—especially ‘cultural outsiders’ who try to take advantage of or irresponsibly regulate
other cultures,” d) to describe moments of daily experience that simply cannot be captured by
other, more traditional research methods, and finally d) to create texts that are accessible to wider
audiences, including those outside of academic settings. 99 The autoethnographic texts authored by Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson meet all of this criteria, providing alternatives to cultural scripts and stereotypes regarding feminism, articulating insider knowledge of the experiences of being a woman and a feminist, encouraging writing that pushes back against antifeminist cultural outsiders, describing moments of daily lived experiences in ways that cannot be captured by traditional research methods, and creating texts that are accessible to wider audiences outside of academic settings.
The accessibility of autoethnographic writing is one of the major appeals of the genre. In their oft-cited autoethnographic essay on the uses of autoethnography, Ellis and Bochner claim that autoethnography not only offers insights to the researcher, but that the narrative mode of writing used for autoethnography “repositions the reader as a coparticipant in dialogue and thus
99. Tony E. Adams, Stacy Holman Jones, and Carolyn Ellis, “Autoethnography,” in The International Encyclopedia of Communication Research Methods, eds. Jörg Matthes, Christine S. Davis and Robert F. Potter (John Wiley & Sons, 2017), 3-5, doi:10.1002/9781118901731.iecrm0011. 43
rejects the orthodox view of the reader as a passive receiver of knowledge.” 100 In publishing
autoethnographic memoirs and essays, academic feminists actively engage their readers in
dialogue rather than attempt to pass on objective knowledge. This is particularly relevant when
considering that autoethnography lends itself to accessibility, meaning that nonacademic
audiences can find entry points into the material without specialized knowledge. When feminist
academics contextualize feminist theory within personal lived experiences and share them as
feminist insiders, they engage both academic and nonacademic audiences in a dialogue of sorts.
As Robin Boylorn suggests, when coupled with Black Feminist Thought,
autoethnography allows black feminists to “look in (at themselves) and out (at the world)
connecting the personal to the cultural.” 101 Marsha Houston further suggests that black women
with access to academic privileges can also use autoethnography as a means to speak to the
experiences of women of color “who have no direct access to the public forums of our
conferences, journals, and books.” 102 Rachel Alicia Griffin attributes her own inspiration to write
autoethnographically to the theoretical works of black feminists who have rooted their theories in
such connections between the personal and the cultural, such as bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins,
and Angela Davis. These writers “built a platform,” Griffin argues, “from which Black academic
women can autoethnographically narrate the pride and pain of Black womanhood. Their
100. Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner, “Autoethnography, Personal Narrative, Reflexivity: Researcher as Subject,” in Handbook of Qualitative Research, 2nd ed. (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 2000), 733-68.
101. Robin M. Boylorn, “As seen on TV: An Autoethnographic Reflection on Race and Reality Television,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25, no. 4 (2008): 413.
102. Marsha Houston, “The Politics of difference: Race, Class, and Women's Communication,” in Women Making Meaning: New Feminist Directions in Communication, ed. L. F. Rakow (New York: Routledge, 1992), 55. 44 foundational commitments to self-determination, intersectionality, and strategic essentialism are invaluable to creating bodies of academic work that include our subjugated voice.” 103 From this platform there have stemmed some of the greatest shifts within the feminist movement as we now know it.
The works that build this platform consist of a variety of media, including speeches, songs, blogs, personal essays, memoirs, poetry, and academic books and journal articles.
Sojourner Truth’s “Aint’ I A Woman?” speech addressed the intersections of race and gender before the concept of intersectionality was even a twinkle in feminism’s eye, and Audre Lorde argued for a politics of difference based on the same idea in Sister Outsider. Alice Walker’s collection of personal essays, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, introduced women to the concept of being Womanist, which she defines in the introduction as being “to feminist as purple is to lavender,” and illustrates the complicated nature of black feminist thought and identities.104
As mentioned earlier, her daughter Rebecca Walker’s personal essay on her feminist experiences led to our current understandings of Third-Wave Feminism and defined its characteristics. 105
Many of the concepts and theories now associated with contemporary feminism arose out of the autoethnographic works produced by black feminists.
103. Rachel Alicia Griffin, “I AM an Angry Black Woman: Black Feminist Autoethnography, Voice, and Resistance,” Women’s Studies in Communication (November 2012): 142.
104. Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1983), xi.
105. “Testimonios as Critical Tools in Theorizing Chicana/o, Latina/o, and Indigenous Studies,” University of California Humanities Research Institute, last modified 2019, https://uchri.org/awards/testimonios-as-critical-tools-in-theorizing-chicana-o-latina-o-and- indigenous-studies/. 45
Many other works by feminists of color and queer feminists have also greatly influenced
feminist theory and the ways in which we discuss it. Chicana feminist epistemology has
frequently been developed and communicated through autoethnographically influenced works .
While testimonio was first employed as a means of recording social struggle in Latin America,
contemporary works often take the form of personal narratives, a methodology which the
University of California Humanities Research Institute finds “especially useful in capturing the
wisdom of marginalized populations, tracing resistance among the oppressed, and exploring the
personal and political lives of women and queers.”106 Works that center personal experience and
build on the testimonio tradition have greatly influenced feminist works, such as Cherríe
Moraga’s Loving in the War Years, which draws on the Latin American testimonio in autoethnographic ways to bear witness to violence and discrimination in Chicano immigrant communities, as well as to build coalition across difference with white allies. 107 Gloria Anzaldua and Cherríe Moraga’s This Bridge Called My Back, which centered queer women of color’s experiences through essays, poems, and other autoethnographic writings that connected the personal to the cultural, also borrows from the testimonio method of connecting experience to wider cultural implications.108
106. Marion Christina Rohrleitner, “Chicana Memoir and the DREAMer Generation: Reyna Grande’s The Distance Between Us as Neo-colonial Critique and Feminist Testimonio,” Gender a výzku/ Gender and Research 18, no. 2 (2017): 40, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13060/25706578.2017.18.2.370.
107. Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years: Lo Que Nunca Pasó Por Sus Labios (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1983).
108. Rohrleitner, “Chicana Memoir and the DREAMer Generation,” 40-41. 46
Many of the autoethnographic works of feminists of color and queer feminists illustrate not only their issues with white patriarchal cultural norm and the limitations of white feminist movements, but they frequently specifically address the limitations of academic feminism. Audre
Lorde suggests academic feminism is limited in its ability to transform oppressive structures because of its reliance on white, male, Western ideologies, methodologies, and languages:
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference – those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older – know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support. 109
Black feminists like Audre Lorde called out the contradictions and tensions in feminist academic work that feminists are still struggling with. In the past decade, an increasing number of feminist scholars are struggling with the limitations of feminist academic work, particularly given the effects of Neoliberalism on academe as a whole, and on feminist academics in particular. Global capitalism has led many universities to focus on market-driven models of scholarship, resulting in the downsizing of units in the humanities and social sciences, areas that have historically offered spaces for feminist theorizing and interventions.110 In 2018, Yvette Taylor and Kinneret
Lahad attempted to illustrate and address what they refer to as “critical and particularly vulnerable moment in academia,” in which the influences of neoliberal ideologies on academic
109. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider, 110 - 13.
110. Yvette Taylor, The Entrepreneurial University: Engaging Publics, Intersecting Impacts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).; Rachel Thwaites and Amy Pressland, Being an Early Career Feminist Academic: Global Perspectives, Experiences, and Challenges (London: Palgrave, MacMillan, 2017). 47
institutions result in “tensions, contradictions, and paradoxes about being a feminist academic and ‘feeling academic.’” 111 In their collection of essays authored by a variety of international
feminist academics, they focus on the causes and outcomes of the “ongoing restlessness” present
in feminist academic spaces and scholarship.
As is evidenced throughout the essays that fill the pages of Taylor and Lahad’s collection, the “ongoing restlessness” in academic feminism is the result of a variety of factors.
Despite the apparent advances in gender representation in universities, academic women and
feminist scholars continue to experience marginalization and discrimination within the academy.
Paradoxically, these experiences of marginalization often occur within universities introducing
policies and guidelines of gender and racial equity that rely on the labor of the already overextended women and people of color they are intended to help, and the burden of diversity work is often placed squarely on the shoulders of academic women and academics of color. 112
While theoretically promoting feminist pursuits, universities often foster and reward neoliberal
goals of individual achievement and competition, which Heather Shipley aptly refers to as
“decidedly nonfeminist goals” that undermine and devalue feminist work. 113 Feminist academics
111. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad, introduction to Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures, eds. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Secaucus, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
112. Michelle Addison, “Knowing Your Way Within and Across Classed Spaces: The (Re)making and (Un)doing of Identities of Value Within Higher Education,” in Educational Diversity: The Subject of Difference and Different Subjects, ed. Yvonne Taylor (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 236-56.; Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (London: Duke University Press, 2012).
113. Heather Shipley, “Failure to Launch? Feminist Endeavors as a Partial Academic,” in Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University, eds. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Secaucus, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 18. 48
often feel pressure to affectively position and assert themselves as legitimate scholars in
paradoxical and contradictory ways that disadvantage them, paying for “a seat at the table” with
exhaustion, self-doubt, and an unwilling co-option into hegemonic practices that contradict their
feminist beliefs. 114
Like Lorde, Walker, and the countless others who have come before and after them,
contemporary feminist scholars rely on personal experience to illustrate and examine oppressive
social structures in an effort to push back against them. As we have seen time and again in feminist attempts at questioning and disrupting patriarchal hegemony inside and outside of the academy, Taylor and Lahad’s collection consists of many personal and autoethnographic accounts. Taylor and Lahad posit that it is precisely such a turn to longstanding activist practices and disruptive feminist voices that we need to, as Lorde would say, dismantle the master’s house:
Academic knowledge, production, and activism has been understood as an ability to articulate, activate and to know differently, but these blockages, as a heightened part of the neoliberal university, perhaps necessitate another way of speaking back, rather than articulating ‘early’ or ‘established’ as entitlements or end points. Here, we could usefully return to some feminist long-standing voices in particular to better think through the histories, presences, and futures of career stretches and necessary (and tiring) feminist repetitions. 115
Taylor and Lahad point out the complicated nature of being a feminist academic continuously
expected to “enact career mobility” through self-recognition and CVs that are bound to the
academy, rather than social justice initiatives, and invite the authors of the essays that follow to
explore not only what it means to perform academia as a feminist, but how it feels to be an
114. Sarah Burton, “Writing Yourself In? The Price of Paying the (Feminist) Game in Academia,” in Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University, 115 – 36.
115. Taylor and Lahad, Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University, 4. 49
academic feminist. 116 Like the authors of the essays in Taylor and Lahad’s collection, many contemporary academic feminists are questioning the ability of academic feminism to effect
change given the institutional reward model of university work, the impetus on academics to
self-recognize success in order to obtain those institutional rewards, and the limitations of racial and gender inequities within neoliberal university systems. Many of these scholars believe that the only way to work around these issues is to “speak back” in alternative ways not offered, encouraged, or rewarded within academe, such as personal essays, open access publications, and accessible, public-facing digital scholarship centered on personal experiences within oppressive social structures.
Addressing the Limitations of Academic Feminism
Aside from addressing the emotional and scholarly issues of academic feminism, contemporary feminist scholars also believe that the creation of accessible public scholarship is imperative to situating feminist issues within formats and languages that nonacademic feminists can understand and identify with. Given the rapid spread of academic feminist language via social media, the increasing popularity of feminism within young women, and the new possibilities offered by digital feminist activism, many academic feminists are turning to nontraditional forms of scholarship. From Brittney Cooper’s work with the Crunk Feminist
Collective to Sarah Ahmed’s feministkilljoy blog and the black feminist podcast co-hosted by
Roxane Gay and Tressie McMillan Cottom, Hear to Slay, public feminist scholarship is getting spread rapidly and consumed eagerly by nonacademic feminists thirsty for feminism they can
116. Taylor and Lahad, 4. 50
understand and apply against the pressures of neoliberal ideologies that encourage them to “lean
in” to the interests of capitalism.
Much of this public feminist scholarship centers on personal experience, reflecting Audre
Lorde’s “politics of difference” solution to feminist division. As Carolyn Ellis and Tony E.
Adams point out, the sharing of personal experience as a basis for theory implies connection:
“We write concrete stories about our lives because we think that the stories of a particular life
can provide useful ways of knowing about general human experience…as well, telling and
listening to stories and comparing our stories to those of others are how we learn, cope, and
make our way in society.” 117 The contemporary publications of academic feminist memoirs and
personal essay collections exemplify the kind of autoethnographic writing contemporary
academic feminists are turning to, situating personal experience within feminist theories and, as
Ahmed argues, generating theory out of those experiences. Although not all public scholarship is
autoethnographic in nature, a great deal of it bears the marks of autoethnography or, as Maggie
Nelson refers to her work in The Argonauts, “autotheory,” personal writings grounded in theories
of subjective experience and their relationships to collective group identity.
Given the history of authoethnography in women of color and queer feminist writings, it
is not surprising that a lot of the public-facing work being done by contemporary academic
feminists takes this form. Ahmed points specifically to the works of queer feminists of color as
influential in her definitions of what theory is and what it can do. She shares, “Here was writing
117. Carolyn Ellis and Tony E. Adams, “The Purposes, Practices, and Principles of Autoethnographic Research,” in The Oxford Handbook of Qualitative Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199811755.001.0001/oxfordhb- 9780199811755-e-004. 51
in which an embodied experience of power provides the basis of knowledge,” writing that
greatly influenced her hypothesis that feminist theory is generated by daily lived experiences. 118
Theory, according to Ahmed, can “do more the closer it gets to the skin,” suggesting that not
only does theory arise out of daily lived experiences, but also that it can and should have direct
connection to those experiences. 119 Like the feminist scholars of Taylor and Lahad’s collection of essays, Ahmed rejects Western academic assumptions that theory is somehow objective, something she struggled with in her early encounters in the academy. Theory, according to
Ahmed, should arise out of experience as well as work toward experience, ever evolving with the
needs of those it affects in order to bring about political and social change. Public feminist
scholarship not only generates theory, but it creates a language that can be used by academic and
nonacademic feminists alike.
A large portion of language creation in feminist theory and activism comes from the work
of college-educated and academic feminists. The term “domestic violence,” for instance, arose
from the work of Erin Pizzey, a member of the British Women’s Liberation Movement and
graduate of Dakar University. Although she ultimately distanced herself from the BWLM,
Pizzey used her knowledge of women’s issues to set up women’s shelters all over London,
inspiring British MP Jack Ashley to address the House of Commons about domestic violence,
which popularized the usage of the term “domestic violence” in political and public spheres. The
widely popular concept of Intersectionality, as well, came from critical race theory that arose out
of the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, a civil rights advocate with degrees from UCLA and
118. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 10.
119. Ahmed, 10. 52
Columbia Law. Both domestic violence and intersectionality are terms that pop up repeatedly in
contemporary feminist circles, both academic and nonacademic. However, like the concept of
emotional labor, the widespread proliferation of these terms often results in confusion and
misuse.120 Public feminist scholarship not only generates theory and language, but it offers
accessible methods of disseminating that language that can possibly mediate confusion
surrounding it.
One of the ways in which we can identify the nuanced relationships between academic
feminism and non-academic feminism is to examine the autoethnographic writings of academic
feminists intended for wider audiences. In particular, given the complicated nature of feminist
identity and political efficacy in a neoliberal world order and an age of unprecedented globalized
digital connection, it behooves us to examine writings that not only teach others about feminism
in an accessible way, but also that interrogate feminism and feminist identity in light of personal
experience. Writers like Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom not only represent methods of
communicating feminist theory in accessible ways, but they also situate themselves personally
within complicated histories of feminist activism and theory, and they interrogate moments in
which their personal experiences and beliefs do not align with what they perceive to be feminist
ideals, a phenomenon many of their readers identify with. Examining such works can contribute
120. Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor’,” The Atlantic, November 26, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt- emotional-labor/576637/.; Sociologist Arlie Hoschild first introduced the concept of “emotional labor” in 1983 to describe the affective work performed by workers in the service industries. Later publications noted the gendered nature of emotional labor, which resulted in several academic and non-academic publications analyzing women’s emotional labor in public and private spheres. Think-pieces and blog posts on emotional labor abounded on social media, rapidly expanding to include all unpaid domestic labor women perform. The consistent confusion and misuse of the term inspired Julie Beck of The Atlantic to interview Hoschild in order to clarify the term’s definition and uses of this term. 53
to our understandings of the experiences of being feminist in this particular sociohistorical
moment, as well as our understandings of feminist identification as a whole. Psychological
theorists and social scientists have been attempting to understand the processes women undergo
to identify with feminism and feminist ideals since the 1980s. 121 One of the limitations of this
largely quantitative body of work is the attempt to define feminist identity in terms of
progression and regression. However, it has been found that individuals can cycle through
multiple stages or dimensions of feminist identity development simultaneously and recursively,
which, much like the current scholarship questioning the usefulness of the feminist wave
metaphor, disrupts assumptions of feminist identity development as linear. Rather, feminist
identify formation is recursive, disruptive, and non-linear, and scholarship that examines feminist
identity has to account for these features.
The ways in which women come to feminism vary widely, reflecting the diversity of
women’s experiences, histories, and relationships. In the processes of “coming to” feminism
over time, feminists are influenced by feminist role models, peers (both feminist and non-
feminist), educational experiences, social contexts, families of origin, cultures, and multiplicities
121. Adena Bargad and Janet Hyde, “Women’s Studies: A Study of Feminist Identity Development in Women,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 15, no. 2 (June 1991): 181 – 201, doi: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.1991.tb00791.x.; Nancy Downing and Kristin Roush, “From Passive Acceptance to Active Commitment: A Model of Feminist Identify Development for Women,” The Counseling Psychologist 13, no. 4 (October 1985): 695-709, doi: 10.1177/0011000085134013.; Ann R. Fischer et al., “Assessing Women’s Feminist Identity Development: Studies of Convergent, Discriminant, and Structural Validity,” Psychology of Women Quarterly (March 2000): 15 – 29, doi: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb01018.x.; Alyssa N. Zucker and Laina Y. Bay-Cheng, “Minding the Gap Between Feminist Identity and Attitudes: The Behavioral and Ideological Divide Between Feminists and Non-Labelers,” Journal of Personality 78, no. 6 (2010): 1895 – 1922, doi: 10.1111/j.1467-6494.2010.00673.x. 54
of other identities. 122 While academic feminist publications like those of Gay, McMillan Cottom,
and Nelson, can aid us in understanding how feminists “reflect, embrace, or change the social
order,” Lewis and Marine argue that it is imperative to also consider the daily lived experiences
of self-identified feminists who are not academics to understand the ways in which everyday
practices inform and are informed by feminist theory. 123
In order to understand issues with contemporary feminist identity, we must consider
contemporary feminists’ daily lived experiences within the contexts of the world in which they
live. Modern-day feminists not only bear the tradition of pushing back against the limitations of
white feminism and liberal feminism, but they now also experience the effects of neoliberal
ideologies in their personal and professional lives. Although it can (and has) been argued that
neoliberalism subsumes feminism as we know it and strips the movement of its political efficacy,
recent scholarship on digital activism and the impact of digital sharing on marginalized voices
complicates that critique. In looking at the ways in which feminists situate their feminist
identities within their personal experiences, we can tease out the nuances of contemporary
feminist identity to gain a clearer picture of why the phenomenon of feeling like a “bad feminist” exists, as well as the potential the sharing of bad feminist moments may offer to address the contradictions inherent in contemporary feminist identity.
122. Susan B. Marine and Ruth Lewis, “I’m in This for Real: Revisiting Young Women’s Feminist Becoming,” Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (2014): 11 – 22, doi: 10.1016/j.wsif.2014.06.008.
123. Ruth Lewis and Susan B. Marine, “Weaving a Tapestry, Compassionately: Towards an Understanding of Young Women’s Feminisms,” Feminist Formations 27, no. 1 (2015): 122, https://muse.jhu.edu/. 55
In this dissertation, I examine the public-facing works of academic feminist women who
are generating feminist theory from autoethnography borne out of digital writing. Gay,
McMillan, and Cottom each identify as feminists and as academics. As such, they share
experiences in which they feel like they are not doing either job well enough. I examine their
most popular works published between 2014 and 2019 to provide a snapshot of academic
feminism in this moment, as well as to generalize more broadly about the myriad pressures and limitations faced by feminist women in contemporary society. Bad feminist moments can be viewed as products of modern feminist ideals embodied by fallible human women trying to get it right when they are not always capable of doing so. As such, they can also be seen as products of the criticisms faced by feminists from a variety of sectors, including criticisms directed at the impacts of digital activism and neoliberal ideals on contemporary feminist movements. Broadly,
I ask why well-known, influential feminist scholars like Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson would feel like they are not doing feminism right. I also consider why they choose to share these bad feminist moments with others, and why they choose to do so in accessible, public-facing formats. Bad feminist moments are caused by a variety of personal, sociocultural, and political factors. As such, they also serve multiple functions. In this dissertation, I draw connections between both cause and function, for the two are intricately intertwined. 56
CHAPTER 2. METHODS AND THEORY
Introduction
In this dissertation, I examine autoethnographic works of academic feminist women who
share moments in which they feel their priorities, beliefs, and/or performances do not align with
their perceptions of what makes an ideal feminist. I used a methodologically triangulated approach that incorporated both manual content analysis and topic modeling to illuminate patterns across the experiences expressed in each text. I examine the following autoethnographic personal essay collections and memoirs of feminist academics attempting to define feminism and/or pushback against contemporary definitions of feminism: Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist:
Essays, Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts, and Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other
Essays.1 I apply topic modeling and content analysis to analyze the “bad feminist moments”
expressed in each work. The little scholarship that exists on individuals’ perceptions of being a
bad feminist show that these perceptions have the potential to affect women’s levels of
engagement with feminism.2 However, not all feminists who experience this cognitive
dissonance opt out of engagement with feminism. Some feminists find other methods of
maintaining cognitive consistency. Caused by a variety of personal, sociocultural, and political
factors, bad feminist moments can serve multiple functions, especially when they are shared with
others. As I argued in Chapter 1, the bad feminist moments shared in autoethnographic works of
1. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019.; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015).
2. Sarah Conlin et al., “Bad Feminists? Perceived Self-Discrepancy predicts Differences in Gender Equality Activism,” Gender Issues 36, no.1 (2019): 67- 88, doi: 10.1007/s12147-017- 9200-2. 57
academic feminists are uniquely twenty-first century products influenced by pervasive
neoliberalism, widespread digital communication and connection, and a Western Fourth-Wave
emphasis on experience, inclusion, and subjectivity. As such, it is worth looking into what bad
feminist moments are, what functions they serve for feminists in this moment, and how they
reflect contemporary issues with feminist identity. We can start with academic feminists since
they are the ones generating and educating others on feminist language and theory. To better
understand this phenomenon and situate it within contemporary feminist thought and action, I
chose to focus on the moments themselves, how they are experienced, and why they exist, as
well as how and why academic feminists opt to share these moments with each other and with broader audiences.
Overview
In order to focus on the daily lived experiences of feminists, I employ methodological triangulation. Triangulation in qualitative research most often refers to the combination of several research methods to study the same phenomenon, perhaps better known as mixed methods research.3 Sociologist Norman K. Denzin differentiates between different types of
triangulation. He defines methodological triangulation as involving more than one method of data gathering, and theory triangulation as involving multiple theoretical schemes.4 Specifically,
I will be employing within-method triangulation, meaning that I will be employing two or more
3. Abir K. Bekhet, “Methodological Triangulation: An Approach to Understanding Data,” Nurse Researcher 22, no. 2 (November 2012): 40-43.
4. Norman K. Denzin, Sociological Methods: A Sourcebook (NY: Oxford, 1970), 449-58. 58
qualitative methods, rather than a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods.5 My methods of choice are topic modeling and content analysis.
I use mixed methods to create a fuller picture of the daily lived experiences of women, consider the influence of standpoint in the knowledge-making of feminists, and attend to the ways in which feminists do and do not recognize their own standpoints when generating knowledge of the world around them. Part of recognizing the influence of standpoint is acknowledging the intersections of identity at which individuals find themselves. There are multiple components to identity that assemble and reassemble over time within an ever-shifting network of relationships. Feminist identity is composed of myriad fragments of multiple identies and relationships that are historically situated, fluid, and continuously affected by the processes of deterritorialization (disarticulating relationships and destabilizing connections) and reterritorialization (articulating relationships and establishing new connections). In this dissertation, I examine the ways in which academic feminists disarticulate and destabilize their connections with feminist identity, as well as if and how they rearticulate their relationships to feminism and/or establish new connections with other identity assemblages, asking the question:
How are descriptions of bad feminist moments used to illustrate, explain, and/or articulate relationships with assemblages of feminist identity concomitant with other identities feminists experience?
I center the experiences of bad feminist moments by examining them through the lenses of subjective standpoint theory, intersectionality, and assemblage theory. I rely upon Sara
5. Denzin, Sociological Methods.; Judith Kimchi, Barbara Polivka, and Joanne Sabol Stevenson, “Triangulation: Operational Definitions,” Nursing Research 40, no. 6 (1991): 364- 66.; Dympna Casey and Kathy Murphy, “Issues in Using Methodological Triangulation in Research,” Nurse Researcher 16, no. 4 (February 2009): 40-55. 59
Ahmed’s concept of the non-linear journey of becoming feminist as outlined in Living a Feminist
Life to act as a conduit through which to place these theories in fwriction ith each other.6 I not only examine areas of overlap and sameness in the authors’ experiences as feminists, but areas of
difference as well. Difference contains experiential realities, whether that difference is rooted in
sexuality, race, gender, class, or any other aspect of identity. As early as 1949, Simone de
Beauvoir spoke of gendered difference when she posited, “anyone can see that humanity is divided into two categories of individuals with manifestly different clothes, faces, bodies, smiles, movements, interests, and occupations.”7 She asserts that these realities are not necessarily
biologically-based, and that they are subject to possible change in the future, but that this does
not make these differences any less real. It is the feminist insistence on emphasizing a lived
body, rather than simply a biological one, that has influenced many other feminist thinkers to
turn to personal experience when contemplating difference. Important distinctions have been
made between the scientific attitude toward the body as an object for scrutiny and investigation
and the body as a site of embodied subjectivity, casting the body as a lived situation rather than
simply a biological object or discursive formation.8
6. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (London: Duke University Press, 2017).
7. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1953), 4.
8. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy—Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution, trans. R. Rojcewicz and A. Schume (Boston: Kluwer, 1989).; Husserl, the main founder of Phenomenology, states that the aim of Phenomenology is to consider the phenomena of the world in terms of how we, as embodied agents, engage with them, rather than as objective, removed sites of contemplation. 60 Specialized Terms
As discussed in Chapter 1, Gay’s usage of the term “bad feminist” can guide us in
establishing a general idea of what constitutes a bad feminist moment. Conlin et al. utilize Gay’s
usage of the term to define the perception that one is a bad feminist as the perception of one’s
“behaviors, other beliefs, or funds of knowledge to be inconsistent with, or not measuring up to,
those of a prototypical feminist.”9 Although Conlin et al. rely on Gay’s usage to develop this
definition, they make it clear that one does not have to explicitly use the term “bad feminist” as
Gay does in order to experience this phenomenon.10 Therefore, when examining moments in which one believes themselves to be a bad feminist, we do not have to limit ourselves to
instances in which one uses the term “bad feminist” to describe themselves. Instead, we can look
to moments in which one perceives their behaviors, beliefs, or funds of knowledge to be inconsistent with what they perceive to be ideal feminism. Gay’s Bad Feminist is an excellent starting point. Since the perception that one is a bad feminist is based on perceived discrepancies
between oneself and one’s idea of a “good feminist,” I look at how women who experience bad feminist moments are defining ideal feminism from day-to-day in order to best understand the phenomenon.
For the purposes of this project, I focus on women who identify as feminists. However, when I use the term women, I am referring to all woman-identified individuals, remembering that
gender is a construct and remaining sensitive to the fact that women’s experiences are varied and
complex, no matter the course of their gender journeys. Each of the authors I study identifies as a
9. Conlin et al., “Bad Feminists?,” 68.
10. Conlin et al., “Bad Feminists?,” 83.; In their conclusion, Conlin et al. state, “Although individuals may not explicitly refer to themselves as ‘‘bad feminists,’’ perceptions of inconsistency between a belief in gender equality and some other aspect of self likely hinders engagement with feminism, in an attempt to maintain cognitive consistency”. 61
woman. Since the nature of womanhood in itself is such a complicated construct, I limit myself
in this project to those who at least sometimes identify as women, although future avenues of
work on bad feminist moments could easily consider those who identify as men. In this sense,
my project is what Ahmed refers to as for women, which she defines as “for those who are
assigned or assign themselves as women, for those who willfully accept being women as their
assignment.”11 As Ahmed maintains, studies and spaces for women will continue to be necessary
“until universities cease to be men’s studies.”12
In this project, I frequently make references to feminist fragility and feminist crisis, terms that have multiple meanings in Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life. Broadly, Ahmed considers fragility as “the wear and tear of living a feminist life,” and she explores the ways in which fragility can be “a thread, a connection, a fragile connection, between those things deemed breakable.”13 Ahmed illustrates the demands made of feminists to stop making a fuss, to get
along, as forms of moral governance, placing the onus of responsibility on those who are being
“shattered” against the walls of structural oppressions, rather than on that which is doing the
shattering. Feminist fragility, then, can be considered the natural result of repeated shattering.
Ahmed suggests that feminism is born out of these shatterings, this willingness to be fragile in a
neoliberal world order that insists on our individual heartiness and imperatives to overcome the
walls that are placed in our paths. To be fragile as a feminist is to be resistant to social structures
that emphasize individual success and personal perfection. Ahmed finds potential for both
11. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 232.
12. Ahmed, 232.
13. Ahmed, 163-64. 62
resistance and feminist transformation in this fragility. These moments of transformation based
on breakage are also defined by Ahmed as moments of the killjoy in crisis:
I want to think about breaking points as the very points we might aim to reach: When we say we have reached a breaking point, we often evoke a crisis…when what you come up against threatens to be too much, threatens a life, or a dream, or a hope. A crisis can also be an opening, a new way of proceeding, depending on how we do or do not resolve that crisis; depending on whether we think of a crisis as something that needs to be resolved.14
To Ahmed, moments of crisis “need not be understood as the loss of integrity of something, but as the acquisition of something else, whatever that else might be.”15 She refers to feminist work
that is dismissed as too fragile, “too soft, too safe, too focused on identity politics or individual
suffering,” as having the potential to teach us “how attending to fragility, the histories that render
some more fragile than others” can be powerful and radical.16 To live a feminist life is to be radically fragile. In this project, I attend to the different levels of feminist fragility as outlined by
Ahmed in Chapter 7 of Living a Feminist Life: fragile things, fragile relationships, fragile shelters, and fragile bodies. I examine bad feminist moments as moments of feminist crisis, in which feminists reach shattering points that may or may not be resolved.
Theoretical Standpoint
Embodied Subjectivity and Standpoint Theory
Although experience as a concept of embodied subjectivity has been useful for bringing marginalized voices to the fore, and for emphasizing the need to recognize difference in all its forms, one must consider the constructed nature of experience when discussing it. In
14. Ahmed, 187.
15. Ahmed, 180.
16. Ahmed, 239. 63
“Experience,” Joan Scott addressed the ways in which historians center experience in their scholarly accounts. She argues that, in doing so, they fail to consider the “constructed nature of experience.”17 We ignore a crucial aspect of experience when we do not consider it to be an effect of discourse. Scott calls for a consideration of experience as being simultaneously constituted and self-constituted. Feminist experiences, in turn, can be viewed as simultaneously self-constituted by those who identify as feminist as well as constituted by a host of other people, relationships, experiences, and discourses.
Gay touches on this concept of feminist experience as both constituted and self-constituted in Bad Feminist. She relies on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to work through her experiences as a self-identified feminist whose own experiences with feminism are simultaneously self-constituted and constituted by other feminists. In Gender Trouble, Butler posits that gender is
“a stylized repetition of acts . . . which are internally discontinuous . . .[so that] the appearance of substance is precisely that, a constructed identity, a performative accomplishment which the mundane social audience, including the actors themselves, come to believe and to perform in the mode of belief.”18 Butler’s theory of performativity is based on repetition. Each repetition of performance reinscribes identity, and one’s identity changes and shifts with one’s own perceptions of oneself as well as other’s perceptions. In Bad Feminist, Gay extends Butler’s definition of performative identity to that of feminist identity, focusing on the precarious balancing act between individual performance and collective acceptance. In this project, I focus on aspects of repetition
17. Joan Scott, “Experience,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, eds. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 25.
18. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 192. 64
in feminist performance and the shifting nature of performance when examining how the authors’ feminist identities change and shift along with their perceptions of themselves. If, as Butler states, each aspect of identity is performative, then I think it is fruitful to ask what happens when the performance of one aspect of a woman’s identity conflicts with the performances of other aspects of her identity. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed reminds readers that “I am not a lesbian at one moment and a person of color the next, and a feminist at another. I am all of these at every moment,” illustrating the labor of being and sharing all of these things at once.19
In emphasizing experience and performativity, scholarship on identity and power has expanded to explore the complicated relationships between the two, as well as their relationships to feminism. Queer women of color feminists have taught feminists academics to turn to embodied experiences of oppression and identity to generate theory. Writers like Gloria
Anzaldúa have focused on the liminal spaces, betwixt and in-between, in which one experiences identity as being simultaneously multiple and none of the socially-prescribed categories available to them. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzaldúa describes her embodied experiences of acting as a liminal bridge between literal and figurative borders. She calls for the fostering of the “Mestiza consciousness,” overcoming binaries of identity and changing how the world views what is normal. She describes the mestiza consciousness as being “like corn, the mestiza is a product of crossbreeding, designed for preservation under a variety of conditions,” overcoming dualistic views of identity and normalcy in order to generate meaningful, helpful change.20 Anzaldúa co-edited an anthology of essays and creative works from lesbian and queer
19. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 230.
20. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Franscisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 103. 65
feminists of color in This Bridge Called My Back with Cherríe Moraga, in which they reflect on
how the act of sharing queer women of color’s experiences in this anthology morphed into a
radical, “uncompromised” definition of feminism.21
Anzaldúa and Moraga’s “uncompromised” definition of feminism hinges on embodied
experience and—particularly important to my project—the sharing of that experience. As
Moraga and Anzaldúa so poetically explain it, “mere words on a page began to transform themselves into a living entity in our guts.”22 The sharing of embodied experience is used to
encourage solidarity through the overlapping of differences and similarities. The works of
lesbian feminists of color like Moraga and Anzaldúa have greatly influenced how we view and
share experience in feminist theory today. In Living a Feminist Life, Sara Ahmed speaks of
lesbian feminism as “a lifeline made up of willful books that had to insist on their own creation,”
and she points specifically to the works of queer feminists of color as most influential in her
ideas of what feminist theory is and what it can do.23 She shares “Here was writing in which an
embodied experience of power provides the basis of knowledge,” writing that greatly influenced
her later hypothesis that feminist theory is generated by daily lived experiences.24 Theory,
according to Ahmed, should arise out of experience as well as work toward experience, ever- evolving with the needs of those it affects in order to bring about political and social change. She stresses the ordinariness of sharing one’s experiences with other feminists by drawing from the
21. Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, 2nd ed. (Persephone Press, 1983), xliv.
22. Cherríe Moraga, and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, xliv.
23. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 230.
24. Ahmed, 10. 66 image of a dinner table, an image typically reserved for the heterosexual, cisgendered family unit. My project builds on this concept of experience as the progenitor of feminist theory, and I prioritize the impacts and functions of sharing those experiences. Many feminists not only find group solidarity through the sharing of experience, but they use those shared experiences to shift and refine their relationships to feminism. I will be turning to the lived experiences of Gay,
Nelson, and McMillan Cottom to learn how their experiences affect and shape their views on feminism, as well as how sharing those experiences shapes their connections to others.
Since experience is at the core of my project, I draw from feminist Standpoint Theory to identify the ways in which feminists experience and approach feminist group belonging in tandem with their multiple other identities. As we have seen, much of contemporary feminist theory is rooted in the concept of difference, the idea that women’s experiences and ways of knowing are different from men’s, and thus of particular value.25 Dorothy Smith, working toward a feminist sociology, used the notion of standpoint to emphasize that knowledge is affected by one’s position in society. Personal experiences shape what individuals know of the world, and one’s understanding of the “other” is dependent upon their own social positions.26
Donna Haraway argues in “Situated Knowledges” that when one starts from the perspective of marginalized people, they are more likely to realize the influence of social positions on one’s
25. Nancy Hartsock, “The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism,” in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reader, ed. Sandra Harding (New York: Routledge, 2004), 35.; Dorothy Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987).; Both Hartsock and Smith’s works on Standpoint Theory derive from the idea that women’s viewpoints are different from men’s, and thus are to be valued as marginalized identities from the outside looking in, rather than overlooked as minoritized experiences.
26. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic. 67
experiences.27 Recognizing the influence of standpoint in knowledge-making can result in
knowledge that is more self-critical and helpful. This has been the basis for Haraway’s work on
bringing the experiences of marginalized people to the forefront, as well as the foundation of the
arguments of black feminists who clarify that their experiences differ greatly from those of white
women, such as bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Patricia Hill Collins, whose work inspired my theoretical approach to this dissertation. In the texts I analyzed for this project, I looked for instances in which the self-criticism present in a bad feminist moment is used to address broader issues within feminist movements as well as other socio-cultural issues at stake in this moment.
In several of the blog posts of “bad feminists” I analyzed in a previous project, feminists not only shared their personal feelings surrounding one feminist issue, but they often tied it to larger issues of complicity, privilege, race, and sexuality.28 In this project, I looked to the functions of
such self-critical knowledge-production in bad feminist moments. I also looked at moments in
which the sharing of bad feminist experiences did not result in self-critical reflection and
endeavored to establish patterns between both self-critical and non-self critical moments.
Intersectionality and Assemblage
As I previously mentioned, although many feminists identify as women, that is not the only identity category they occupy. Furthermore, those who identify as feminist are not only feminist. They hold multiple identities, including that of woman and feminist, simultaneously,
27. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575-599, http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.bgsu.edu:8080/10.2307/3178066.
28. Elizabeth Brownlow, “Bad Feminism or Inclusive Feminism? Issues of Performativity and Conflict in the Bad Feminist Movement,” Paper presented at the Ray Browne Conference on Cultural and Critical Studies, Bowling Green, OH, April 2018. 68 and those identities inform each other, shaping how each is experienced. As we see in the writings of women wrestling with their feminist identities, women often struggle with the salience of identity as they move throughout time and space. In my project, I use the feminist theories of Intersectionality and Assemblage to identify moments in which feminists struggle with which aspects of their identity to prioritize. I rely primarily on Ahmed’s image of the feminist killjoy, which she uses to discuss, among other aspects of feminist living, the fragility of being feminist, and the myriad ways in which fragments of feminist identity are continuously assembled, disassembled, and reassembled on one’s feminist journey. While the killjoy is central to Ahmed’s understanding of the experience of being a feminist, I argue there is more at stake for many feminists, and the outspoken, confrontational, continually transgressive image of the killjoy is not one that feminists are always ready to adopt. While the image of the killjoy pervades feminists’ perceptions of what it means to be a good feminist, it is in bad feminist moments that we discover the other aspects of feminist identity that are undervalued, such as empathy, connection, and self-critical reflexivity. Bad feminist moments allow feminists to redefine ideal feminism within light of these qualities without sacrificing the killjoy entirely.
The values and desires of feminists are rooted in the intersections of their multiple identities. Feminism is but one aspect of their identity, and thus feminists often feel torn between which identity category to prioritize from moment to moment, particulary when those identities are marginalized. The conflicting needs and desires of feminists are evident in moments in which they feel like they are cannot or do not want to prioritize contemporary feminist ideals when they conflict with other aspects of marginalized identity. Therefore, it is important to consider the role of intersectionality in feminist identity and how it impacts bad feminist moments. Theories of intersectionality have been used to identify the complex nature of sorting through and untangling 69
multiple oppressions, to examine the ways in which feminist identity is filtered through cultural
traditions, and to explore the roles of queer women in generating collective feminist action.29
Intersectionality is particularly useful in unifying women through difference, especially when
recognizing how those differences result in change-based conversations. Audre Lorde uses the concept of intersectionality to suggest that, while white feminists have traditionally unified around their sameness as women, it is primarily their differences from men that bring them together.30 Differences, in Lorde’s mind, can be what create true sisterhood, if only feminists are
able to move their focus beyond their oppression as women to include issues of difference
amongst women, such as race, class, age, and sexual preference. She also points out that feelings
of guilt that arise from considerations of difference can be used to enact change, but only if we
can move beyond that guilt to something greater rather than making the conversation about that
guilt. In my project, Lorde’s work offers a critical lens for understanding discomfort with
feminist practice, demonstrating a history of feminists who push back, feminists who don’t
always agree with mainstream feminist practices and values, and feminists of color who
challenge mainstream ideals of feminism that center whiteness by instead centering
29. Carly Friedman, and Campbell Leaper, “Sexual-Minority College Women’s Experiences with Discrimination: Relations with Identity and Collective Action,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34, no. 2 (June 2010): 152–64, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2010.01558.x.; Lisa Y. Flores, Maria D. Carrubba, and Glenn E. Good, “Feminism and Mexican American Adolescent Women: Examining the Psychometric Properties of Two Measures,” Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 28, no. 1 (February 2006): 48–64, doi:10.1177/0739986305283222.; A.M. Manago, C.S. Brown, and C. Leaper, “Feminist Identity among Latina Adolescents,” Journal of Adolescent Research 24, no. 6 (November 2009): 750-776, doi:10.1177/0743558409341079.; Bonnie Moradi, “Advancing Womanist Identity Development: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go,” The Counseling Psychologist 33, no. 2 (March 2005): 225–53, doi:10.1177/0011000004265676.
30. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1984). 70
intersectionality as ideal feminist practice. I suggest that, in writing about their struggles with
feminist identity, feminists opt to move from guilt about not being feminist enough to starting
broader conversations about that guilt and what it means within the context of feminist change.
In doing so, they utilize the concept of being a bad feminist to rework their definitions of ideal
feminism.
While the concept of intersectionality has come to influence and shape feminist theory,
and it greatly shapes my project, it has its limitations, which some suggest can be taken up by
also considering assemblage. Some scholars take issue with popular uses of intersectionality that
fail to consider aspects of identity that are not race, class, gender, or sexuality, but that do have
dynamics of power within them, such as religion.31 Still other critics have suggested that
intersectionality has not centered race enough as it gains steam in mainstream feminism,
“whitening” it and, thus, discrediting it.32 When discussing new ways of thinking about
feminism’s relationship to identity, there are large differences in opinion regarding not only the
value of these concepts to the field, but regarding their practical effectiveness as well. Jasbir Puar
argues that intersectionality has been “mainstreamed” and used to serve liberal multiculturalism,
removing the original legal power Crenshaw intended it to hold due to its treatment as a one-
size-fits-all model of oppression.33 Feminist philosopher Elizabeth Grosz has also questioned the
31. Ange-Marie Hancock and Ohio Library and Information Network, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 197-99. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199370368.001.0001.
32. Hancock, Intersectionality, 3-4.
33. Jasbir Puar, “ ‘I Would Rather be a Cyborg Than a Goddess’: Becoming-Intersectional in Assemblage Theory," Philosophia, 2, no. 1 (2012): 49-66, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/ejournals/article/321998677. 71
usefulness of the notion of intersectionality because "[e]ach oppression, while perhaps
sometimes invisible to some, is ultimately assumed to be determinable, recognizable, and
separable from the other forms of oppression with which it engages.”34 Much like Puar, Grosz
believes intersectional analysis is still needed to recognize relations of power and oppression
based on social divisions. However, both Puar and Grosz argue it is often used to simultaneously
maintain social classifications and perpetuate assumptions that identities (or their different
components) are distinct and conclusively determinable.
Taking into consideration the limitations of popular understandings of intersectionality
that posit identity as fixed and static, I utilize intersectional understandings of identity along with
assemblage theory to explore how feminist identity is continuously shifting, assembling and
reassembling in moments that represent a non-linear jourey of being feminist. Scholars that
question the contemporary usefulness of intersectionality as a theoretical lens do not ultimately
suggest doing away with it altogether, but instead offer new forms of usage that consider the
shifting nature of identity through time and space. Grosz argues that, when conducting
intersectional analyses, it is important to pay attention to the constant “becomings,” or temporal
and situational complexities of individual and group existence, which do not lend themselves to
clear-cut and predefined categories.35 Thus, I read bad feminist moments as moments of
“becomings” that are situationally and temporally-bound, paying attention to how and when they
occur to understand them as part of subjective feminist experience. Puar argues that it is equally important to consider the multiple, moving components of identity as it shifts through time and
34. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art (London: Duke University Press, 2011), 92.
35. Puar, “I Would Rather be a Cyborg,” 88. 72 space. This is particularly relevant when we consider feminist identity. In Living a Feminist Life,
Ahmed also reveals feminist identity to be a complicated network of “becomings,” moments of experience that are founded on histories of feminist experience, fragments that shatter to assemble and reassemble over a series of moments that are temporally and situationally bound.36
The concept of feminist identity as a becoming, an ever-shifting network of fragments assembling and reassembling to create something new, is at the center of my project. As Puar suggests, while intersectionality offers an understanding of power and identity, it can be used along with assemblage to address limitations in terms of variation and the relationships between bodies.37 Puar argues that Kimberlé Crenshaw’s original vision for intersectionality was more akin to assemblage than feminists have envisioned it to be and suggests the two frameworks are frictional, rather than oppositional.38 In focusing on bad feminist moments as moments of feminist becoming that address variation, temporal and situational contexts, and relationships to others, I place these theoretical viewpoints into friction with each other, attending to the intersectional experiences of feminists with a focus on how their identities are assembled, disassembled, and resassembled from moment to moment.
In examining bad feminist moments as representative of these varied moments of feminist becoming, I heed the call of Grosz and Puar to emphasize the constantly temporal, situation-bound, and multidimensional dynamism of modes of being by bridging the two frameworks of Intersectionality and Assemblage Theory via Ahmed’s approach to feminist
36. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 19-20.
37. Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (London: Duke University Press, 2007).
38. Puar, “I Would Rather be a Cyborg,” 50. 73
“becomings.” Puar suggests that “intersectionality as an intellectual rubric and a tool for political
intervention must be supplemented—if not complicated and reconceptualized—by a notion of
assemblage.”39 In Deleuzian terms, assemblages include both material (physical, natural)
components and expressive (sensate, linguistic, symbolic, etc.) components. Assemblages are
continuously shifting based on the relationships between components.40 Assemblages are composed of bodies that are themselves assemblages, each composed of multiple material and expressive components.41 Thus, not only are communities, ecosystems, identity groups, and
other higher-level assemblages made up of these components, but the bodies within them are as
well. Bodies are assemblages themselves that compose larger assemblages (such as families),
which in turn compose broader assemblages (such as communities) that then compose
assemblages like local governments, and so on.
I situate feminist identity as an ever-shifting body of assemblages that are historically
situated, fluid, and continuously affected by processes of deterritorialization (the process of
disarticulating relationships and destabilizing connections) and reterritorialization (the process
of articulating relationships and establishing new connections). While these terms may appear to
be each other’s opposites, they are “in and of each other,“ together expressing the “
transformative and creative potential of making new connections, linkages, becomings, and
39. Jasbir Puar, “I Would Rather be a Cyborg,” 50.
40. Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guatarri, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
41. Manuel De Landa, A New Philosophy of Society: Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity (New York: Continuum, 2006). 74
assemblages,” rendering them subject to constant transformation.42 Some identity theorists have utilized assemblage theory to focus on the body as an “unstable assemblage” of multiple components that cannot be simply disaggregated into static identity categories and intersections.43 Based on relationships and connections that continuously change and transform
throughout time and space, assemblages cannot be seen as static identity formations that always
operate on the same level from moment to moment, but rather as temporal, situational, dynamic
modes of being.44 These modes of being (and their different dimensions) are not fully knowable
attributes, but are instead features that are continually forming and re-forming, taking shape in
relation to others from moment to moment. One can see elements of assemblage in Ahmed’s
depictions of feminist fragments, ever-shifting to assemble, disassemble, and reassemble, both at
the individual and collective levels. In situating feminist identity as a body of assemblages, the
moments in which feminists query their feminist identity can be seen as destabilizing moments in
which feminists disarticulate and rearticulate their relationships to feminism. These destabilizing
moments are contextually-bound, and therefore I pay special attention to the various situations,
relationships, and settings in which these moments occur.
Assemblange and reassemblage of feminist identity can also result in redirection of one’s
feminist beliefs and practices. As non-linear moments of becoming, bad feminist moments
represent the abrupt stops and starts that characterize the journey of becoming feminist. Ahmed
42. Henk van Houtum, "Deterritorialization," in Encyclopedia of Political Theory, ed. Mark Bevir (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2010), 377, doi: 10.4135/9781412958660.n123.
43. Grosz, Becoming Undone.; Donna Haraway, “The Cyborg Manifesto and Fractured Identitie,” in Symians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991).
44. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages. 75
maintains that it is not only at the intersections of social traffic that we find systems of
oppression working; they are also found in the simple existence of those who do not fit the
directives presented by those systems.45 Many feminists come to feminism because they do not fit the directives presented by sociocultural systems, such as whiteness, heteronormativity, ableism, and gender normativity, that make it easier for those who fit these directives to move along with the traffic of society. However, redirecting oneself from well-worn paths is not a matter of linear decision, but a series of abrupt stops and starts, directings and redirectings, alternatively intentional and unexpected. Bad femininist moments are representative of these stops and starts, resulting in intentional self-reflection in some moments and unexpected self- questioning in others. In fact, the texts of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom are written in this
non-linear style. Gay and McMillan Cottom’s works are essay collections, each covering
different but overlapping aspects of their feminist identities. Nelson’s text is lyrical, jumping
from one moment to another in her experiences with pregnancy, motherhood, and her partner’s
gender transition. The journeys of becoming feminist are at different stages in each of these
texts, and they are littered with moments in which the authors question their feminist beliefs and
practices. These bad feminist moments can be read as moments of intersectional feminist
assemblage, as they stem from tensions between each authors’ subjective positions, the authors’
relationships to others, and the contexts of their feminist work and knowledge bases.
Becoming Feminist
Ahmed’s journey of becoming feminist acts as a bridge between intersectionality and
assemblage theory in my project, as I examine bad feminist moments as moments of becoming
45. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 46. 76 feminist. In examining these moments, I attend to the elements of unease, unhappiness, and fragility expressed when these moments are shared. Ahmed suggests that becoming feminist begins with feelings of unease, feelings that something is wrong or out of place with the world around you. These feelings then progress into further moments of discomfort that one eventually overcomes by identifying and calling out situations of injustice and embracing fragility as a form of protest against systems of inequality.46 The importance of overcoming that discomfort, of occupying fragility, and of denying the neoliberal concept of Happiness to embrace world- altering Unhappiness is central to Ahmed’s depiction of what she refers to as the Feminist
Killjoy. Ahmed argues that the imperative of Happiness is used to maintain existing social structures of oppression by requiring people to follow well-worn paths of normativity. When one will not or cannot follow these well-worn paths, those who care about them may fear the obstacles they will face, and the subsequent lack of Happiness. To embrace Unhappiness is to refuse to be content with the status quo. Ahmed insists feminists must be willing to be unhappy, to be fragile, and to uncomfortable, in order to resist. The definitions of ideal feminism that saturate the bad feminist moments of Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom suggest that this embrace of unhappiness and adoption of the killjoy are at the center of their understandings of what it means to be a good feminist. However, the authors do not always feel it is possible or desirable to be the killjoy. In fact, many bad feminist moments reveal the desires they have for pleasure, for connection, and for understanding, values they utilize bad feminist moments to work into their definitions of ideal feminism. However, these moments can be uncomfortable.
The authors embrace discomfort even though they do not necessarily wish to reside in it
46. Ahmed, 21-42. 77
continuously. The pressures to be continuously transgressive are often what cause the discomfort
in the first place.
Moments of discomfort with feminism and feminist ideals can contribute to processes of feminist becoming when they are confronted. It is in this confrontation that I find these authors embracing fragility. In admitting to their limitations and personal vulnerabilities as feminists, they allow themselves to be fragile not only in order to resist structures of oppression, but to
resist problematic values of contemporary mainstream feminism. I examine bad feminist
moments as moments of the killjoy in crisis in which feminists question how to live as a feminist
when the feminist is not always the killjoy. In focusing on daily lived experiences, I identify
ways in which bad feminist moments are and/or are not utilized in the personal journeys of
becoming feminist. I scoured the autoethnographies of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson for
moments in which the questioning of their performances of feminist identity became part of that
identity. I also looked for the contradictions present in those moments, as the experiences of
feminists shift throughout time and space, simultaneously constituted by other feminists and self-
constituted by one’s own positions in society.
One of my tasks while identifying bad feminist moments and their impacts on
perceptions of ideal feminism was to take into consideration the effects and pressures of
surviving as a feminist within systems of neoliberal patriarchy along with the criticisms of
marketplace feminism. While some believe women share bad feminist moments in efforts to curb
feminist critique, others view it as a method of depoliticizing feminism.47 With this in mind, I
looked for elements of survival and community building based on vulnerability and fragility, as
47. See Chapter 1 of this dissertation for an overview of the critiques of neoliberal feminism. 78
well as elements of neoliberal individual-centered self-indulgence. When discussing the killjoy
in crisis and how to survive being feminist (a difficult journey), Ahmed notes the complicated
relationships between feminist survival and neoliberal agendas that shift the focus of feminism to
the resilience of individuals. She draws from the work of Audre Lorde to aide in understanding
the differences between feminist survival and self-oriented politics perpetuated by neoliberal
ideologies. Surviving a world in which some people are not meant to survive, self-preservation
can be viewed as radical, particularly when one is surviving a system “that decides life for some
requires the death or removal of others.”48 Although caring for oneself as a form of self-
indulgence can lead one away from engaging in political struggle, Ahmed calls for a radical form
of self-care that “is not about caring for one’s own happiness,” but is rather about finding ways to exist in a world that makes it difficult to exist.”49 The self-care of queer, feminist, and
antiracist work is centered on the creation of “fragile communities...assembled out of the
experiences of being shattered...through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of
looking after ourselves; looking after each other.”50 These fragile feminist communities are built
and made up of flawed human beings who are trying to exist in a world that makes it difficult to
exist in it, let alone to subvert it. As such, feminists tend to direct their criticisms toward each
other, particularly their feminist mentors and role models. The works of McMillan Cottom,
Nelson, and Gay reveal how feminists’ expectations for personal perfection and resilience can
contribute to the sense that one is a bad feminist. However, they also demonstrate how these
48. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 237.
49. Ahmed, 239.
50. Ahmed, 240. 79
moments can be used to engage in critical self-reflection that encourages others to do the same and allow them to rethink how feminist shelters are built and utilized.
Methodology
I analyzed these bad feminist moments using a two-fold mixed-methods approach that incorporates topic modelling and content analysis to illuminate patterns across feminist experiences. I employed the principles of feminist ethnography as a community insider to produce knowledge about academic feminist women. Feminist ethnography can be seen as a
framework that reflects feminist epistemology, examining how knowledge is produced from a
feminist standpoint. It can include a range of methods and is argued to be informed by a politics
of social justice. According to Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven’s definition, “Feminist
ethnography produces knowledge about people and situations in specific contexts with attention
to power differentials and inequities.”51 In this project, I sought to produce knowledge about
women-identified people who identify as feminist in specific contexts (i.e., academic,
professional, personal) with attention to the power differentials and inequities inherent in those
contexts. In seeking to identify the complexity of experiencing multiple identities, I considered the various power differentials within and between feminist communities as they shift throughout time and space.
I analyzed these writings as a woman-identified feminist academic, finding my own way into the contradictions, negotiations, and shifts in feminist identities offered in these texts. I approached my examination of women who have “bad feminist” moments as a community insider, producing knowledge about contemporary feminists within the specific context of their
51. Dána-Ain Davis and Christa Craven, Feminist Ethnography: Thinking Through Methodologies, Challenges, and Possibilities (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 9. 80 experiences with bad feminist moments. I focused on the ways in which feminist academic writers not only question feminist ideals, but also ask themselves difficult questions about their own relationships with those ideals. As part of my engagement with feminist ethnography and exploration of the autoethnographic sharing of bad feminist moments, I kept my own autoethnographic journal while I worked through these texts, situating myself as a feminist insider and using my own daily lived experiences to better understand how I interpret these texts, as well as how and why I came to my conclusions.
I chose to analyze works of public scholarship written by self-identified feminist scholars who use autoethnography to share their experiences as feminists representing the various communities to which they belong, reflect on those experiences, and connect them to wider cultural implications. In order to tease out the various aspects of bad feminist moments, I analyzed Gay’s text alongside the autoethnographic works of other feminist academics: Tressie
McMillan Cottom and Maggie Nelson. I selected these texts not only because they were autoethnographic works, published after Gay’s 2014 Bad Feminist and written by academic feminists, but because they are each published by nonacademic presses and became quite popular with nonacademic audiences. Like Bad Feminist, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other
Essays is a collection of personal essays revised from her online op-ed pieces and blog posts.
Nelson’s The Argonauts is a book of poetry comprised of multiple works derived from pieces she presented and published in public arenas. All three writers share their discomforts with feminism by centering their lived experiences and sharing moments in which they perceive their behaviors or beliefs to deviate from what they imagine a good feminist would do, say, or believe
(or what they imagine other feminists would believe a good feminist to do, say, or believe).
These autoethnographic works extend from women of color and queer feminists’ longstanding 81
traditions of personal sharing that question and push back against feminist limitations.52 As such,
these texts can offer us insight into contemporary issues with modern-day feminism. Given that
Gay’s work, and many of the works that build on this tradition, are part of an increasingly
popular genre of personal writing borne out of feminist scholarship that is rendered accessible for
wider audiences, in examining these texts one can learn about the different limitations and
experiences of feminist academics in this particular moment, and their relationships to popular
feminism.
Considering the impacts of ongoing discrimination, the increasing neoliberal
commodification of academic work, and the complications of scholarship in the digital age, the
“ongoing restlessness” of contemporary feminist academics is abundantly clear in these texts.53
As such, it is worth examining what it means to perceive oneself as a bad feminist in an occupational field that appears to promote feminist ideals yet is not particularly amenable to feminist values. Many feminist scholars have taken to alternative methods of publishing and communicating their feminist scholarship, and the writings of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and
Nelson are prime examples of such work. As popular texts of feminist scholarship that appeal to nonacademic audiences, each of these texts engages feminist publics in a unique way, and I analyzed them not only for their shared moments of discomfort and unease with feminist identity, but I asked of them: In what ways does the difficult project of feminist scholarship in
52. See Chapter 1 of this dissertation for an overview of these legacies.
53. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad, introduction to Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures, eds. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Secaucus, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).; see Chapter 1 of this dissertation for an overview of Taylor and Lahad’s findings on contemporary academic feminism. 82
today’s world inform academic feminists’ experiences both outside of and inside of the
academy?
As social geographers Paul Chatterton and Jenny Pickerill remind us, feminist politics
exist not only or primarily in the realms of academic work or even in the works of public
intellectuals, but they also reside in daily decisions; “everyday practices define participation in
political projects where participants attempt to build the future in the present.”54 Feminist
“discursive politics” that change norms and practices occur at the level of the day-to-day, and it
is these discursive politics that we need to examine to identify the ways in which the daily
practices of feminists are building on feminist pasts to shape feminist presents and futures.55 In
these autoethonographic accounts, each author shares her daily experiences and choices,
allowing us a glimpse into the everyday decisions that define and shape the authors’ identities as feminists and as academics.
Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom all have impressive academic backgrounds and are widely published. Their academic, nonacademic, and creative works lie at the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, and feminist theory. Roxane Gay is an American writer of Haitian descent whose writings are greatly influenced by her experiences as a black bisexual-identifying woman in America. Maggie Nelson is a white bisexual-identifying American woman who has a family with a gender nonconforming partner, which she explores in The Argonauts. Tressie
McMillan Cottom is a black American writer with roots in the American South, identifying as
54. Paul Chatterton and Jenny Pickerill, “Everyday Activism and Transitions towards Post- Capitalist Worlds,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 35, no. 4 (2010): 487, doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2010.00396.x.
55. Stacey Young, Changing the Wor(l)d: Discourse, Politics, and the Feminist Movement (Abdingdon, UK: Routledge, 1997). 83
what she calls “black-black,” an American descendant of people who were enslaved.56 All three writers are American and engage primarily with Western feminist theory. Although Gay is the only writer in this group to label her issues with feminist identity as “bad feminism,” Nelson and
Mcmillan Cottom express similar moments of questioning and discuss their own processes of disarticulating and rearticulating relationships to not only feminism, but also to other aspects of their identities. I identified these processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization across all texts to illustrate the ways in which they compare and differ.
Analysis Process
I conducted a mixture of topic modeling and content analyses of all three texts,
systematically categorizing content in my dataset through the process of coding, or “identifying
segmented units of meaning” from the data and derive meaning from them.57 Coding enables one
to organize and group similarly coded data into categories, or what Johnny Saldaña refers to as,
“families,” because they share characteristics and begin to establish a pattern.58 I chose to use a
mixture of emic and etic analyses. In emic content analysis, one summarizes what emerges from
the data itself with no previously established categories. In order to engage in emic analysis, I
used digital topic modeling for the first cycle of coding, the process of which I describe below.
In etic content analysis, one derives coding categories from specific previously existing research
questions, existing theories, and/or prior research.59 Once I established tentative analysis
56. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 127-52.
57. Hyers, Diary Methods, 114.
58. Johnny Saldaña, The Coding Manual for Qualitative Researchers (London: SAGE, 2009), 8.
59. Hyers, Diary Methods, 33. 84 categories through the process of topic modeling, I then engaged in a second cycle of coding by hand, which I describe in-depth below. For example, when considering Through this mixture of emic and etic analysis, I employed the lens of previously established tentative categories established via topic modeling to guide the process of inductive manual coding by hand. I focused my hand-coding on passages in each text that aligned with those tentative topics.
While emic and etic analyses each offer their own unique limitations, some scholars feel a mixture of the two is the best way to tackle the nuanced, complicated nature of qualitative research and address the limitations of each approach.60 Lauri Hyers suggests in her introduction to diary methods that, even when working within the etic constraints of previously established theories, previous research, and/or preestablished research questions, “those working with the contextualized richness of diary data should be open to the possibility of incorporating some emic coding into a content analysis.”61 As reflective texts that discuss personal experiences, I made sense of these autoethnographic works as types of diary data because they are nuanced and full of the “contextualized richness” that Hyers describes as typical of diary data. Across all texts, I primarily concerned myself with contextualizing the experiences of women who identify as feminists, rather than forcing a false universalism onto those experiences. It is for this reason that although an etic analysis is necessary to understand contemporary feminist identity within the contexts of feminist and identity research, a complementary emic approach opens my
60. E. Duncan and I. Grazzani-Gavazzi, “Positive Emotional Experiences in Scottish and Italian Young Adults: A Diary Study,” Journal of Happiness Studies 5, no. 4 (December 2004): 359- 84.; Positive psychologists E. Duncan and I. Grazzani-Gavazzi concluded in their etic analysis of positive emotional experiences that a blend of etic and emic approaches is best to account for the nuances between experiences found in diary studies such as theirs.
61. Hyers, Diary Methods, 33. 85 analysis up to work through the differences in experience between people, spaces, and moments.
Since I wanted to identify patterns across texts without preconceived ideas about what patterns would emerge, I selected topic modeling as an emic approach to content analysis that I could then further dive into with etic processes of hand-coding, making sense of the patterns that arose.
For example, one pattern that was established during the topic modeling phase of my content analysis was inclusion of the names of feminist theorists and feminist mentors. Although I had expected these authors to discuss feminist theorists, I had not noticed how much of a role these feminist predecessors had played in their bad feminist moments. This pattern then prompted me to look for instances in which bad feminist moments included references to feminist predecessors and mentors. In the process of etic coding by hand, I noted that bad feminist moments that were contextualized by relationships to feminist predecessors and mentors served to differentiate the writers from those feminists who came before them as well as to redirect their expectations for those role models to themselves.
The practice of utilizing a mixture of coding approaches is what Saldaña refers to as
“eclectic coding,” or an open form of coding that involves a mixture of methods and approaches that complement each other.62 As Saldaña explains, the employment of eclectic coding methods refines and hones the categories one creates. One might use multiple methods of coding in the first cycle, or in subsequent cycles. One might also use eclectic coding methods to differentiate between cycles. Saldaña explains how important it is to engage in multiple cycles of coding in qualitative research:
Rarely is the first cycle of coding data perfectly attempted.The second cycle (and possibly the third and fourth, and so on) of recoding further manages, filters, highlights,
62. Saldaña, The Coding Manual, 150-92. 86
and focuses the salient features of the qualitative data record for generating categories, themes, and concepts, grasping meaning, and/or building theory.63
I utilized multiple cycles of coding to not only generate tentative categories, but to refine and shift those categories throughout my analysis, as I explain below.
Cycle 1: Topic Modeling
I first established a corpus of tentative coding categories using Topic Modeling Tool, an open source graphic user interface (GUI) tool that uses MALLET’s Latent Dirichlet Application
(LDA) implementation to find and trace clusters of words or “topics” within the selected autoethnographic works of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom. Topic modeling is a form of text mining used to identify patterns in a corpus.64 Topic modeling is a still fairly new method of textual analysis in humanities work, and it has been primarily utilized by historians rather than literary scholars. However, it is gaining popularity for its potential for extrapolating backward from a collection of documents to infer the discourses or “topics” that could have generated them. This allows for what Ted Underwood refers to as “meaningfully ambiguous” results that allow humanities researchers engaged in textual analysis to apply interpretations to those results rather than assuming an objective reality underlying them.65 Essentially, the Topic Modeling
Tool identifies words that appear frequently within a corpus, creating a “model” of possible categories, or “topics.” LDA topic modeling assumes that words are used contextually. Thus, if
63. Saldaña, 8.
64. Megan R. Brett, “Topic Modeling: A Basic Introduction,” Journal of Digital Humanities 2, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 12-15, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/2-1/topic-modeling-a-basic- introduction-by-megan-r-brett/.
65. Ted Underwood, “Topic Modeling Made Just Simple Enough,” The Stone and the Shell (blog), April 7, 2012, https://tedunderwood.com/2012/04/07/topic-modeling-made-just-simple- enough/. 87 if certain words and word phrases tend to appear together across texts in a corpus, the tool assumes it is because they refer to the same topic. For example, a LDA Topic Model of a corpus of Spanish poetry created by Borja Navarro-Colorado generated topics that included the following word groups:
1. Fuego “fire,” amor “love,” ciego “blind,” llama “flame,” ardiente “burning,” pecho “chest,” and corazón “heart.” 2. Dios “God, cielo “sky,” santa “saint,” padre “father,” madre “mother,” hijo “son,” virgen “virgin,” divino “divine.” 3. Vos “thou,” valor “courage,” fuerte “strong,” fue “was/were,” fama “fame,” virtud “virtue,” esfuerzo “effort.” 4. Flores “flowers,” verde “green,” prado “field,” monte “hill,” campo “countryside,” hojas “leaves,” fruta “fruit,” sol “sun,” árbol “tree.” 5. Mar “sea,” viento “win,” puerto “harbor,” ondas “waves,” nave “boat,” cielo “sky,” tormenta “storm,” tierra “land,” golfo “gulf.”66
The Topic Modeling Tool assumes that these groups of words establish common themes or topics across the corpus analyzed. It is then up to the researcher to make sense of and derive meaning from these groupings. For example, Navarro-Colorado interpreted the above topic model as: 1) Love, 2) Religion, 3) Eulogistic, 4) Nature, and 5) Marine.67 Of this process, he notes, “The objective is to find the common feature that justifies the LDA-Topic: a noun or a small description that explains the relationship between the keywords of each LDA-Topic.”68
For this dissertation, I used a similar method to Navarro-Colorado’s, generating topic models multiple times, modifying them until the word clusters that it generated started to make sense to
66. Borja Navarro-Colorado, “On Poetic Topic Modeling: Extracting Themes and Motifs From a Corpus of Spanish Poetry,” Frontiers in Digital Humanities, 5, no. 15 (June 2018): 8, doi: https://doi.org/10.3389/fdigh.2018.00015.
67. Navarro-Colorado, “On Poetic Topic Modeling,” 8.
68. Navarro-Colorado, 8. 88 me. I then identified common features that justified the group pairings, as I explain further below.
I produced several topic models using a corpus of .txt versions of Nelson, Gay, and
McMillan Cottom’s texts using the default setting to exclude English “stopwords,” or commonly used English words that are not considered “content words” (“a,” “an,”, “the,” etc.). After running the tool several times, and coming up with large, unwiedly clusters that did not seem to create coherent categories, I re-trained the tool to also remove stopwords that I personally added to the list (words I noticed kept coming up in the generated topics, but that did not offer much content, including such words as “you’re, you’ve, I’ve, we’re, they’re, and we’ve”). Although initially tempted to also remove proper names mentioned frequently in the texts (for instance,
Maggie Nelson mentions her son Iggy and her partner Harry frequently), I ultimately decided the inclusion of these names was important to understanding the prioritization of relationships in bad feminist moments. As well, some of the names that frequently repeated across all texts were the names of feminist authors, such as Eve Kosovsky Sedgwick and Audre Lorde. Since the sharing of bad feminist moments arises out of longstanding traditions of feminist sharing and pushback, I opted to include rather than exclude those names from the model to gain a sense of the influence of what Ahmed refers to as “feminist ghosts” on these contemporary writers’ feminist ideals.69
I ran the topic modeling tool several times, each time slightly changing either the number of words per topic, the number of iterations, or the number of topics generated. The first time I ran the tool, I used the default settings of twenty words per topic, which means that the Topic
69. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 16-17.; Ahmed refers to feminists ghosts as feminists who “haunt” other feminists through their written works. I explain the different types of feminist ghosts later in this chapter. 89
Modeling Tool identified twenty words that were mentioned together/words the tool decided fit together into a single topic at a time. I found the resulting clusters too broad to be considered coherent topics. I reduced this number to ten words per grouping, and ten topics maximum, which still proved unwieldy and incoherent. This is also the point at which I realized I needed to exclude words like “they’re” and “we’re” to tighten up word groupings. For example, on an early topic model of 10 topics including clusters of 10 words, the topics produced in one iteration were as follows:
1. Black, beauty, social, media, race, political, essay, university, poor, American
2. White, word, story, there’s, terrible, sweet, we’re, race, privilege, tournament
3. Long, thing, bad, feel, sense, written, eyes, sexual, wrote, days
4. Life, body, room, mother, matter, children, things, call, home, color
5. Don’t, rape, feminism, friends, television, scrabble, doesn’t, feminist, books, made
6. Baby, mother, harry, it’s, day, told, Sedgwick, body, I’ve, makes
7. Time, stories, book, great, feminist, family, lives, York, experience, writer
8. Women, people, men, black, woman, girl, man, young, girls, show
9. White, people, women, woman, school, kind, culture, public, power, economic
10. Made, child, hard, wanted, babies, straight, forms, eventually, city, interesting
Realizing I was working with a much smaller corpus of much larger texts than are typically utilized by humanities researchers using topic models, I adjusted the output to seven words per grouping. I also adjusted the number of “iterations,” or guesses the tool makes regarding how to divide the corpus into topics. I began with the default setting of twenty iterations, and to account for my small corpus of only three texts, I lowered the number of iterations with each pass to see what came up. I also played with the number of topics themselves, limiting the tool to output 90 twenty topics, then fifteen, then ten. Each time, I saved the resulting topic keywords (the final topics that included the most frequently found words in each pass) as well as the multiple models generated by the tool that led to the keyword corpus, as .cvs and .html documents. I noted any themes that began to appear, refining my topics each time I ran the tool with narrowed or expanded parameters. I took particular note of any topic that included the word “feminist” or
“feminism.”
The final topic models introduced some interesting groupings that revealed much more coherent topics.70 I then established tentative analysis categories revealed by the final iteration. I identified which words were frequently grouped together, paying special attention to words that frequently were grouped with the words “feminism” and “feminist.” I then utilized Ahmed’s theories of becoming feminist to make sense of these topics and generate the following tentative category titles based on my findings:
1. Feminist Bodies: This topic was not only borne out of the emic coding produced
by the Topic Modeling Tool, but also out of the previous research I had
conducted on bad feminist blogs. Many of the writers in my initial study
suggested that embodied experiences, such as trauma, caused them moments of
feminist discomfort, ultimately leading them to question whether they were being
very good feminists, or if they wanted to be. Within the topics models, the words
“rape,” “violence,” “girls,” “body,” and “feeling,” frequently appeared alongside
each other. Feminist experiences are often rooted in complicated, messy histories
of emotional and bodily trauma. I identified moments of what Ahmed refers to as
70. See Appendix A for a small sample from the final topic model iterations. 91
feminist “sensations,” or “how a body is in contact with a world,” beginning with
the intensities of early experiences, the histories “that leave us fragile.”71 Ahmed
points to the accumulation of sensations over time, making the past “heavy,” and
difficult to bear, often resulting in fatalism, fear, and/or cautiousness.72 Such fear
and caution can lend to one’s acceptance of social scripts that cast the “other,”
the “stranger,” as dangerous. It can also lend to the learning of gendered cultural
scripts and the imperatives of gendered binaries.73 Ahmed reminds us that,
although feminism can be seen as “a form of self-assembly,” feminist
experiences can leave them too fragile to undo the careful self-protection work
one has done in order to reassemble.74 Becoming feminist is not only about will,
but about timing as well.75 I decided to attend to issues of timing in each author’s
journey of becoming feminist, identifying moments in which bodily experiences
and past traumas affect their attempts to negotiate their relationships with
feminism.
2. Feminist Ghosts: Within the final topic model, the word “feminist” most
frequently appeared with the words “woman,” “ make,” “ story,” “ book,” and “
71. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 22.
72. Ahmed, 23.
73. Ahmed, 24-26.; In this section, Ahmed points to the ways in which bodies learn not to deviate from cultural norms in order to achieve safety and acceptance (for example, girls learn to take up less space, while boys follow the imperative to “be boys”).
74. Ahmed, 27.
75. Ahmed, 27. 92
friends.” I refer to this topic as “feminist ghosts,” as it indicates a connection
between the histories and experiences shared by feminists past and present, the
“haunting” of feminists by other feminists that Ahmed refers to in Living a
Feminist Life. Ahmed points to two different types of feminists ghosts: feminist
companions and feminist classics. Firstly, Ahmed suggests that feminists create
their dwellings with companion texts, stories that enable feminists to “proceed on
a path less trodden,” following those who have forged such paths.76 In
understanding one’s relationship with feminism, Nelson, Gay, and McMillan
Cottom also frequently refer to foundational feminist theorists that shape their
understandings of the world. The names of Audre Lorde, Eve Kosovsky
Sedgwick, and Patricia Hill Collins popped up time and again throughout the
topic models, paired with different words each time. Ahmed also suggests that
the journey of becoming feminist is rooted in the sharing of feminist classics,
books that have “become worn from being passed around,” and shape feminist
communities.77 She also points to the importance of having other feminist
“killjoys” in one’s circle, not only because “they too have been there,” but
because having a network can aid feminists in recognizing when they themselves
are part of the problem.78 In my subsequent content analysis, I looked for
76. Ahmed, 16.
77. Ahmed, 17.
78. Ahmed, 244-45.; Ahmed argues when failing to hear other killjoys on the assumption that one is a killjoy, feminists can miss the point and get it wrong. In listening to others, feminists can remain vigilant and adapt when necessary. 93
moments in which authors work through their bad feminist moments by drawing
on feminist companion texts, feminist classics, and the stories of other feminists
that cause them to question their own feminisms. I asked how they utilized the
stories of other feminists to interpret and work through these moments.
3. Feminist Relationships: Within the final topic model, the words “mother and
“motherhood” appeared in at least three topics of every iteration. Alongside them
the words “men,” “baby,” “queer,” “feeling,” “caretaking,” and “pleasure,”
appeared most frequently. Keeping this in mind, when coding by hand, I
identified moments in which the priorities and desires inherent in the authors’
relationships with other people caused discomfort because they conflicted with or
complicated what they perceived to be feminist ideals, particularly when
considering familial or romantic ties. Ahmed speaks of feminist moments of
crisis in relationships that matter: “We might…decide not to become a killjoy in
certain moments, because the costs would be too high: we would break what we
need to hold on to a relationship that we care about, a person we love, a world we
cannot let go of.”79 In my subsequent analysis, I considered the functions of
disarticulating one’s relationships to feminism in order to articulate relationships
to other people and/or identity groups, as well as to (in some cases) rearticulate
those relationships to feminism through self-critical reflection on feminist
performance.
79. Ahmed, 171. 94
4. Feminist Spaces: In every iteration of the final topic model, one topic changed
only slightly each time. It always included the words “black,” “women,” “white,”
and “social.” Other words rotated in this topic; “media,” “space,” “public,”
“room,” “men,” and “home,” “work,” and “school” each made appearances
within this topic. Unsurprisingly, the words “social” and “media” frequently
appeared next to each other. In this age of widespread global digital connections,
feminists commune with each other in new, exciting, and fraught ways. When
feminists speak up in these spaces, they are subject to public backlash both from
feminists and nonfeminists. This backlash is not only based on gender and
sexuality, but is often predicated on deeply held racial assumptions. For example,
when Tressie McMillan Cottom first published her piece on beauty standards, she
received widespread backlash from well-meaning feminists that took offence to
her referring to herself as unattractive.80 Speaking up, even casually, in a feminist
space can offer surprising amounts of support and equally surprising amounts of
criticism. Ahmed reminds us that the need for feminist spaces has not eroded as
many believe, and that feminists must build them together. However, joining
with other feminists to build communities does not always mean you are on the
same side about everything. To assume feminists must always agree an cause one
to stop hearing others when they need to be heard. Ahmed reminds us that not
80. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 33-72.; In her first essay of the collection, “In the Name of Beauty,” McMillan Cottom describes the backlash to her article on Miley Cyrus that prompted criticism from both women and men, not for her critiques, but for her reference to herself as “unattractive.” She breaks down the different viewpoints of these critics, which I will dive into more in Chapters 3, 4, and 5 to discuss embodied experience and feminist spaces. 95
only can we inflict hurt on others with our criticisms, but that the claim to hurt
can often be used to deflect the hurt of others.81 This is particularly evident in the
discourses surrounding race. White women have historically used hurt as a way
of refusing to hear women of color, to accuse them of getting in the way of
community building, as if community building rests solely on sameness.
Returning to the example of beauty, McMillan Cottom reveals to her readers in
Thick that she carefully considered the criticisms she received for her statement,
taking “the time to figure out my responsibility,” and to address the racialized
beauty norms she unflinchingly refused to pander to while intuitively drawing on
the myriad motivations of her critics and situating them within historical and
contemporary racial politics.82 When feminists allow themselves to be questioned
and criticized, sometimes feminist spaces can serve to make room for the self-
questioning and self-criticism that is imperative to becoming feminist, as well as
to address issues of difference that Audre Lorde argued to be the foundation of
coalition. In keeping with the emphasis on racial difference in this topic, when
coding by hand, I looked for moments in which these feminist academics point to
the intersections of race and gender in public discussions of feminism. I paid
special attention to the moments in which the authors question and engage with
feminist spaces both physically (at home, at work, in feminist groups, etc.) and
digitally.
81. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 178-79.
82. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 38. 96
Cycle 2: Content Analysis
I used these hypothetical coding categories established by the topic models to guide the process of coding by hand across all three texts. I first engaged in precoding, using colored page tabs to mark passages that might fit into one of the categories I derived from the topic model
(yellow), passages that contextualized these topics sociohistorically (red), passages that specifically illustrated bad feminist moments (pink), and passages that indicated a possible function of bad feminist moments (blue). As I completed preliminary coding of each work, I then input my coding notes into a spreadsheet with 5 columns for the following:
1. Possible category: Each phrase or paragraph was labelled “Bad Feminist Moment,”
“Purpose/Function,” “This Cultural Moment,” or “Analysis Categories.” The
“Analysis Categories” label was applied to passages that appeared to fit within a
category established by the topic model. Sometimes this fit was obvious. For
example, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s statement, “I have never felt more incompetent
than when I was pregnant. Pregnancy is not just resistant to the dictates of capitalism,
it is hell on competency,” fit well within the category on feminist bodies.83 However,
other passages did not so obviously fit within a specific category. For example,
McMillan Cottom’s discussion of “loaning out” the privileges of education to others
did not fit within one specific category upon first glance.84 It could have illustrated
feminist relationships or feminist spaces, but its place within this analysis did not
become clear until I had gone through several cycles of coding. For this reason, I used
83. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 81.
84. McMillan Cottom, 162. 97
the same color to highlight all passages that might fit into analysis categories
(yellow). These categories were still tentative and fluid, and I wanted to allow them to
evolve as I moved along.
2. Notes: In this column, I included my thoughts and notes on each entry, preliminary
judgments on how it may fit into categories, ideas for ways in which it fit in with or
deviated from the topic models previously produced, questions that it brought up,
contradictions it suggested, etc.
3-5. I dedicated the remaining spreadsheet columns into “Quote,” “Page #,” and
“Paragraph #.”
In all spreadsheet tables, each category was color-coded to give me a sense of which categories were discussed most often, as well as to assist in making sense of the patterns emerging in the coding process.85
I used coding as a constant comparison technique, comparing each data bit that was an indicator of the same category against each other in search of differences and similarities.
Constant Comparison comes out of grounded theory work, and can be defined as the process of comparing bits of data against each other, generating codes and categories that are being constantly refined. The process of constant comparison goes hand in hand with the process of theoretical sampling, and involves multiple techniques, such as close readings, re-readings, coding, displays, data matrices, and diagrams. Glaser and Strauss define constant comparison as a form of joint coding and analysis used to generate theory systematically. They suggest four stages in the constant comparative method: 1) comparing incidents applicable to each category,
85. See Appendix B for a sample from the color-coded spreadsheet created for Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. 98
2) integrating categories and their properties, 3) delimiting theory, and 4) writing theory.86
Glaser and Strauss maintain that all four stages remain in operation simultaneously throughout analytical processes. This ongoing process of comparing data units against each other results in categories in which to place each unit. Since the process is continuous and recursive, however, these categories and the codes used to place data into categories are constantly shifting and being redefined. Ultimately, this constant redefinition is meant to define each category’s properties with greater precision.87 Ideally, as these codes and categories evolve, theories emerge from the data in the process of theoretical sampling.
Cycle 3: Refining
In order to allow my codes and categories to evolve and expose gaps in the research, I employed theoretical sampling, the process of collecting data selectively, based on theoretical questions and gaps found during initial analyses. The primary purpose of theoretical sampling is to seek answers to the questions and theoretical gaps that arise throughout the processes of collection and data analysis.88 I used the “Analysis Categories” label in the spreadsheet tables to illuminate questions and gaps that arose during the process of coding, and I returned to each text to selectively collect further data that addressed these questions and gaps. For example, the fact that McMillan Cottom’s discussion of “loaning out” the privilege of education did not immediately fit into a clearly established category forced me to consider why I had included it in my spreadsheet
86. Barney Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Chicago: Aldine, 1957).
87. Thomas Lindlof and Brian C. Taylor, Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles, CA: SAGE, 2011).
88. Judith Wuest, “Grounded Theory: The Method,” in Nursing Research: A Qualitative Perspective, ed. P. Munhill (Sudbury: Jones & Bartlett, 2006), 239. 99 at all. I then returned to the text, identifying how and why McMillan Cottom shares this concept of “loaning out” privilege. Although I had initially thought of it as an example of feminist relationships, the fact that it appeared within a discussion of academic performance and elitism caused me to reconsider my categories altogether.89 The category “feminist spaces” got narrowed to “feminist occupations,” and a possible function of sharing bad feminist moments began to reveal itself. I returned to my coding spreadsheet multiple times to refine my categories in this way. I further refined these categories as I applied the theories set forth by Ahmed in Living a Feminist
Life, identifying bad feminist moments as moments of the feminist in crisis. Ultimately, utilizing constant comparison and theoretical sampling, I narrowed the categories of analysis down the following, each of which I explore chapter-by-chapter in this dissertation:
1. Bad Feminist Moments as Trauma-Based Crisis: In this chapter, I draw from both the
topic model category of Feminist Bodies and the hand-coded stories of trauma that
influence the authors’ understandings of feminism, experiences of feminism, and
complicated relationships to contemporary feminist trends and movements. I explore
the ways in which the authors utilize and embody feminist fragility to work through
and address contemporary issues within feminism, approaching moments of feminist
crisis that are sometimes resolved through explication, and sometimes not.
2. Bad Feminist Moments as Relationship-Based Crisis: In this chapter, I draw from the
topic model categories of Feminist Relationships and Feminist Spaces, as well as the
hand-coded stories in which the authors share moments of feminist crisis brought
about by relationships to other people, including family members, friends, partners,
89. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 162-69. 100
and other feminists. I explore the different relationships that affect and define the
authors’ moments of crisis, and the ways in which those relationships affect their
abilities and willingness to engage with these moments.
3. Bad Feminist Moments as Occupational Crisis: In this chapter, I draw from both the
topic model categories of Feminist Spaces and the hand-coded stories authors share
regarding their occupations as academics and writers. I attend to the ways in which
academic work, diversity work, non-academic writing, and feminist expectations
shape these authors’ bad feminist moments as well as the ways in which they choose
to share and address these moments (or not). It is in this chapter that I establish the
functions of sharing bad feminist moments with others as a feminist academic.
In each of these chapters, I draw from the topic model category of feminist ghosts to trace the influences of feminists that came before on how and why these authors experience bad feminists moments, as well as how and why they share and/or address these moments. I examine the different ways in which these moments are shared with audiences. In some moments, these crises are shared as moments of guilt, in others they are shared as moments of breakage, and in still others as moments of unapologetic resistance. I consider the role of contemporary neoliberal capitalism and its relationship to individuals as well as the academy, as well as the influences of feminist ghosts and foundational texts to which academic feminists frequently turn in order to make sense of and articulate their bad feminist moments. I pay special attention to the ways in which these academic feminists utilize and share their bad feminist moments to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their relationships to feminism, to others, and to themselves, suggesting that bad feminist moments serve several functions and purposes from moment to moment in feminists’ daily lives. 101 CHAPTER 3. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS TRAUMA-BASED CRISIS
When it happens, a sharp pang runs right through the center of my body. Or I feel sick to
my stomach. Or I vomit. Or I break into a cold sweat. Or I feel myself shutting down, and
I go into a quiet place. Or I close my fingers into tight fists until my knuckles ache. My
reaction is visceral and I have to take a deep breath or two or three or more. I have to
remind myself of the time and distance between then and now. I have to remind myself
that I am not the girl in the woods anymore. I have to convince myself I never will be
again. It has gotten better over the years. It gets better until it doesn’t.
- Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist1
When Roxane Gay was in middle school, she was lured into the woods by a boy she was dating at the time, where he and a group of friends gang-raped her. The above quote describes the post- traumatic stress symptoms she still experiences when she comes across any triggers, including but not limited to, walking by groups of men, seeing a young girl “of a certain age,” and reading about others’ “all too familiar” experiences of sexual violence.2 She uses this story to explore her
“failing” to understand or support the feminist practice of trigger warnings.3
Stories of trauma and its effects are threaded throughout Gay’s Bad Feminist, Tressie
McMillan Cottom’s Thick, and Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts. Not only does each work contain at least one story of trauma and its effects on the authors, but each work situates these traumas within the contexts of larger sociopolitical issues. Tressie McMillan Cottom discusses
1. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 2014), 147-48.
2. Gay, Bad Feminist, 147.
3. Gay, 153. 102 the traumatic experience of medical mistreatment that led to her miscarriage, exemplifying the ways in which the neoliberal imperative of competence further marginalizes and excludes women of color.4 Maggie Nelson talks about the trauma of being stalked by a man who read a book she had written on her aunt’s rape and murder, demonstrating the dangers of sharing one’s traumatic experiences as a woman.5 When these authors speak of their traumatic experiences, they also broach the ways in which these experiences influence their views on feminist practices and beliefs and/or their own inabilities to perform ideal feminism. These stories of direct trauma are not the only forms of trauma the authors contend with in their works, however. The insidious traumas of living as women in an age of ongoing gendered violence, objectification, and bodily legislation are perpetuated by the rise in digital globalization and neoliberal ideals that place responsibility for overcoming and refuting these violences on the victims. Many of the bad feminist moments expressed in the texts of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom reflect the myriad ways in which trauma shapes their relationships to feminism. While trauma can make them feel incapable of engaging with their feminist ideals, the bad feminist moments produced by these moments make way for them to redefine those ideals.
In this chapter, I draw from the stories of direct and insidious trauma that influence the authors' understandings of feminism, experiences of feminism, and complicated relationships to contemporary feminist trends and movements. I explore the ways in which Nelson, McMillan
Cottom, and Gay utilize feminist fragility to work through and address contemporary issues within feminism, approaching moments of feminist crisis that are sometimes resolved through
4. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019), 77-97.
5. Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015), 114-24. 103 explication, and sometimes not. To this end, I situate bad feminist moments as shattering moments based in trauma that offer potential for feminist misattunement, feminist shattering, and cruel pessimism. Feminists are consistently morally governed, pressured to stop making a fuss and get along with others. These experiences of moral governance are what Sara Ahmed refers to as “shattering moments,” moments in which feminists are “shattered“ against the walls of structural oppression, leaving them vulnerable and fragile.6 Feminists who refuse imperatives to shut up and sit down embrace fragility in a neoliberal society that insists on their individual heartiness and personal perfection.7 However, I argue these neoliberal influences also pervade contemporary feminism that insists feminists overcome personal traumas to be continually transgressive in their personal choices. In this light, moments in which feminists resist these imperatives to be continually transgressive also embrace fragility to resist the neoliberal ideals that have shaped contemporary feminism. Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Gay render themselves fragile and vulnerable by sharing bad feminist moments brought on by trauma. As discussed in
Chapter 2, to be fragile as a feminist is to be resistant to social structures that emphasize these ideals, such as the imperatives of happiness and personal perfection. Bad feminist moments based in trauma allow for such rejection of the promises of happiness and safety in neoliberal mainstream feminist ideals. However, they can also be used to create wiggle room that makes time and space for feminists to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their relationships to feminism when they find that the histories of violence that brought them to feminism are also the
6. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (New York: Duke University Press, 2017), 163-64.
7. Ahmed, 184-86.; See Chapter 2 of this dissertation for an in-depth explanation of Ahmed’s concept of fragility. 104 histories that render them incapable of pushing back against or articulating their feelings about mainstream feminism in the moment.
Defining Trauma
Many think of trauma as a reaction to a one-time extreme event, which makes sense given that, up until 1994, the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) defined a traumatic event as “an event that is outside the range of human experience.”8 Feminist approaches to trauma have challenged this definition by emphasizing women's everyday experiences of violence, recasting trauma as ongoing and embedded in one's daily life experiences.9 Feminist therapists like Laura S. Brown contributed greatly to current understandings of trauma that look “beyond the public and male experiences of trauma to the private, secret experiences that women encounter in the interpersonal realm and at the hands of those we love and depend on.”10 In her essay, “Not Outside the Range: One
Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” Brown demonstrated that, since women experience traumatic experiences such as rape, violence, and harassment on a daily basis, they are forced to
“make room in their lives and their psyches” to accommodate such experiences.11 Such arguments challenged the agreed upon view of trauma as based in unusual, distinctive events.
Feminist therapists who emphasized the daily lived experiences of trauma in girls and women
8. Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : DSM-III ( Arlington, VA : American Psychiatric Association, 1987).
9. Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2003).
10. Laura S. Brown, “Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Cultural Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 102.
11. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 101. 105 contributed greatly to the shift in Western definitions of traumatic stressors.12 The American
Psychological Association revised their definition of traumatic stressors in the 1994 edition of the DSM, stating that it “no longer requires that an event be infrequent, unusual, or outside of the supposed human norm of experience.”13 This new definition allows for consideration of the impacts of continuous, common experiences of microaggressions, intergenerational trauma, and daily aggressions that women deal with on a daily basis.
In addition, not all trauma is overtly violent or physical in nature. Feminist therapists have also contributed to understandings of insidious trauma, explained by Brown as the
“traumatogenic effects of oppression that are not necessarily overtly violent or threatening to bodily well-being at a given moment but that do violence to the soul and spirit.”14 A term developed by feminist therapist Maria P. Root, insidious trauma is “usually associated with the social status of an individual being devalued because a characteristic intrinsic to their identity is different from what is valued by those in power,” and unlike conventionally defined trauma, may be present throughout one's life.15 According to Root, the effects of insidious trauma are cumulative and shape worldviews (as opposed to direct traumas, which are believed to shatter assumptions about the world one previous held). They are based in often normative yet traumatic
12. Joanne Muzak, “Trauma, Feminism, and Addiction: Cultural and Clinical Lessons from Susan Gordon Lydon's Take the Long Way Home: Memoirs of a Survivor,” Traumatology, 15, no. 4 (2009):28. doi:10.1177/1534765609347547
13. Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : DSM-IV (Arlington, VA : American Psychiatric Association, 1994).
14. Brown, “Not Outside the Range,” 107.
15. Maria P. Root, “Reconstructing the Impact of Trauma on Personality,” in Personality and Psychopathology: Feminist Reappraisals, eds. L.S. Brown and M. Ballou (New York: Guilford Press, 1992), 240. 106 experiences that can produce “a distinct threat to psychological safety, security, or survival,”
even when there is no physical violence.16 Insidious trauma can accumulate over time, resulting
in symptoms such as anxiety, depression, paranoia, and substance abuse, just to name a few.17
Root identifies three types of insidious trauma, each of which is based in marginalized existences and normative experiences that accumulate over time. The first type focuses on individual identity, and includes the cumulative traumatic effects of racism, poverty,
heterosexism, and ageism.18 The second type includes the transmission of “unresolved trauma
and attendant defensive behaviors and/or helplessness that is transmitted transgenerationally as
the result of an ancestor's direct trauma.”19 This is similar to the sociological concept of
historical trauma, coined by Native American social worker and mental health expert Maria
Yellow Horse Brave Heart. Defined as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over
the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma,” historical trauma
was initially used by Brave Heart to understand unresolved Native American grief and its effects
on mental health.20 The concept of historical trauma, however, has since been expanded to
understand the shared traumas of other groups, such as African Americans and Holocaust
survivors. The third type of trauma discussed by Root applies to significantly declining health,
16. Root, “Reconstructing the Impact,” 241.
17. Root, 240.
18. Root, 241.
19. Root, 241.
20. Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart, “The Historical Trauma Response among Natives and its Relationship with Substance Abuse: A Lakota Illustration,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs 35, no. 1 (2003): 7. 107 including “progressive debilitating illness, or markedly decreased ability to function
independently,” such as in cases of AIDS, diabetes, some cancers, etc.21
Trauma in Bad Feminist Moments
We see evidence of not only direct trauma, but also all three types of insidious trauma at work in the bad feminist moments of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom. In this chapter, I explore the effects of both direct traumas and insidious traumas associated with gendered violence, objectification, pregnancy/motherhood, and transgressive identity on contemporary academic feminists’ relationships to feminism as they manifest in bad feminist moments. As suggested by Sarah Brown above, sexual violence is not always directly nor physically violent. It includes the everyday experiences of women and girls that they learn to accommodate over time.
As such, sexual violence and the traumas of womanhood serve to contextualize the bad feminist moments of all three authors. Feminist women are not immune to the contradictions that arise from growing up in a culture that denigrates them while simultaneously holding them responsible for that denigration. The violence that surrounds feminist women permeates and structures their very beings, and the attendant anxieties that arise from it often contribute to bad feminist moments in which they feel torn between their identities, personal pleasures, and feminist sense of responsibility. In utilizing bad feminist moments to take the time and space to further reflect on these contradictions and anxieties, Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson appear to attempt to push back against expectations that they continually be held responsible for resisting the social structures in which they are locked. However, in some of these moments, they also take that time and space to think through the limitations of contemporary feminism.
Rape Culture and the Traumas Associated with Gendered Violence
21. Root, “Reconstructing the Impact,” 241. 108 In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay defines rape culture as a “phrase that denotes a culture
where we are inundated, in different ways, by the idea that male aggression and violence toward
women is acceptable and often inevitable.”22 She puts forth this definition as she discusses the
gang rape of a young girl in Texas, the media’s depictions of the rapists as innocent boys, and the
public backlash that held the girl and her mother responsible for the rape (with no mention of the
girls’ father), rather than the men who did it.23 The term “rape culture” was first coined in the
1970s by feminist activists to shed light on the commonness of rape and gendered violence in
America and highlight the complex system of misogynistic social structures and discourses that
normalize it. Borne out of consciousness raising efforts in second-wave feminist movements, the
phrase “rape culture” was a response to the widespread belief that rape rarely happened in
America, ensconced in the misogynistic view of women as property to be protected and
exploited by men. The term was first published in 1974 by New York Radical Feminists’ Rape:
The First Sourcebook for Women, in which they argued that rape cannot end without radical
societal change.24 Over the last fifty years, women have raised awareness regarding rape culture through consciousness sharing, countless publications, activist campaigns such as One Billion
Rising and SlutWalk, and digital movements like #MeToo. Although reported incidents of rape have dropped by more than half since the 1990s, the Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network
(RAINN) still reports that, as of 2020, one in six American women are victims of rape or
22. Gay, Bad Feminist, 129.
23. Gay, 128-30.
24. New York Radical Feminists, Noreen Connell, and Cassandra Wilson, Rape: A Sourcebook for Women (New York: New American Library, 1974). 109 attempted rape throughout their lifetimes.25 This statistic does not account for sexual assault that
does not qualify as rape, nor does it account for unreported rapes.26 As Gay points out in her
example, media coverage of rape typically blames the victims, casting rapists as boys who make
mistakes while depicting victims as responsible for their own assaults or liars with something to
gain from reporting assault. It should not be surprising, then, to learn that rape is the most
underreported crime in America; 63% of sexual assaults are not reported to police.27
Growing Up Traumatized
Feminist women grow up into a world in which gendered and raced violence are normalized, and they are not immune to the internalization of sexual objectification and imperatives of personal responsibility that pervade this world. The normalization of gendered violence in girlhood shapes the ways in which women interact with the world around them from a young age. Children and adolescents do not have the tools or experience levels to cope with trauma as adults do, and the daily experiences of sexual objectification that surround young women can lead to increased anxiety and feelings of vulnerability. Feelings of anxiety and vulnerability are enhanced by societal narratives depicting constantly endangered women in charge of protecting themselves from the world around them.28 Feminist women’s experiences
25. Rape Abuse and Incest National Network, "Scope of the Problem: Statistics," Last updated 2020, https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem.
26. RAINN does share that, statistically, an American is sexually assaulted every 73 seconds.
27. National Sexual Violence Resource Center, "Sexual Violence Statistics," NSVRC, Last updated 2018, https://www.nsvrc.org/node/4737.
28. Timothy Beneke, Men on Rape: What They Have to Say About Sexual Violence (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982).; Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (New York: Bantam/Simon and Schuster, 1975).; Susan Griffin, Rape: The Power of Consciousness (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1979).; Analise O'Donovan, Grant J. Devilly, and 110 are charged with these anxieties. In fact, these anxieties are often what lead them to feminism in the first place. Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson contextualize their bad feminist moments by sharing the ways in which these anxieties brought them to feminism and subsequently shape their relationships to feminism.
Take Maggie Nelson’s work in The Argonauts, for instance. In this text, she shares many moments in which she feels like a bad feminist because of the anxieties surrounding gendered violence. She contextualizes these moments by explaining how these anxieties have built up over time, how they build up for women everywhere, reminding readers that she is one of many women who experience this phenomenon. Nelson maintains that women’s identities and sexualities form around the narratives of gendered sexual violence fed to them throughout their lives: “If you’re looking for sexual tidbits as a female child, and the only ones that present themselves depict child rape or other violations...then your sexuality will form around that fact.”29 The popular culture, media, and word-of-mouth narratives that perpetuate images of women as sexual victims rather than sexual agents teach young girls that sexual violence is largely unavoidable. Nelson reminds readers here that women, including feminist women, bring these narratives of sexual violence that surround them from a young age into adulthood, whether they want to or not. It is largely unavoidable, given the ways in which gendered violence saturates the culture around them.
Within a neoliberal society that teaches girls they are responsible for their own fates, the responsibility for dealing with and avoiding violence is placed squarely on their shoulders. While
Ronald M. Rapee, “Antecedents to Women’s Fear of Rape,” Behaviour Change, 24 (2007):135– 145, doi:10.1375/bech.24.3.135.
29. Nelson, The Argonauts, 66. 111 feminists have fought long and hard to push back against these narratives, they are still not
immune to this sense of responsibility for gendered violence. Take, for example, Nelson’s story of being stalked by a man who had read her book about the murder of her aunt. As a feminist,
Nelson understands that she is not responsible for being stalked, but is instead a victim.
However, throughout the story, she vacillates between this “enlightened” knowledge of victimhood and the fear that she is somehow responsible for summoning the violence by choosing to share her aunt’s story:
It was I who had insisted on writing about Jane's murder, and while I knew intellectually that I wasn't responsible for this man's actions any more than Jane was for her murder (as the caller had indicated), my less enlightened self felt sick with a sense of late-breaking comeuppance. I had summoned the horrible thing, and now here he was, attaché case in hand.30
Nelson's “less enlightened self” could be read as her perception of herself as a bad feminist. She
clearly differentiates between the self as enlightened feminist and the self as “less enlightened”
feminist. To be a good feminist, to Nelson, is to be enlightened, to understand the social
structures that shape women's histories of trauma, and to refuse to give in to the victim-blaming
culture she lives in. However, when faced the traumas of gendered violence in her own life,
Nelson finds it much more difficult to remain so enlightened. Her individual trauma contradicts
her assumptions of transgressive feminism, making her feel less enlightened, and bearing the
blame for that lack of transgressive attitude on top of the blame for the violence being enacted
against her.
Along with the traumas of gendered violence girls bear as they grow into women, many
of them must also contend with the insidious traumas of historical racialized violence, which
bears its own attendant sense of personal responsibility. As McMillan Cottom reminds us, “All
30. Nelson, 117. 112 women in our culture are subject to this kind of violence, when people judge their bodies to
decide if they deserve abuse. But for black women and girls, that treatment is specific to our
history as much as it is about today’s context.”31 Black girls in particular are not only taught
gendered violence is unavoidable, but they are also taught to blame themselves and fear reprisal
for the violences enacted against them. This is particularly evident in Roxane Gay’s discussion
of her rape as a child in Bad Feminist, and in her choice not to report it to anybody because she
“didn’t want to get in trouble, because my parents were strict, because you’re not allowed to
have sex before marriage, because I was a good girl.”32 Once again, one can sense a trace of
personal responsibility within this passage. Gay has clearly internalized the lessons of being a good girl who doesn’t cause trouble, but she feels she needs to explain this internalization. There is a double-edged sword in this bad feminist moment, as Gay is suggesting she not only was not a “good girl” for allowing herself to be raped, but that she was not a good feminist for not reporting the rape. In this moment, Gay cannot win. As a girl, she had already internalized narratives of personal responsibility for racialized gendered violence, but as a feminist she feels she should have somehow been above this. Thus, she feels the need to contextualize her bad feminist moment with an explanation.
The lines between the status of “girl” and “woman” consistently blur along racialized lines within this culture of gendered violence. In a 2014 study conducted at Georgetown Law, adults were surveyed to assess their views on black girlhood. Across all age ranges, they found that black girls were viewed by participants as more adult than white girls, in less need of protection and nurturing than white girls, and more knowledgeable about sex than white girls in
31. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 185.
32. Gay, Bad Feminist, 144. 113 the same age groups.33 McMillan Cottom refers to this study in her discussion of black girlhood, which she maintains is similar in many ways to the experiences of other women:
We are most vulnerable to the men in our homes. We are taught to blame ourselves. We fear reprisal for speaking up. But black women and girls face additional burdens of protecting the reputations of black boys and men. As black feminists have argued, that burden has trapped us in cultural silences that a focus on gender violence alone cannot capture.34
McMillan Cottom utilizes this study to demonstrate not only the ways in which gendered violence against black women is compounded by racialized violence, but she traces that combination to the sense of responsibility placed on black girls’ shoulders. She points out the burden in this assumption: if black girls need less protection than white girls, and they are more sexually knowledgeable, then the burden of responsibility for resisting gendered violence is theirs. This burden is racialized. Furthermore, McMillan Cottom connects the dots between the ways in which black girlhood is not only shaped by the same gendered violence and fear of reprisal that shapes the girlhoods of white women, but it is also formed by the burden of responsibility for protecting the same men and boys that often contribute to the direct and insidious traumas of gendered violence. Since these violences are products of histories of racialized violence intended to subjugate black men, black women are faced with the same double-edged sword found in Gay’s bad feminist moment. Gay demonstrated how she was expected to be a good girl who would not allow sexual violence to be enacted against her, effectively silencing her. This expectation exemplifies the trap to which McMillan Cottom refers.
The burden of protecting black men against the effects of racialized violence traps black women
33. Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia Blake, and Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood , Georgetown University Law Center, June 27, 2017, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3000695 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3000695.
34. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 193. 114 into silence. These traps contextualize bad feminist moments such as Gay’s, revealing the ways in which feminist expectations of personal responsibility for resisting internalized narratives of gendered violence are aligned with white understandings of that violence, not taking these racialized traps and their silencing effects into account.
Moreover, the narratives of violence that contradictorily perpetuate images of women as victims of sexual violence who are somehow responsible for that violence even more closely define the limited popular works that depict black girlhood. The very stories that provide avenues for young women to cope with trauma are often the same stories that perpetuate the rape culture with which they seek to cope. This contradiction also shapes feminist women’s relationships with popular culture. While Gay discusses the importance of identifying with young girls who experience similar traumas in literature and popular culture, both McMillan
Cottom and Nelson suggest that this need for identification is also a double-edged sword that perpetuates rape culture and contributes to the insidious traumas of rape culture in women. Gay’s discussions of book series like The Hunger Games, rap music that promotes violence, and television shows like Law & Order: SVU all center around the trauma she experienced in middle school. Gay does not discuss her middle school rape simply for the sake of sharing or personal exploration. Instead, she inserts the traumatic story of life-changing sexual violence into a discussion about her enjoyment of the popular young adult series, The Hunger Games. She utilizes her experience to address concerns over the violence and trauma in YA literature.
Connecting her own traumatic experiences and loneliness to that of Katniss Everdeen’s, Gay suggests that removing the trauma from teen literature removes one of the primary purposes of it: identification with someone like oneself. Just as Gay identified with Katniss in her youth, she 115 argues that young girls need something to identify with in order to cope with the very real daily
traumas of living as a young woman:
I learned a long time ago that life introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you.35
This passage serves to contextualize Gay’s complicated relationship to popular culture as an adult. Many of her bad feminist moments center on her relationship to popular culture that provides such avenues for identification. Popular culture, at least on some level, provides an avenue for coping with traumatic experiences for young women, allowing them to identify with others so they don’t feel like they are going through it quite as alone.
However, the stories of girlhood that black girls must turn to are frequently laced with traumatic encounters that normalize sexualization of and violence toward black women.
McMillan Cottom directly addresses this issue when she shares:
The thing I remember most about reading for black girlhood was that the easiest way to locate the girl in a story about a woman was to search for the sexual trauma. It was always there: a dirty uncle, a mother’s new husband, a dotty brother, a mean boy at school, a nasty white man, any nasty man. Being raped, molested, ‘touched’ seemed to be the one thing, other than Jim Crow and beauty salons and spirituals, that hung black womanhood together.36
The insidious traumas of racialized rape culture begin early in life, and pervade the few stories
that black girls can turn to. While stories of trauma in girlhood might offer young women like
Gay the opportunity to see “someone like me” that is affected by the ongoing traumatic daily
experiences of young womanhood, McMillan Cottom illustrates ways in which such stories can
35. Gay, Bad Feminist, 144.
36. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 176-77. 116 also normalize these experiences. These reminders serve to contextualize bad feminist moments
in which the authors feel torn between their need for popular culture and their subsequent
feelings that this need comes at the cost of being a good feminist who resists the narratives of
racialized and gendered violence.
These texts also remind us, though, that part of the reason young girls turn to problematic
texts is the lack of diversity in educational and popular literature. Canonical literary texts taught
in schools tend to center the experiences of white men and boys, so young girls must turn to
popular literature to find texts that depict girlhood. Young adult fiction that depicts girlhood,
though, is also sorely lacking in diversity, frequently focusing almost entirely on young white
experiences. Movements like #WeNeedDiverseBooks have campaigned for changes to the
publishing industry to produce and promote young adult literature that reflects the experiences of
all young adults, rather than white ones.37 In Thick, McMillan Cottom writes about how
important it was for her to read girls’ stories in an educational setting that defaulted to white
men’s literature:
It is not easy to read about girls. As a voracious reader, I knew perhaps all of the widely available books. I loved Ramona Quimby, danced with the idea of teenagerdom in Sweet Valley High, and decided I was Claudia in the Baby-Sitters Club. I understood that these were not the books you read in school, but after one had read The Diary of Anne Frank, school reading was all boys on rafts and men traversing the Canterbury Tales and wicked wives who betray their kings.38
37. Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, “From Hashtag to Movement to Book: #WeNeedMoreDiverseBooks Publishes First Anthology,” NBC News, January 5, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/hashtag-movement-book-weneeddiversebooks- publishes-first-anthology-n703606.; #WeNeedMoreDiverseBooks began as a Twitter campaign in response to an all-white male panel of children's book's authors at a 2014 BookCon reader event but has since expanded to a nonprofit organization.
38. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 176. 117 McMillan Cottom, like Gay and many other young girls, had to turn to popular literature to find
stories she identified with. As a black teen, she had to turn to an even smaller canon of works to
find black girl characters she could identify with, such as the works of Anne Moody and
biographies of black women. While younger generations are being offered increasingly more
diverse literature due to initiatives like #WeNeedDiverseBooks, feminist women who grew up
prior to movements like this had to meet their needs for girl-centered narratives that reflected
their experiences in any way they could. These narratives, for better or for worse, have shaped
their understandings of girlhood and womanhood.
These narratives of gendered and racialized violence are not only perpetuated by popular
culture and literature, but by the attitudes of those around young women as they move
throughout their lives, those they trust and love. Families, friends, coworkers, and strangers
contribute to women’s understandings of themselves as sexual objects responsible for their own
objectification. McMillan Cottom suggests the hardest lessons she learned about rape culture and
black womanhood were learned around her family’s kitchen table. She tells a story of a defining
moment in which her cousins were discussing R. Kelly’s rape of a young woman, whom her
family members suggested was a “ho” for letting R. Kelly have sex with her, rather than a young
girl being coerced by a powerful man.39 McMillan Cottom intimates that, through this discussion, she learned that girlhood ended for women when men decided they could sexualize them: “It was over a plate of ribs at my aunt’s dining room table that I learned that being a woman is about what men are allowed to do to you. I was fourteen years old.”40 She depicts the
39. McMillan Cottom, 178.
40. McMillan Cottom, 178. 118 scene around her family table as not only one of lessons learned, but of trauma that extended into adulthood:
Watching men I love turn a girl into a woman and a woman into a ho has never left me. That conversation at my aunt’s dinner table was not the first time I felt deeply afraid, but it left a cut that will never heal. It’s the kind of wound that keeps you alert to every potential doorway through which you might enter as a friend, sister, or woman, but leave as a bitch or a ho.41
McMillan Cottom exposes herself to the reader in this passage, allowing herself to be vulnerable to contextualize the emotional “cuts” of insidious trauma that will not heal, no matter how feminist she is. If, as Nelson and Gay suggest in their bad feminist moments, good feminists resist this internalization, then to be a bad feminist is to admit to the fact this is simply not possible. Perhaps, then, in rendering oneself vulnerable to others, feminist writers like McMillan
Cottom are exposing the double bind presented by contemporary feminist values of individualistic resistance in a world that will not allow that resistance. The traumas of gendered violence in American women are not simply rooted in direct traumatic experiences such as
Gay’s, but in the lessons learned regarding their fragility in society that shape how they interact with the world around them, including how they interact with feminism.
Embodied Traumas of Objectification
The direct and insidious traumas of racialized and gendered violence also shape women's relationships with their own bodies. Rape culture is not only rooted in assumptions that men are natural predators and women their prey, but in the assumptions of women's bodies as sexual objects. Much of feminist scholarship and activism has been devoted to this objectification of women, the treatment of women's bodies and their parts as objects to be used. This objectification takes place in almost every aspect of women's lives. Popular culture depictions
41. McMillan Cottom, 188. 119 fragment images of women's bodies and ignore their emotional complexities, from film and
television scenes that focus on women's individual body parts to media advertisements that
depict women as sex objects to sell products and women's popular magazines and websites that feature "ideal" body types to which women should women should aspire. These ideals are notoriously rooted in raced and classed assumptions of womanhood and pressure women to strive for unattainable physical goals. The beauty industry is built almost entirely upon the promise of achieving these ideals, and women are pressured to invest in products and practices that are often harmful, both emotionally and physically.
Everyday experiences of sexual objectification contribute to the insidious traumas of womanhood in contemporary society. In a 2014 study conducted by psychologist Haley Miles-
Mclean and colleagues, they found that sexual objectification can lead to self-objectification,
body surveillance, and body shame in ways that contribute to the insidious traumas of gendered
violence in women.42 In Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression, Sandra Bartky situates the feminine body as an instance of internalized oppression
in which women whose bodies fit the raced and classed ideals of womanhood are viewed as both
object and prey for men.43 As such, women discipline their bodies through dieting, restricted
movement, and elaborate skincare and makeup routines.44 Women who fail to discipline their
bodies to the standards deemed fit by societal norms are severely penalized by a variety of
42. Haley Miles-McLean, et al., “ ‘Stop Looking at Me!’: Interpersonal Sexual Objectification as a Source of Insidious Trauma,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 39, no. 3 (September 2015): 363–74, doi:10.1177/0361684314561018.
43. Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990).
44. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 67-82. 120 means, such as denial of employment.45 Women who do discipline their bodies in accordance with societal expectations often do so in ways that ultimately harm them, both emotionally and physically. Both are subject at any time to becoming prey, whether they adhere to social standards of beauty or not. When women experience interpersonal objectification and are exposed to objectifying material, they often self-objectify, taking a third-person perspective of
their own bodies and surveying themselves almost as an outside observer.46 The toxic
combination of body evaluation and unwanted advances are related to increased levels of body
surveillance and self-objectification, which are associated with a number of mental health
effects.47 These effects range anywhere from depression to disordered eating and appearance
anxiety.48
45. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 88-98.
46. Barbara L. Fredrickson, and Tommi-Ann Roberts, “Objectification Theory: Toward Understanding Women's Lived Experiences and Mental Health Risks,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 21 (1997):173–206, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1997.tb00108.x.; Bonnie Moradi, and Yu-Ping Huang, “Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women: A Decade of Advances and Future Directions,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32 (2008):377–398, doi:10.1111/j.1471- 6402.2008.00452.x.; Dawn M. Szymanski, Lauren B. Moffitt, and Ericka R. Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women: Advances to Theory and Research,” The Counseling Psychologist, 39 (2011): 6–38, doi:10.1177/0011000010378402.
47. Erica R. Carr and Dawn M. Szymanski, “Sexual Objectification and Substance Abuse in Young Adult Women,” The Counseling Psychologist, 39 (2011): 39–66, doi:10.1177/0011000010378449.; Fredrickson and Roberts, “Objectification Theory,” 173-206.; Holly B. Kozee, and Tracy L. Tylka, “A Test of Objectification Theory With Lesbian Women,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 30 (2006): 348–357, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.2006.00310.x.; Moradi and Huang, “Objectification Theory and Psychology of Women,” 377-398.; Szymanski, Moffitt, and Carr, “Sexual Objectification of Women,” 6-38.
48. Mindy J. Erchull, Miriam Liss, and Stephanie Lichiello, “Extending the Negative Consequences of Media Internalization and Self-objectification to Dissociation and Self-harm,” Sex Roles, 69 (2013): 583–593, doi:10.1007/s11199-013-0326-8.; Dawn M. Szymanski and Stacy L. Henning, “The Role of Self-objectification in Women's Depression: A Test of Objectification Theory,” Sex Roles, 56 (2007): 45–53, doi:10.1007/s11199-006-9147-3.; Marika Tiggemann and Julia K. Kuring, “The Role of Body Objectification in Disordered Eating and Depressed Mood,” British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 43 (2004): 299–311, 121 Raced and classed feminine body ideals not only contribute to women's overall
symptoms of trauma, but they specifically contribute to the oppression and insidious traumas of
women of color. In Thick, McMillan Cottom suggests that the ultimate function of beauty is to exclude blackness, and she suggests that beauty “also violently conditions white women and symbolically precludes the existence of gender nonconforming peoples.”49 In the works of
McMillan Cottom, Gay, and Nelson, beauty operates to shape their experience and their
relationships to their bodies. It does so in different ways, though. As McMillan Cottom posits,
beauty acts as a “kind of capital,” that reproduces the existing social order.50 Therefore, beauty standards, such as thinness, are markers of class and racial distinctions. While Nelson focuses on how her obsession with having a small body is reflective of her family’s desires for class mobility, McMillan Cottom illustrates the ways in which beauty serves to reserve social capital for white women. “As long as the beautiful people are white,” McMillan Cottom speculates,
“what is beautiful at any given time can be renegotiated without redistributing capital from
white to nonwhite people.”51 She illustrates the ways in which beauty is used to coerce women
for capital gain and how they contribute to internalized inferiority that does violence to women
not only emotionally, but physically as well. The commodification of beauty leads to harmful
doi:10.1348/0144665031752925.; Tracy L. Tylka and Melanie S. Hill, “Objectification Theory as it Relates to Disordered Eating Among College Women,” Sex Roles, 51 (2004): 719–730, doi:10.1007/s11199-004-0721-2.; Stephanie M. Noll and Barbara L. Fredrickson, “A Mediational Model Linking Self-objectification, Body Shame, and Disordered Eating,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 22 (1998): 623–636, doi:10.1111/j.1471-6402.1998.tb00181.x.
49. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 45.
50. McMillan Cottom, 44.
51. McMillan Cottom, 45. 122 products, self-perfection techniques, and interpersonal practices that all serve the imperative of white beauty standards.
Legislated Bodies
For feminist women, the traumas of existing as a woman are compounded by the public
nature of debates surrounding their bodily autonomy. These debates are rendered necessary by
the continual legislation of women’s bodies as sexual objects. However, feminists must take up
these debates in order to resist and fight for women. As if the daily lived experiences of gendered
violence and sexual objectification weren't enough to traumatize women, the U.S. judicial system
contributes to that trauma by legislating women's bodies as sexual objects as well. American
feminists have been fighting for a long time for women to be allowed control of decisions
concerning their own bodies. Issues of reproductive health, sexual harassment, and motherhood
have pervaded American politics, reminding women that their bodies are always up for debate, a
debate they are frequently not allowed a say in. Women frequently attempt to combat rape culture and the stripping of their bodily autonomy by coming forward with stories of rape and sexual harassment from men in power. In doing so, they often face the trauma of backlash not
only from the courts, but also from the media. As the stories of Anita Hill and Christine Blasey-
Ford remind us, when women's bodies are endangered, they are often rendered responsible for it.
When they speak out about these dangers, their bodies are dragged into public debates. Even with the 2020 conviction of serial rapist Harvey Weinstein, women writers have found the incredible numbers of women who shared their stories, the length of the trial, and the overtly sympathetic depiction of Weinstein in the media to be demonstrative not of progress concerning the violence against women, but instead the herculean efforts it takes for women to be heard in 123 matters concerning the treatment of their bodies.52 Nowhere is this more evident than in the debates surrounding Planned Parenthood. Even though the historic ruling of Roe vs. Wade protected women's choices regarding reproduction in 1973, by July 2019 nine states passed laws banning abortion as early as the fertilization stage.53 Both Georgia and Alabama passed abortion bans on the premise of the “personhood” of fetuses.54 Women, in this sense, are no longer persons themselves, but incubators for children. Many of these bans do not include exceptions for women with health concerns, or for women who are impregnated through rape or incest.55
Women in these states are literally forced to physically bear the burdens of rape.
Such legislative treatment of women’s bodies that places the onus of responsibility for gendered violence and its effects on women renders public experiences that are commonly thought of as private, such as sexual assault, pregnancy, and motherhood. Being a feminist not only means that your bodily rights are stripped by legislative control, but it also means contradictorily offering up one’s body for public debate to fight that legislative control. This can leave feminist women feeling like they can’t win. They embody the struggle for autonomy whether they want to or not. As Roxane Gay reflects in Bad Feminist,
Pregnancy is at once a very private and a public experience. It happens within the body. In a perfect world, pregnancy would be an intimate experience shared by a woman and her partner alone, but for various reasons that is not possible. Pregnancy is an experience
52. Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders : DSM-3 (Arlington, VA : American Psychiatric Association, 1987).
53. Mary Ziegler, “A Brief History of US Abortion Law: before and After Roe V Wade,” History Extra, June 21, 2019, https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/history- abortion-law-america-us-debate-what-roe-v-wade/.
54. Mary Ziegler, “A Brief History of US Abortion Law.”
55. Mary Ziegler, “ A Brief History of US Abortion Law.” 124 that invites public intervention and forces the female body into the public discourse. In many ways, pregnancy is the least private experience of a woman's life.56
As the world watches the U.S. Supreme Court legislate away women's bodily autonomy and turn
it into public spectacle, they are faced with the knowledge that women’s bodies, to put it simply,
are not their own. It is not simply the legislation that Gay is referring to here. She is specifically referring to the public intervention and public discourse surrounding women’s bodies. The insidious trauma of existing in a world in which one's body is simultaneously subject to and responsible for gendered violence and objectification is compounded by the public nature of having one's body constantly on display for public debate, even from fellow feminists. Feminist movements have long fought for women’s bodily autonomy, but that fight is often very public, and feminist women are faced with the knowledge that the values they hold as feminists necessarily contribute to the public objectification of their bodies in order to free them. Gay sums up this feeling in her discussion of the contemporary legislation surrounding abortion and reproduction: “I struggle to accept that my body is a legislative matter. The truth of this fact makes it difficult for me to breathe. I don't feel like I have inalienable rights. I don't feel free. I don't feel like my body is my own.”57 Note that Gay does not blame feminist movements for this
feeling that her body is not her own. However, this does not negate the feeling that her body
should be free from public debate at all. She struggles to accept that it is not free from debate, even thought she understands why it is not. The constant need to fight for that freedom is perhaps the most limiting of all. Feminist women are caught in the catch-22 of their bodies being constantly up for debate in order to achieve a future of bodily autonomy for others.
56. Gay, Bad Feminist, 269.
57. Gay, 273-74. 125 Public Motherhood
During pregnancy and early motherhood, women are subjected to intensive medical
surveillance, media scrutiny, and legislative discipline that renders private experiences public
while pressuring women to perform motherhood in ways that align with white, bourgeois,
neoliberal ideals and punishing them for being unable to achieve them. Feminist scholar Rickie
Solanger maintains that the rhetoric of women's choice rather than women's rights obscures the
classed nature of choice, concluding that American motherhood has become a class privilege in
America.58 Poor women are stigmatized as “'bad'” choice-makers whose reproductive lives must
be controlled via legislative measures such as Medicaid restrictions and welfare caps. As
McMillan Cottom points out in Thick, women of color in America are lumped into the category
of poor and “incompetent” mothers incapable of making “good” choices about their own bodies and families.59 For McMillan Cottom and countless other women of color, this assumption of
incompetence results in misdiagnosis, miscarriage, and even death.60 Black women and Native
American women are reported by the CDC to be three to four times more likely to die from
pregnancy or child-related birth than white women in America, about the same rate as women in
underdeveloped nations.61 Most women in the U.S. who die from childbirth do so because of
58. Rickie Solanger, Pregnancy and Power: A Short History of Reproductive Politics in America (New York: New York University Press, 2005).
59. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 77-97.
60. Amy Roeder, “America is Failing its Black Mothers,” Harvard Public Health, Winter 2019, https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/magazine/magazine_article/america-is-failing-its-black- mothers/.
61. U.S. Center for Disease Control, “Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System,” Center for Disease Control, last updated 2020, https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternal- mortality/pregnancy-mortality-surveillance-system.htm. 126 barriers of access to high-quality maternal care, particularly women who are poor or face racial
discrimination.62
Alongside the direct traumas of miscarriage and childbirth-related health issues, women
of color are also faced with the specter of potential death from childbirth, not to mention the
accompanying promise of legislative and media policing if they do manage to live through the
process of giving birth. In Thick, McMillan Cottom brings up her own miscarriage experience to
exemplify the ways in which the neoliberal imperative of competency is used render citizens
incapable of surviving without tools and self-help practices that promise competency (such as
LinkedIn and time management software). In McMillan Cottom’s story, she presented with
symptoms that the white nurses did not expect to hear. Never having been pregnant before,
McMillan Cottom only knew that her “butt hurt,” a symptom that white nurses dismissed as
irrational, making her wait for hours before allowing her to see the doctor who ultimately refused
to provide an ultrasound.63 Sent home because her symptoms and excessive bleeding somehow did not seem serious enough to warrant treatment, McMillan Cottom experienced weeks of
undiagnosed labor symptoms, blocked from giving birth by undiagnosed tumors. Even as
McMillan Cottom bled onto the waiting room chair, the only concern shared by nurses was for the chair. She shares this traumatic miscarriage story to demonstrate how, even as a PhD-holding
middle-class woman, the color of her skin was taken as evidence of her incompetence and
inabilities to understand her own symptoms as contractions. McMillan Cottom refers to this
assumption as “the competency trap,” which she describes as a “cumulative multifold iron cage
62. Amnesty International, Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Healthcare Crisis in the USA, Amnesty International, last updated 2010, https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/pdfs/deadlydelivery.pdf.
63. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 81-86. 127 of network effects in oppressive regimes” for black women existing in an age of global
inequality and rapidly changing technology.64 She shares that “I have never felt more incompetent than when I was pregnant.”65 Presumptions of incompetency not only lead to
feelings of inadequacy for McMillan Cottom, but to traumatic experiences of miscarriage and
medical mistreatment. Not only are women of color—particularly black women—subject to the
direct traumas of miscarriage, pregnancy- and birth-related complications, and mistreatment by
health care professionals, but they are also subject to the insidious traumas of existing in a world
that presumes them to be incapable as mothers and as women, and unable to make choices
regarding their own bodies and families.
Before, during, and after pregnancy, the double bind created in images of ideal
motherhood rooted in whiteness and classism serve to create feminist women subjects that are
pressured to empower themselves as mothers through consumption. This bind is most evident for
many women when faced with the pressures of also being ideal feminist mothers. Over the past
twenty years, multiple books on feminist motherhood have come out, advising women on
everything from raising empowered daughters to giving birth “like a feminist,” crafting
definitions of what it means to be a feminist mother based on practices of self-empowerment.66
Given the ways in which early feminist movements largely dismissed mothers in favor of
encouraging women to move into the workforce, feminist women not only feel pressured to
perform motherhood in a way that aligns with their identities as feminists, but they also often
64. McMillan Cottom, 81.
65. McMillan Cottom, 81.
66. Milli Hills, Give Birth Like a Feminist (London: Harper Collins, 2019).; For example, Hills calls on mothers to find their voice and empower themselves through birth plans and self- education about their rights. 128 struggle with the fact that they have chosen motherhood at all. In The Argonauts, Maggie Nelson posits pregnancy as “inherently queer,” as the experience is at once transgressive and “the ultimate conformity,” simultaneously occasioning a radical intimacy with and a radical alienation from one's own body.67 This contradictory experience colors the works of all three authors as they discuss their experiences of pregnancy and motherhood from the different perspectives of one who has experienced both pregnancy and motherhood (Nelson), one who has experienced pregnancy and miscarriage (McMillan Cottom), and one who is impacted by the rhetorics of pregnancy and motherhood because she has opted not to have children (Gay).
Danger in the Digital Sphere
Already subjected to intensive medical surveillance, media scrutiny, and legislative discipline that renders private experiences public while pressuring women to perform ideal motherhood and punishing them for being unable to attain this ideal, women are also faced with the dangers of public womanhood on the internet. In an age of digital globalization, the internet has become one of the primary sites for sharing and discussing one's personal experiences and convictions. As I illustrated in Chapter 1, digital autoethnographic writing has become one of the main outlets for women of color to engage in political thought and situate their personal experiences in order to push back against the status quo.68 Therefore it is not surprising that, while Nelson finds the internet to be too intimidating a platform for discussing her traumas, Gay and McMillan Cottom began their careers as public intellectuals by writing for digital
67. Nelson, The Argonauts, 13-14.
68. In Chapter 5, I address the unequal burdens of public intellectual work on academic women of color, and the role they play in defining what counts as feminist work. 129 publications.69 McMillan Cottom started writing for online publications like Slate in graduate
school. Gay began her online writing and editing careers with publications like the feminist
writing site The Butter, and the U.S. Guardian. Both Gay and McMillan Cottom have incredibly
active social media accounts and utilize online spaces for feminist connection and survival. Their
stories about writing digitally almost always end in backlash for sharing, whether that backlash be from white men who vitriolically disagree with their writing or from other feminists who
question their viewpoints.
The trauma of living as women from day-to-day is reflected in the dangers and violence-
laced responses faced by each author when they attempt to share their experiences in digital
spaces. Regarding her work as a public intellectual, McMillan Cottom shares, “I receive death
threats and hate mail and can never trust social interactions with strangers in public. I am just
public enough to be targeted for harassment without many of the attendant benefits of being very
well known.”70 The "stranger danger" mentality that Ahmed suggests influences how women
interact with the world around them is enhanced for feminists whose work is public and well-
known, as is evidenced by McMillan Cottom's mistrust of strangers she meets in public.71 In this
passage, she touches on a contradiction that makes the burden of public intellectualism even
more acute: as a public intellectual rather than a celebrity, McMillan Cottom receives the
attention and danger of being a public figure, but does not receive the benefits associated with
69. Nelson, The Argonauts, 60-61.; Nelson shares, “After a lifetime of experimenting with the personal made public, each day that passes I watch myself grow more alienated from social media, the most rampant arena for such activity. Instantaneous, noncalibrated, digital self- revelation is one of my greatest nightmares.”
70. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 219.
71. Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 24-25. 130 celebrity. Celebrities within capitalist societies are fittingly offered uniquely capitalist rewards,
such as free swag from expensive designers and influential brands, payment for autographs, and
the financial abilities to protect oneself from the dangers of celebrity. While feminists who
become known for their public intellectual work might occasionally be offered some small
rewards for their efforts, they are most often faced with threats, insults, and myriad other social
punishments for speaking out in public settings. And those punishments, at least for women, are
often violent ones, especially when those women are non-white and/or queer.
The dangers of speaking in digital spaces are enhanced by the well-known undercurrent
of danger that always accompanies being a woman on the internet. When Gay discusses her
younger self running away with an older man she met on the internet, she briefly touches on the
dangers of that situation by claiming that it was “a small miracle” she wasn't killed by that man.72 Gay doesn't delve into the reasoning behind that danger; she doesn't have to. Women
don't have to talk about how dangerous the internet can be for them. They already know. Stories
and studies abound featuring women who go online only to find harassment, cyberstalkers, and
real-life violence enacted against them.73 For women of color, queer women, trans-women, and
nonbinary people, the danger of violence for sharing or being online at all is even greater.74
72. Gay, Bad Feminist, 51.
73. Amnesty International, “Amnesty Reveals Alarming Impact of Online Abuse Against Women,” 20 November 2017, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2017/11/amnesty- reveals-alarming-impact-of-online-abuse-against-women/.’.; Azy Barak, “Sexual Harassment on the Internet,” Social Science Computer Review 23, no. 1 (February 2005): 77–92, doi:10.1177/0894439304271540.; Nellie Bowles and Michael H. Keller, “Video Games and Online Chats are ‘Hunting Grounds’ for Sexual Predators,” The New York Times , December 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/07/us/video-games-child-sex-abuse.html.; Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014).
74. Caitlin E. Lawson, “Platform Vulnerabilities: Harassment and Misogynoir in the Digital Attack on Leslie Jones,” Information, Communication, and Society 21, no. 6 (2018): 818- 131 Women feel significantly more pressure to engage in self-protective behaviors online than in
face-to-face meetings.75 Once again, the responsibility for the online dangers women face is
placed on the shoulders of the victims.
Overlapping Histories of Trauma
Women’s individual traumas are further compounded by the intergenerational traumas of
violence passed on from woman to woman. Nelson's story of her stalker exemplifies the ways in
which histories of gendered violence overlap, as well as the danger and oft-justified fears of
sharing overlapping histories of sexual trauma. She frames the story by first explaining to her
reader the fears she harbored about unearthing and sharing the story of the 1969 murder of her
aunt in the book Jane: A Murder. She shares that she “nursed terrible fears: namely, that I would
be murdered as Jane was, as punishment for my writerly transgressions.”76 Her fears appeared to
be justified once the book was published, as a man obsessed with Jane's murder began calling
Nelson at home, leaving her threatening voicemails, showing up at her office, and harassing
students on campus in search of her. The direct trauma of being stalked merges with the
insidious trauma of violence against women in Nelson's mind:
It wasn't long before my image of him merged with that of Jared Lee Loughner, the man who, exactly two weeks prior, had walked up to Representative Gabby Giffords in a
833.; Amanda Lenhart, et al., Online Harassment, Digital Abuse, and Cyberstalking in America (New York: Data & Society Research Institute, 2016).; Jessica Vitak, ,Kalyani Chadha, Linda Steiner, and Zahra Ashktorab, “Identifying Women's Experiences with and Strategies for Mitigating Negative Effects of Online Harassment,” Proceedings of the 20th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (Portland: ACM, 2017), https://vitak.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/vitak_etal-2017-cscw-online-harassment.pdf.
75. Billie E. Cali, Jill M. Coleman, and Catherine Campbell, “Stranger Danger? Women's Self Protection Intent and the Continuing Stigma of Online Dating,” Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking 16, no. 12 (December 2013): 853-857, doi: http://doi.org/10.1089/cyber.2012.0512.
76. Nelson, The Argonauts, 114. 132 Safeway parking lot in Tucson, Arizona, and shot her, along with eighteen others. A form letter from Giffords was found in Loughner's home with the words "Die, Bitch" scrawled in it; Loughner was known for saying that women should not hold positions of power. It doesn't matter to me if both of these men are mad. Their voices still have clarity.77
In just this brief excerpt, histories of violence overlap. Nelson's trauma is not only a product of the direct effects of her stalker, but of the indirect effects of Jane's murder, Gabby Gifford's murder, and the murders of countless women before and since. By including the statement that
Loughner did not believe women should hold positions of power, Nelson draws a clear connection between the sexist microaggressions experiences by women on a daily basis and the acts of brutal violence that constantly threaten them.
On top of histories of gendered violence, many feminists must also contend with overlapping histories of racialized violence. In Thick, McMillan Cottom refers to a moment in which she “almost forgot” the ways in which democracy in America often serves the project of whiteness:
White voters allowed Barack Obama to become an idea because he was a fundamental projection of the paradox that defines them as white. I almost forgot once. Old trees are new whites are a seduction. But my soul remembers my grandmother's memories. It is imperative that one knows one's whites.78
To “know one’s whites” is to remain ever-vigilant, refusing to trust white people on the mere basis that they support seemingly equalizing projects. McMillan Cottom brings up her grandmother’s memories to remind her reader of the histories of intergenerational violence that have taught generations of women of color to maintain this vigilance, regardless of how exhausting it may be. The insidious traumas of historical racism shape how feminists of color interact with the world as black women and as feminists.
77. Nelson, 117-18.
78. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 112-13. 133 Am I a Bad Feminist? Moments of Forced Choice
One of the ways in which we can understand bad feminist moments is to read them as moments of forced choice. Insidious and direct traumas associated with overlapping histories of gendered and raced violence and pressures to perform ideal womanhood affect women on both physical and emotional levels, and so women are faced with a host of contradictions in their daily choices. Their private experiences are consistently rendered public, and they are constantly pressured to perform ideal womanhood in manners that are inconsistent with their personal identities and histories. Given the myriad contradictions women are faced with, and the accompanying traumas associated with gendered violence, objectification, histories of race and class oppression, and the pressures of transgressive identity, feminist women find themselves faced with a variety of what I refer to as forced choices on a daily basis. Throughout the bad feminist moments of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom, we see the authors express that they feel as if they are forced to choose between their raced and gendered identities, as well as between their potential for transgression and their personal needs and desires. In the rest of this chapter, I outline the ways in which the authors appear to be pulled in different directions, resulting in guilt, shame, and conflict that cause them to question their relationships to feminism.
While some of these moments result in feelings of guilt and shame for possible complicity in perpetuating structural inequality, others result in focused pushback against feminist ideals and practices that do not fulfill their promises of setting women free.
Racialized vs. Feminist Identities of Womanhood
The first forced choice I would like to examine is that of the authors' racial identities and histories versus their identities and beliefs as feminist women. Women's racial identities often do not align with what they believe to be ideal feminism, suggesting that ideal feminism, despite all 134 of its advances, is still viewed as white and centers the experiences of white women, whether it is intended to or not. Women of color grapple not only with their feminist identities and gender identities, but their racial and ethnic identities as well. It should not come as a surprise, then, that writers like Nelson, who dig deep into issues of gender and sexuality in women's experiences, do not feel the need to grapple with race in their work. Nelson's work, for instance, does not significantly explore her identity as a white woman. Although she acknowledges this position offhandedly in several spots, she does not feel the need to grapple extensively with her experiences as a white woman, nor feminism's misalignment with those experiences. Her work is written from an almost race-less perspective, rarely considering the role her own race plays in her bad feminist moments, never faced with the forced choice between feminist identity and racial identity.
For women of color, and black women in particular, the expression of bad feminist moments centers on this forced choice and the emotional toll it can take when faced with it on a daily basis. When McMillan Cottom brings up the statistics on how white people view black girls as older and more mature than they are, and as more knowledgeable about sex than their peers, she situates her own experiences authoethnographically, breaking apart feminist arguments that do not consider the differentiated traumas of sexual violence in black womanhood.79 Roxane Gay shares the direct trauma of her early experience with sexual violence in order to work through her personal feelings that do not always align with contemporary feminist practices and beliefs, expressing the shame, self-questioning, and feelings of personal failure within them.80 In doing so, she highlights the effects of rape culture not only on women in
79. McMillan Cottom, 187-88.
80. Gay, Bad Feminist, 147-53. 135 general, but on feminist women who desire to resist but do not always feel able to do so, especially given that feminists are faced with it on a daily basis. Through these moments, she also explores her experiences as a black woman who feels caught between her racial and gendered traumas, and doesn't always feel up to the task of facing the forced choices associated with them. Unlike Gay, who takes more a more self-effacing approach to her moments of misalignment with feminist practices and values by sharing her feelings of shame, McMillan
Cottom expresses her bad feminist moments rooted in the traumas of sexual violence unabashedly in order to draw attention to the very real disparities between contemporary feminist beliefs and practices regarding sexual violence against women and the lived experiences of black women. This, however, does not mean that McMillan Cottom does not express her personal feelings. She openly refers to the wounds that never heal from the insidious trauma of rape culture, the frustration of having to combat it daily in spaces in which she is supposed to feel safe
(such as with family and friends), and the pain of feminist practices that still often fail to consider the ways in which white women's experiences differ from the experiences of women of color.
One of the areas in which we see this conflict is in the bad feminist moments experienced by Gay and McMillan Cottom in regards to their consumptions of popular culture. As a black feminist woman who is also an academic writer, Gay's feminist beliefs often conflict or coincide with the insidious traumas of rape culture as well as the insidious traumas of historical racism.
These conflicting traumas are particularly evident in Gay's attitudes toward rap music. More than once, Gay indicates her guilt and shame over her enjoyment of rap music that demeans women.
In her explanation of the many things that she believes make her a bad feminist, the first item on her list is her music choice: “When I drive to work, I listen to thuggish rap at a very loud volume 136 even though the lyrics are degrading to women and offend me to my core...(I am mortified by my music choices).”81 The mortification Gay expresses in this bad feminist moment reveals that she feels forced to choose between cultural products that she identifies with as a black woman and the values and beliefs she adheres to as a feminist woman.
As woman of color who identifies as feminist, Gay appears to feel caught between issues of race and gender in her popular culture consumption. On the one hand, popular culture artifacts have historically offered simplistic, racist depictions of people of color that are rooted in white supremacy and capitalist individualism. Black women have had to navigate such narratives that not only diminish their existence as women, but as members of black communities. On the other hand, critics have historically pointed to traditionally black popular culture products, such as rap and hip-hop music, as emblematic of the misogyny of black men and the problematic nature of black masculinity. In response to such criticism, most of the research conducted by scholars of color on the relationships between black women and rap music has focused on complicating and disproving that legacy. Kevin Powell's Keeping' It Real: Post-MTV Reflections on Race, Sex, and
Politics situates the hip-hop generation within the structural obstacles they faced in the 1990s, suggesting the relationships within hip-hop culture are representative of both the historical and contemporary struggles of young black people in America.82 In When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist, Joan Morgan suggests rap music is essential to the black struggle against sexism “because it takes us straight to the front lines of the battlefield.”83
81. Gay, 315.
82. Kevin Powell, Keeping' It Real: Post-MTV Reflections on Race, Sex, and Politics (New York: Ballantine Books, 1997).
83. Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: My Life as a Hip-Hop Feminist (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 72. 137 The image of the battlefield Morgan conjures reminds readers that rap music does not exist in a
vacuum, but as black feminist theorists like bell hooks and Tricia Rose assert, reflects the
prevailing values created and sustained within a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.84 While
early feminist thinkers like hooks called on black feminists to speak out against sexism in rap
music and hip-hop culture, contemporary black feminists such as Eisa Davis and Gwendolyn
Pough address the potential for resistance through dialogue and a deeper understanding of the
relationships between black men and women within hip-hop communities.85 Feminist groups like
the Crunk Feminist Collective utilize the traditions and experiences of black women who grew
up in the hip-hop generation to carve out new forms of feminist collectivity.
Black feminists' relationships to rap music and hip-hop culture are not dichotomous,
however, as is revealed by autoethnographic works that focus on the feelings of black women
who love the genre. In To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism, Eisa
Davis situates the duality of hip-hop feminism in her discussion of her own dilemmas with the genre, suggesting that she is apparently forced to choose between "indignant innocence”
(demonstrated by buying Queen Latifah’s Black Reign) or “unenlightened guilt” (buying into
Snoop Doggy Dog’s Doggystyle).86 While Davis opts to approach the genre with humor,
claiming an acquired immunity to sexist lyrics, she does admit that “when sexist lyrics are not
84. bell hooks, “Gangsta Culture—Sexism and Misogyny: Who Will Take the Rap?,” in Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, bell hooks (New York: Routledge, 1994), 115-24.; Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).
85. Eisa Davis, To Be Real: Changing the Face of Feminism (New York: Anchor Books, 1995).; Gwendolyn Pough, Check It While I Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004).
86. Davis, To Be Real, 131. 138 self-conscious but instead are full of vitriol and anger, they do still hurt, they still feel real.”87 For
Davis, the issue is not that she feels pain, but that the pain she feels does nothing to solve the
problem; it only helps her to diagnose it.
Gay's discussions of her contradictory enjoyment of popular culture that diminishes her
existence demonstrates the ways in which the pain of feminist diagnoses of objectification in
popular culture can leave women of color feeling ambivalent and sometimes even guilty about
their popular culture consumption. In discussing comedian Richard Pryor, Gay shares her
conflicted feelings of enjoyment and guilt because of his rape jokes. Gay notes:
I am painfully reminded of how bad a feminist I am when I consider someone like Richard Pryor. He was a comic genius. I am always floored by how he tackled the complexities of race with his humor. Pryor was also flagrantly abusive toward the women he loved. His brilliance cannot be overlooked. That's what I tell myself, but then I imagine all the hurt he caused and how rarely that hurt is discussed. That may be the saddest thing of all. 88
Gay pairs this reflection with a discussion of the perpetuation of rape culture in rap music, stating, “As much as it pains me to admit it, I like these songs.”89 In both instances, Gay
describes her admissions of enjoyment as painful, indicating that her bad feminist moments are emotionally conflicted, rooted in anxiety over her personal enjoyment of popular culture that violates her feminist sensibilities as a woman but also speaks to her experiences as a person of color.
It is in the painfulness of these moments that Gay gets to the root of the conflict; the choices feminist women are forced to make between their cultural identities. As a black woman,
87. Davis, 137.
88. Gay, Bad Feminist, 187-88.
89. Gay, 187. 139 Gay is not only confronted with pop culture that is rooted in histories of violence toward women, but that is also steeped in histories of violence toward people of color. As seen in Gay's discussion of her feelings towards Pryor's work, she is clearly conflicted not only about the possibility of her own complicity in rape culture, but also about the choice she is forced to make between identifying with his humor based on her experiences as a black person, and disidentifying with his humor based on her experiences as a woman. Not only a woman nor only a black woman, Gay is also a scholar and a writer with strong feelings regarding censorship. She appears to be more comfortable falling back on her position as a writer to describe the conflict she is experiencing when she states, “I still hate rape jokes, but I hate censorship more. I hate that I have to choose.”90 Note how Gay indicates that she feels she has to choose. The choice is forced onto her. As a black feminist woman who is also an academic writer, Gay's feminist beliefs often conflict or coincide with the insidious traumas of rape culture as well as the insidious traumas of historical racism, resulting in moments of forced choice.91
In McMillan Cottom's work, the anxiety experienced over being a bad feminist is not expressed through guilt or shame, but rather through the delineation between herself and other black feminists. When McMillan Cottom discusses her reaction to a skit performed by black woman comedian Leslie Jones on Saturday Night Live. In the skit, Jones's character laments her sad dating life, stating:
See, I’m single right now, but back in the slave days, I would have never been single. I’m six feet tall and I’m strong, Colin. Strong! I mean, look at me, I’m a mandingo... I’m just saying that back in the slave days, my love life would have been way better. Massa would
90. Gay, 188.
91. In Chapter 5, I explore the tensions between being an academic and a feminist in more detail. 140 have hooked me up with the best brother on the plantation. I would be the number one slave draft pick.92
The skit received significant backlash from viewers across social media platforms, who called it
tone deaf and criticized Jones and the SNL writer team for pandering to white viewers.93
McMillan Cottom wrote a response to the backlash at the time in an article entitled “Here, a
Hypocrite Lives: I Probably Got It Wrong on Leslie Jones but I Tried.” 94 She reflects on the experience in Thick as well, suggesting that she differed from other black respondents on the point of the video. She describes how this point of view makes her “something different” from
other well-known black feminists:
Not a single black woman that I read or followed seemed to empathize with Jones's obvious pain, whereas I had not been able to watch the video clip without pausing several times. Where others saw insult, I saw injury. The joke was not on enslaved black women of yesteryear but on the idea that it would take a totalizing system of enslavement to counter the structural violence that beauty does to Jones in her life today. Perhaps I caught what others missed because I am something different from Patricia Hill Collins or Joan Morgan or other important black women scholars of black feminism.95
92. Saturday Night Live, Season 39, Episode 19, “Weekend Update: Leslie Jones,” featuring Leslie Jones and Colin Jost, aired May 4, 2014, https://www.nbc.com/saturday-night- live/video/weekend-update-leslie-jones/2779226.
93. Michael Martin, host, “Viewers Not Laughing About SNL Slavery Skit,” Tell Me More (podcast), May 6, 2014, accessed 03/02/2020, https://www.npr.org/2014/05/06/310099294/viewers-not-laughing-about-snl-slavery-skit.
94. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Here, a Hypocrite Lives: I Probably Got it Wrong on Leslie Jones, but I Tried,” tressiemc.com, Accessed January 13, 2019, https://tressiemc.com/uncategorized/here-a-hypocrite-lives-i-probably-get-it-wrong-on-leslie- jones-but-i-tried/.
95. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 51. 141 She goes on to situate herself as “physically and culturally” black, rural, Southern, and dark- skinned, all qualities which she believes disqualify her from the ranks of “professionally smart people,” including the black feminist scholars she admires.96
The bad feminist moments of Gay and McMillan Cottom as they pertain to popular culture reflect the ambivalence, resignation, and depletion that can stem from existing in a world that forces them to choose between their raced and gendered identities, positing them traitors to whichever identity category they don't prioritize in the moment. The pain associated with popular culture that degrades and objectifies black women often contradicts the enjoyment of those very same products, as they reflect experiences and histories that shape black women's experiences.
Individual Desire vs. Collective Transgression
The second forced choice evident in the bad feminist moments of Gay, McMillan
Cottom, and Nelson is between the authors’ individual desires and the pressures of collective transgression. Sara Ahmed suggests that the burden of transgression is placed on the shoulders of the marginalized who do not inhabit existing norms, and that a “desire for a more normal life does not necessarily mean identification with norms, but can be a desire to avoid the exhaustion of having to insist just to exist.”97 We see evidence of this burden of transgression and desire for normality to avoid the exhaustion of constantly going against the grain in Gay's frustration over being forced to choose between complicity and censorship. While Gay's annoyance over being forced to choose gets passed over rather quickly and inconsequentially, we see several other
96. McMillan Cottom, 51-53
97. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 122. 142 moments throughout the works of all three authors that further exemplify the impacts of the pressure to be transgressive simply due to one's identity categories.
The pressures of being transgressive are particularly resonant in the work of Maggie
Nelson, who situates queer experiences as simultaneously personal and public, reflecting on the pressures placed upon those who identify as queer to be transgressive simply due to the fact that they are queer: “People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself, but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure beings to bear down hard upon it.”98 Nelson points out the societal binaries of normative and transgressive identities and shares the ways in which such binaries are untenable for queer people. The pressure to always choose transgression at the expense of individual desire, she maintains, belies the nature of personal desire in queer identity. As she maintains, “it's the binary of normative/transgressive that's unsustainable, along with the demand that anyone live a life that's all one thing.”99 In the bad feminist moments of Nelson, Gay, and
McMillan Cottom, we see responses to the pressure of being “all one thing,” whether that “one thing” be gay, straight, woman, man, black, white, or even feminist. Bad feminist moments that reflect this pressure then, can serve as reminder that feminist women, perhaps especially so, do not hold one identity at any one time, nor are they always, continuously capable of acting transgressively without considering personal needs and desires. To expect such, as Nelson reminds us, is unsustainable for women, and for humanity in general.
98. Nelson, The Argonauts, 74.
99. Nelson, 74. 143 In an age of neoliberalism that emphasizes personal achievement and self-perfection,
transgressive identity is situated within personal choices, making feminists feel as if their
feminism rests on ideals of personal behavior. Since many contemporary feminist ideals are
rooted in women’s self-improvement and personal strength, the pressures to perform feminism in
one’s personal life are the very pressures that deplete them as people. Gay expresses this in her
explanation of what makes her a bad feminist:
Because I have so many deeply held opinions about gender equality, I feel a lot of pressure to live up to certain ideals. I am supposed to be a good feminist who is having it all, doing it all. Really, though, I'm a woman in her thirties struggling to accept herself and her credit score. For so long I told myself I was not this woman—utterly human and flawed. I worked overtime to be anything but this woman, and it was exhausting and unsustainable and even harder than simply embracing who I am.100
In this passage, Gay illustrates the toll it can take to live up to perceived ideals of feminism.
However, she also illustrates the ways in which these ideals are situated in personal choice rather
than collective action. To be a “good feminist” is to have it all (job, family, money, happiness,
etc.) and to “do it all” (perform the multiple roles women are expected to take in Lean In
feminist culture). In attempting to live up to neoliberal ideals as feminist ideals, Gay finds herself
depleted. Gay sees herself as torn between feminist ideals of personal, continuous defiance of norms and her own humanity.
Such an emphasis on personal feelings and choices in ideal feminism that lead to forced
choices between transgression and individual survival can manifest as feeling torn between feminist knowledge and anti-feminist feeling. Let us return to Nelson’s story of being stalked by the man who had read her book on the murder of her aunt. While Nelson shares her feminist beliefs regarding gendered violence and the rape culture that perpetuates it when discussing the
100. Gay, Bad Feminist, 316-17. 144 merging histories of violence, she still can't shake the feeling that she is somehow at fault for daring to share a story of such violence. To be a good feminist, to Nelson, is to not only to understand the social structures that shape women’s histories of trauma, but it is also to refuse to give in to the sense of personal responsibility for gendered violence that has shaped her since childhood. To be a good feminist, in this sense, is to be mentally and emotionally resilient, to overcome the traumatic impacts of normalized violence, to be individually transgressive in one’s mindset. This aligns with much of the neoliberal feminist rhetoric that requires women to be personally resilient and empowered, personally transgressing against patriarchal systems of oppression.
In some bad feminist moments, feminists respond to the pressure to be continuously transgressive with lighthearted humor, reminding readers that they too are human, and demonstrating the almost comical experience of being simultaneously feminist and flawed. As described above in Gay's discussion of rap music, feminists may laugh off their personal tastes as simply “mortifying,” resigning themselves to feelings of irresolvable (or perhaps not-yet- resolvable) guilt.101 In other moments, feminists may opt to hide their choices from others in the name of transgressive performance. For example, McMillan Cottom describes the ability of her trashcan to hold multiple Amazon boxes at once, which is:
…good because I am really working on being a socialist black feminist. It would help if my comrades did not see my Amazon Prime boxes in my trash can. As it is, I am careful never to link to my book page on Amazon or take a selfie where you can see the traitorous blue tag in the background. I made that book link mistake once on social media and I am still apologizing for not linking to the unionized Powell's bookstore.102
101. Gay, 315.
102. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 203. 145 The fact that McMillan Cottom is willing to bring up these habits in her book indicates that she
doesn't take these hiding behaviors too seriously; they simply demonstrate her humanity.
However, in describing how careful she is to maintain the appearance of continuous transgression, she reveals the ways in which the pressure to always behave transgressively encourages her to simply hide her choices, rather than have to explain herself to others. As she reminds us in this passage, socially transgressive groups, such as feminist groups, police and correct each other for personal choices that suggest complicity in dominant social structures.
Therefore, as a socialist black feminist, McMillam Cottom is not only faced with forced choices over her popular culture consumption, but the ways in which she consumes them as well. Even the most unabashedly feminist of women sometimes just want free two-day shipping, even if they have to hide it in order to maintain their feminist image.
The emotional toll of being forced to choose between racial and gender identities as well as individual desires and collective resistance appears to contribute to the insidious traumas experienced by feminists in ways that, to quote Gay again, diminish their very existences.
Ahmed suggests that, although feminism calls for women not to shrug off or ignore sexism and racism, the pervasiveness of both can make it difficult to survive without doing so:
Sometimes: surviving the relentlessness of sexism as well as racism might require that you shrug it off, by not naming it or even by learning not to experience those actions as violations of your own body; learning to expect that violence as just part of ordinary life; making that fatalism your fate.103
The consequences of calling out and resisting the ongoing violence against women and people of
color can feel too great, too much, or too often. While Ahmed suggests that it is the feminist
imperative to “teach ourselves not to shrug things off,” she also illustrates the difficulty in doing
103. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 36. 146 so to remind us that there are often consequences for which feminists are not always ready.104
For instance, when stealing a moment of enjoyment from music, humor, literature, or free shipping.
The Limitations of Privilege in Personal Experience
As we have seen, the choices between salient identities that feminist women are forced to make are rooted in assumptions about which bodies are considered transgressive, as well as which bodies get to be transgressive. Bad feminist moments can only reveal how individual feminists are coping with these forced choices in relation to their personal experiences with marginalized identities and histories. They cannot speak for other marginalized identities. This is perhaps why Nelson does not feel the need to engage critically with issues of race, or why Gay and McMillan Cottom do not significantly confront issues of sexuality. Although Gay identifies as bisexual, she rarely refers to this in Bad Feminist, speaking primarily about the forced choices between her identities as a woman, a black American, second-generation Haitian-American, a feminist, and an academic. The romantic encounters she describes are all heterosexual, and her feminist conflicts are often in regard to her complicated relationships with men. This indicates that these identities, the ones that are most sharply visible in her life, are those with which she most closely identifies. The same goes for McMillan Cottom, who primarily focuses on the choices she is forced to make between her identities as a woman, a black American, a descendant of poverty, a socialist black feminist, an academic, and a public intellectual. Both mention issues of sexuality in their texts, but virtually none of their bad feminist moments contend with issues of sexual identity. Nelson, on the other hand, focuses almost solely on her identities as a woman, a queer person, an academic, and a writer. Although she is cisgender, she does trouble gender
104. Ahmed, 36. 147 frequently in her text, perhaps because this is her field of study or because of her experiences
with Harry, her recently transitioned partner. Much like the ways in which race colors most of
the bad feminist moments experienced by Gay and McMillan Cottom, queer identity and
sexuality pervade the bad feminist moments expressed by Nelson.
Each author, however, is not without their attendant privileges, and those privileges do
structure their texts. Ahmed argues the walls of oppression reveal the materiality of race and
gender, but this materiality is not something every body comes up against. That which an
individual considers material “can be understood as an enactment of privilege,” that reveals not
only what individuals have personal experience with, but also what individuals do not.105 Ahmed
further explains, “Race might seem immaterial or less material if you are white; gender might
seem immaterial or less material if you are a cis man; sexuality might seem immaterial or less
materials if you are straight; (dis)ability might seem immaterial or less material if you are able-
bodied, and so on.”106 I would not say that Gay, McMillan Cottom, or Nelson consider any
aspect of marginalized identity to be immaterial. Nelson, for instance, consistently refers to the
racist histories of academic scholarship. Gay and McMillan Cottom also briefly refer to issues of
sexuality in their discussions of histories of oppression. These authors do, however, seem to consider the marginalized identity categories occupied by themselves and those they love to be somewhat more material to their concerns as feminists. They each hold, along with their marginalized identities, the privileges associated with normative identities, those categories which are assumed to be default experiences. For example, none of them explicitly refers to issues of ability. Even though McMillan Cottom refers to the “birth defect” of being
105. Ahmed, 147-48.
106. Ahmed, 148. 148 simultaneously “bowlegged and pigeon-toed,” she considers her disability through the lens of
race rather than ability.107 She focuses on how she adapted to appear “like a normal person,”
suggesting that she still does not walk “normally,” but that she also does not walk like she is
“deformed,” language that is generally considered ableist in its assumption that disability is
abnormal, and that there is a default setting for physical normality.108 If she had considered this
adaptation through the lens of accessibility, she might have found interesting intersections
between race and ability that queried the concept of “normal.”
Bad feminist moments (and lack thereof) in these texts reveal the ways in which personal
experience and privilege shape one’s feminist concerns. This might be why each author refers to
their own privileges at least once in their texts. Nelson, for example, reflects on the nature of
privilege as it relates to personal experience:
I am interested in offering up my experience and performing my particular manner of thinking, for whatever they are worth. I would also like to cop easily to my abundant privilege—except that the notion of privilege as something to which one could 'easily cop' as in 'cop to and be done with' is ridiculous. Privilege saturates, privilege structures.109
In this passage, Nelson reminds readers privilege moves throughout one’s life from moment to
moment, saturating one’s personal experiences and structuring the world around them. It shapes how feminists interact with the world, and it influences which feminist causes they concern themselves with. To admit to one’s privilege is important, but to use acceptance of privilege to dismiss it defeats the purpose of that acceptance. Perhaps, then, since bad feminist moments are
107. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 13.
108. McMillan Cottom, 13-14.
109. Nelson, The Argonauts, 7. 149 rooted in personal experiences, they can offer opportunities to identify and grapple with one’s
own privileges.
For Nelson, McMillan Cottom, and Gay, privilege appears at different moments, in
different scenarios. It is not something they can easily dismiss. Therefore, in many of the bad
feminist moments in which the authors do not feel capable of grappling with a concern that is not
their own, they turn to an explanation of their own privileges to better understand the limitations
of their personal experiences. Gay actually expresses her relationship to privilege in a bad
feminist moment, admitting that “My life has been far from perfect, but it's somewhat
embarrassing for me to accept just how much privilege I have.”110 It is not the fact that Gay has
privilege that causes her shame, but the acceptance of those privileges. To Gay, a good feminist
should not have that much privilege. However, Gay does not stop there. The feeling of shame
she expresses brings her to a deeper reflection on what privilege really is and how it operates.
She utilizes this bad feminist moment to explore the contested nature of privilege in sharing
personal experience:
When someone writes from experience, there is often someone else, at the ready, pointing a trembling finger, accusing that writer of having various kinds of privilege. How dare someone speak to a personal experience without accounting for every possible configuration of privilege or the lack thereof? We would live in a world of silence if the only people who were allowed to write or speak from experience or about difference were those absolutely without privilege.111
Like Nelson, Gay argues that privilege saturates personal experiences. To speak from experience means to speak with one’s attending privileges. Gay translates this reflection on privilege into a call to rethink how we talk about it and utilize it:
110. Gay, Bad Feminist, 16.
111. Gay, 18. 150 We should be able to say, “This is my truth,” and have that truth stand without a hundred clamoring voices shouting, giving the impression that multiple truths cannot coexist. Because at some point, doesn’t privilege become beside the point? Privilege is relative and contextual…If you are reading this essay, you have some kind of privilege. It may be hard to hear that, I know, but if you cannot recognize your privilege, you have a lot of work to do; get started.112
Gay reminds readers that privilege not only saturates the experiences of those who write from
personal experience, but it also saturates the experiences of those who dismiss others’
experiences based on perceptions of privilege. Bad feminist moments can reveal the relational, contextual nature of privilege. And, as in the case of Gay, they can also be used to remind others of their own privileges, encouraging readers to recognize them.
Bad feminist moments can not only be used to encourage others to recognize their own
privileges, but to also utilize them for feminist aims. McMillan Cottom refers to her education
and ability to “talk like white folks” as a sort of privilege that she could “loan out” to others in
her community.113 Privilege, to McMillan Cottom, is not necessarily a barrier to feminism, but is
actually a responsibility. She discusses her own privileges and the responsibility she feels to
utilize them to help others:
Occasionally I am asked to hold forth on being a woman academic. Then, as now, I am always clear that I am an exception to many rules. I do not have children or a spouse. I am not yet a full-time caregiver for my parents. I do not come from money. I am, in many ways, the people I study. I have six-figure student loan debt, did not have a credit card that could buy an airline ticket until maybe three years ago, and I obsessively hoard loose change so that I can at least have more than the roughly $300 in the bank that the typical black woman in the United States does not have in savings. Still, I am high-earning. I may work five jobs to afford it, but I can, on occasion, pay a student to edit a paper or an on-demand worker to deliver my groceries. With the privilege to read and to think comes great responsibility. When you have that privilege precisely because so many others like
112. Gay, 19.
113. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 162. 151 you—black women—are systematically filtered out of every level of social status, then the responsibility is especially great.114
This bad feminist moment differs from Gay’s. While Gay expresses her guilt over privilege to interrogate how it is perceived, McMillan Cottom expresses no such guilt. Instead, she expresses
a feeling of responsibility. McMillan Cottom not only believes pr ivilege is relational and contextual, but she also believes it can be harnessed and used. In fact, she argues that some
privilege is meant to be used, such as the privilege of education.
Bad feminist moments based on privilege, as well as the lack of bad feminist moments
that address concerns that one does not have direct experience with, reveal feminists’ fraught relationships to privilege. Privilege shapes what feminists find to be material, and thus it should
come as no surprise that each of the authors in this study do not significantly engage with aspects
of identity that they have the privilege of not engaging with. However, in sharing these bad feminist moments with others, feminists might also be issuing a rallying cry for other feminists
to recognize and utilize their own privileges. The forced choices that are revealed in bad feminist
moments are flavored by the privileges each author experiences. This does not mean that they are
not grappling with those privileges, however, as evidenced by their nuanced discussions of the nature of privilege in sharing personal experiences of trauma.
Functions of Bad Feminist Moments in Trauma-Based Crisis
In the works of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom, bad feminist moments (and the
subsequent lack thereof in some respects) reflect the direct and insidious traumas of existing as feminist woman along with myriad other identities that one is forced to choose between from
moment to moment. In reading them as such, these moments can be read as moments of trauma-
114. McMillan Cottom, 30-31. 152 based crisis, in which feminists engage in feminist misattunement, feminist shattering, feminist ambivalence, and cruel pessimism. In some moments, the authors reflect on their relationships with feminism to question feminist practices and ideals, acting “out of tune” with other feminists and/or nonfeminists in ways that make room for improvement and change. These moments of misattunement within feminism can be seen as moments of cruel pessimism, in which feminists reject the promises of happiness and safety in mainstream practices and ideals that ultimately detract from the larger project of equality. In other moments, the authors find themselves in situations where they are not yet ready or capable of engaging in such pushback, instead approaching moments in which their very being threatens to "shatter" against the walls of oppression and trauma. Sometimes these moments result in humorous dismissal, but they also often result in contradictory feelings of ambivalence or resignation that offer the writers time and space to think through and articulate their relationships to feminist ideals and practices.
Feminist Misattunement
For many women, it is trauma that brings them to feminism, but that does not mean that the traumas they experience disappear or heal because one has become feminist. However, these traumas can often cause moments in which they feel incapable of engaging with feminism to the standards of what they consider ideal feminism. These authors’ bad feminist moments based in trauma often morph into something more. Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson utilize moments in which they feel incapable of being feminist enough or agreeing with other feminists to question the utility of commonly accepted feminist practices and explore the roles that personal needs and desires play in their feminist experiences. When feminists push back against mainstream feminist practices, they appear to be out of tune with other feminists in order to question and subvert practices that might not benefit all, even if they appear to do so. Ahmed 153 situates the perceptions of feminists speaking out as “misatttunement,” the perception that feminists are “out of tune” with others, resulting in a “mishandling” of things they are supposed to be in tune with.115 She further suggests that feminist misattunement is not only being out of
sync with the oppressive structures around feminists, as well as the people who perpetuate them,
but that to experience misatttunement is also “to experience what is in tune as violence.”116 A
prime example of this misattunement can be seen in McMillan Cottom's Thick, in which she tells
the story of speaking out against rape culture with the men in her life about the accusations of
child molestation against R. Kelly in the early 2000s, a moment of speaking out which was
immediately assumed by those around her to be the product of irrational female rage, ruining the
fun associated with objectifying women and misunderstanding the situation:
I remember the stories about Aaliyah. I fought with friends, men I adored and respected, when videotapes of R. Kelly having sex with what appeared to be an underage girl were being peddled on street corners. At a house party, the men laughed when I announced I didn't want us to watch the video, but they finally acquiesced when I displayed the telltale signs of female rage. It was as if a ‘crazy woman’ was a fair reason not to watch child pornography, but my request was not.117
In McMillan Cottom's stories, we often see the feminist killjoy unflinchingly speaking out against oppression. However, when discussing the effects of these moments, she reveals the underlying traumas associated with perpetually being perceived as the problem in a world in which women are faced with daily violence from the men they care about. This toll is not simply
exhaustion or frustration, but the ongoing trauma of being faced with men that women love, but
115. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 40-41.
116. Ahmed, 41.
117. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 181-82. 154 who see women as property. When what is “in tune” is a culture of rape and victim blaming, then misattunement is to experience the violence of that culture again and again.118
This misattunement in a world that perpetuates rape culture in the fabric that comprises women’s experiences can also contribute to moments of bad feminism. When feminists experience misattunement as violence in relation to cultural artifacts, this does not always remove the pleasure they take away from those artifacts. They make up the very ground they walk on. Take Roxane Gay’s relationship with popular culture, for example. When discussing rap music, she reflects on a bad feminist moment that exemplifies both the violence of being out of tune with specific aspects of it and the pleasure of being in tune with other aspects: “We have all manner of music glorifying the degradation of women, and damnit that music is catchy so I often find myself singing along as my very being is diminished.”119 Gay is not referring to only rap music, although she does spend the most time on that genre. She refers to the pervasive degradation of women that influences all genres of music, reminding readers that rap music is not the only issue. She admits to the contradictory experience of enjoying music that is influenced by rape culture as simultaneously pleasurable and diminishing. She experiences the violence of rape culture again and again, but she often finds herself getting caught up in the pleasure of the experience that music brings, even while experiencing the violence it perpetuates.
Feminists are made up of the cultures in which they grow up, even when those cultures are designed to diminish and subjugate them. Therefore, moments of misattunement do not
118. In Chapter 4, I return to the effects this has on feminist relationships and the influence of feminist relationships on bad feminist moments, but for now I choose to focus on the trauma associated with gendered violence perpetuated by those feminists care about.
119. Gay, Bad Feminist, ix 155 necessarily result in dismissal or separation from that culture. The same could be said for the
cultures of feminist movements.
In bad feminist moments, feminists often find their own experiences of trauma to be not
only out of tune with mainstream culture, but also out of tune with mainstream feminism. For
example, in the discussion of her empathetic stance on Leslie Jones's SNL performance,
McMillan Cottom situates herself as “something different” from other black feminist scholars.
Out of tune with those who lambasted SNL and Jones for trivializing histories of slavery and
sexual violence against black women, McMillan Cottom suggests that her identification with
Jones's apparent trauma that stems from the daily objectification of women’s bodies along raced
and classed lines allows her unique insight into the narrative. In doing so, McMillan Cottom is enabled to demonstrate how Jones’s performance aligns with rather than trivializes the historical traumas of sexual violence and objectification faced by black women in America. In short, by allowing herself room to be out of tune with mainstream feminism, McMillan Cottom is able to empathize with another women’s experience and shed some light on an underdiscussed issue within mainstream feminist movements.
While misattunement with mainstream feminism allows the authors to see things from different perspectives, this does not mean that it causes them to wholly reject or disavow feminist beliefs or practices. While acting out of tune with rape culture might come with attendant contradictory feelings of pleasure, acting out of tune with feminist culture often comes with a desire to understand other feminist positions. In order to do this, feminists must question their own understandings and engage in feminist reflexivity to better situate their stances. Bad feminist moments offer that chance at reflexivity. Take, for instance, Gay's discussion regarding
the common contemporary feminist practice of issuing "trigger warnings,” or notifying 156 audiences of potentially PTSD-triggering material in cultural artifacts, such as rape scenes,
before they watch/read/listen to them. Gay explores the ongoing post-traumatic stress symptoms
she has experienced since her childhood rape to question this practice:
Many feminist communities use trigger warnings, particularly in online forums when discussing rape, sexual abuse, and violence. By using these warnings, these communities are saying, “This is a safe space. We will protect you from unexpected reminders of your history.” Members of these communities are given the illusion that they can be protected.120
Gay falls out of tune with a common feminist practice due to her personal experiences of trauma,
but she does not do so without questioning the source of this misattunement. Gay recognizes the
influence of trauma on her ability to understand a particular feminist practice: “I don't know how
to see beyond this belief [that safety does not exist] to truly get why trigger warnings are
necessary”121 She characterizes her inability to understand as a feminist failing: “I don't feel safe.
I don't feel protected. Instead, I am surprised there are still people who believe in safety and
protection despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is my failing. But.”122 This is obviously a bad feminist moment, as she characterizes her inability to act in tune with other feminists as a personal failing. However, the pivotal “but” that follows this statement suggests that Gay is not willing to simply accept herself as a failed feminist. Instead, she wishes to utilize this perceived failing to offer a more nuanced understanding of the purpose and usefulness of issuing trigger warnings in an age where women are never really safe from the traumas of sexual violence. She ends the essay with her explanation of this complicated stance that some feminist beliefs simply aren't for everybody:
120. Gay, Bad Feminist, 149.
121. Gay, 152.
122. Gay, 153. 157 I do recognize that in some spaces, we have to err on the side of safety or the illusion thereof. Trigger warnings aren't meant for those of us who don't believe in them, just like the Bible wasn't written for atheists. Trigger warnings are designed for the people who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from. But still. There will always be a finger on the trigger. No matter how hard we try, there's no way to step out of the line of fire.123
Cruel Pessimism
While it appears in the above passage that Gay is simply opting out of a common feminist
practice based on her personal experience, Gay's inquiry into the practice of issuing trigger
warnings and her own relationship to the practice can also be read as what Ahmed refers to as an
expression of feminist cruel pessimism. Ahmed's idea of cruel pessimism stems from Lauren
Berlant's theory of cruel optimism, a relation that exists “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.”124 The objects, practices, and life stage events one attaches themselves to because they promise a better life cannot, in and of themselves, actually produce that better life. As Berlant suggests, it is the fantasy of the better life that needs to be interrogated, as it is often the fantasy that impedes progress or change. To Berlant, optimism is not inherently cruel but can become cruel when “...the object/scene that ignites a sense of
possibility actually makes it impossible to attain the expansive transformation for which a person
or a people risks striving.”125 Just as Gay demonstrates the potential of trigger warnings to foster
a feeling of safety while simultaneously keeping that safety from ever actually being realized,
scenes of cruel optimism offer the promise of a life that is less diminishing (such as a safer life
123. Gay, 153.
124. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (London: Duke University Press, 2011), 1.
125. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 2. 158 for traumatized women) while compromising one's capacity to realize such a life, or even to
imagine an idea of it.
In reading this particular bad feminist moment as a form of feminist cruel pessimism,
Gay's expression of her complicated relationship with trigger warnings appears less like personal
preference and more like feminist snap. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed frames the feminist
killjoy as a scene of cruel optimism, “which is all the more cruel as it rests on a pessimism: not
only are her attachments judged as not working, as diminishing her own life as well as the lives
of others, they stop her from being attached to, or reattaching to, a better script, one that would
lead her in a happier direction.”126 In her bad feminist moment, Gay suggests the practice of
issuing trigger warnings is not particularly harmful in and of itself, but she locates the harm in
the illusion that they create safe spaces. There are no safe spaces, in Gay’s mind. Until there are,
Gay feels feminists are not doing women any favors by fostering this illusion. The presumed
happier direction of safety is nonexistent. In questioning feminist investments, feminists
demonstrate a willingness to let a bond “snap,” or break apart, a willingness that Ahmed argues
can be understood as a form of cruel pessimism.127 I would not say that Gay allows her bond to
feminism snap in this scene, but she does appear to suggest that feminists could demonstrate a
willingness to snap away from the illusion of safety the practice offers. Gay has failed to become
attached to the idea of safety in a world that is designed to ensure that women are never really
safe, but she does not outright dismiss the usefulness of trigger warnings for individuals. The
bond to the illusion is the problem for Gay. It is this bond that she proposes feminists be willing
to allow to snap. In autoethnographically situating her trauma within a society structured by
126. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 195.
127. Ahmed, 195. 159 gendered violence, Gay illuminates the illusory nature of any individualistic belief or practice that optimistically promises safety for women within it. No matter how hard one tries to adhere to illusions of safety for the sake of women's survival and coping within such a society, Gay reminds her readers, these practices do not remove the proverbial hand from the trigger. Gay's misattunement might make her feel like she is “failing” as a feminist, but it offers her a viewpoint from which to interrogate feminist practices by allowing her to speak from a place of feminist cruel pessimism without dismissing the perspectives and experiences of others. Feminist snap may not always be literal in that it may not always result in the release of a bond. Instead, perhaps it is simply demonstrating a willingness to let it snap in light of its limitations and potential harm.
Shattering Moments
Feminist snap is not always something that feminists choose, but often the decision to allow a bond to snap is chosen for them in an effort to cope with experiences of shattering against the walls of oppression. Bad feminist moments can also be seen as moments in which feminists find themselves not yet ready or capable of engaging in pushback, whether against mainstream societal norms or mainstream feminist ideals. Ahmed suggests that the journey of becoming feminist is littered with moments in which feminists’ very beings threaten to “shatter” against the walls of oppression and trauma.128 Becoming feminist does not mean becoming impervious to shattering in moments when one is faced with the walls of oppression, but it might mean that one chooses their battles in accordance with their own abilities and feelings of depletion in the moment, even though battles frequently choose them. To be shattered can be “to experience the costs of our own fragility: to break, to reach a breaking point,” and Ahmed
128. Ahmed, 22. 160 suggests that feminists can be quite inventive when dealing with breakages in order to survive
and find ways to keep going even when exhausted and depleted by coming up against walls
again and again.129 Feelings of depletion, resignation, and ambivalence can arise from repeated shattering moments, both within and outside of mainstream feminist movements. In a shattering moment, there is often a “too,” an assumption of being too breakable, too fragile, too something or another.130 In the works of McMillan, Cottom, Nelson, and Gay, we see each author point to
the ways in which they are too fragile, too aware of the traumas they suffer the effects of, too
much. McMillan Cottom talks about how being “too much” for the white women who
disciplined her for her black body growing up shaped her abilities to trust white women, not to
mention how it shaped her relationship to her body.131 Gay reflects on how her experience with rape leaves her too fragile to believe in trigger warnings.132 Nelson suggests she was too afraid
of her stalker to think in an “enlightened” feminist manner about rape culture, instead blaming
herself for inviting violence into her life.133 Each of these authors assumes themselves to be too
something or another to engage with feminism in the ways they believe they are supposed to or
expected to. Bad feminist moments often reveal walls against which the authors do not always
feel ready to bang their heads against for the millionth time. As I demonstrate below, sometimes
these moments result in humorous dismissal, but sometimes they result in contradictory feelings
129. Ahmed, 163.; By “depletion,” Ahmed refers to “a material as well as embodied phenomenon of not having the energy to keep going in the face of what you come up against.”
130. Ahmed, 164.
131. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 7, 40-41.
132. Gay, Bad Feminist, 149-51.
133. Nelson, The Argonauts, 117. 161 of ambivalence or resignation that allow the authors the time and space to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their relationships to feminism.
Ambivalence
Some of these shattering moments produce contradictions that result in feelings of ambivalence the authors use to give themselves time and space to explore and articulate their relationships to feminism. Clare Hemmings suggests “in imagining that we know how to ameliorate gendered, racial, and sexual inequalities, or indeed what gender, race, and sexuality are, it is easy to miss the profound ambivalence about these terms and the inequalities of pleasures that cluster around them.”134 To Hemmings, a politics of ambivalence indicates a struggle to articulate the unknown while still committing to it. In situating ambivalence as struggle rather than inaction or opting-out, one can see the ways in which bad feminist moments that result in ambivalence do not necessarily reflect a lack of engagement with feminism, but a struggle to articulate feminist ideals while still committing to them. As Ahmed suggests, feminists might need time, or “wiggle room,” to react in situations and think through them before responding or reacting.135 The ambivalence that arises in bad feminist moments can be viewed as attempts at achieving the wiggle room necessary to engage in the struggle of articulating one's views and feelings, as well as articulating how they fit within the larger projects of feminism. As we see in the works of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson, however, this wiggle room does not always result in definitive action or an idea of the ideal way to handle a situation. However, it
134. Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist Political Ambivalence and the Imaginative Archive (London: Duke University Press, 2018), 5.
135. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 173. 162 demonstrates a willingness to do so that might buy them some time to engage in further
reflection and do so later.
This ambivalence based in the contradictions produced by direct and insidious trauma is
evident across the texts of all three authors. The “ inequalities of pleasures that cluster around”
the experiences of gender, race, and sexuality are reflected in the contradictions of pleasure and trauma that shape many of the authors’ bad feminist moments.136 Gay's ambivalence toward
popular culture is both a result of the traumas of gendered and raced violence and a product of
the pleasures associated with the cultural artifacts that perpetuate such violence. McMillan
Cottom's desire for literature that reflects stories of black womanhood both fulfills her need for
identification and reinforces narratives of black womanhood shaped by sexual violence. Nelson's
stance on child rape in stories of female sexuality is complicated by her enjoyment of them, as
we see in her identification with Munro's work. The insidious traumas of sexual violence start in
girlhood and shape women's attitudes and feelings toward themselves and others around them,
generating an ambivalence toward rape culture that situates women as both accomplice and
victim, whether they want to be or not.
Nelson's The Argonauts zeroes in on the particular brand of ambivalence that arises out
of traumas that begin in girlhood and extend into womanhood. Nelson points to the contradictory
feelings of being both victim and accomplice in a moment, drawing from the stories she read as a
young girl to explain the double bind of feeling like both victim and accomplice in sexual
assaults in her discussion of reading Alice Munro's Wild Swans:
In just a few short pages, Munro lays it all out: how the force of one's adolescent curiosity and incipient lust often must war with the need to protect oneself from disgusting and wicked violators, how pleasure can coexist with awful degradation without meaning the degradation was justified or a species of wish fulfillment; how it
136. Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman, 5. 163 feels to be both accomplice and victim; and how such ambivalence can live on in an adult sexual life.137
Echoing Gay’s feelings on popular culture, Nelson utilizes this story to demonstrate the
ambivalence of feeling both pleasure and degradation. While Gay’s bad feminist moments
typically center on the enjoyment of degrading popular culture artifacts, Nelson focuses on the
inherent contradictions in young women’s sexuality. While feelings of sexual curiosity and lust
are a natural part of women’s lives, they are also experienced simultaneously with the gendered violences enacted against them daily. The ambivalence Nelson refers to carries this contradiction through time, allowing her to reflect on these feelings several years later even as she is no longer
experiencing that first moment, indicating that she is still struggling to articulate it. By sharing it
in The Argonauts, she takes a stab at doing so. However, she remains ambivalent; the
contradiction remains unresolved for the time being.
The ambivalence expressed by all three authors is exemplified in the tensions of
contradictory feelings produced by forced choices. Let us return again to Gay’s discussion of
music that glorifies the degradation of women. Her pleasure in the music coexists with the sense
that her “very being is diminished.”138 There is a notable difference between this approach to
discussing her enjoyment of music that perpetuates rape culture and her later dismissal of how
“mortified” she is by that enjoyment. The marked tonal shift between personal embarrassment
over something that is collectively supposed to be frowned upon (“I am continuously mortified
by music choices”), and the statement that her “very being is diminished” by these experiences,
indicates that such conflict takes more of an emotional toll on Gay that she is perhaps ready to
137. Nelson, The Argonauts, 66-67.
138. Gay, Bad Feminist, ix 164 admit. The contradictions between personal enjoyment and collective transgression, as well as between prioritizing racial identity or feminist identity, come up again and again in her discussions of popular culture. However, there is never a solution articulated. In adopting a position of ambivalence, Gay makes time to think through these moments, play with how she articulates them, and make room to allow for multiple feelings and experiences at once.
Resignation
While the contradictions of inequitable pleasures surrounding gender, race, and sexuality result in feelings of ambivalence that make room for the authors to articulate and reflect on them, these bad feminist moments sometimes lead to feelings of resignation. Like bad feminist moments marked by feelings of ambivalence, a sense of resignation often leaves bad feminist moments hanging out without clear solutions. However, that does not mean they do not offer potential for resistance. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed discusses her resignation from
Goldsmith’s University in 2016. She had left her post in protest against the sexual harassment of students by campus staff. “Resignation,” she muses, “can sound passive, even fatalistic: resigning oneself to one’s fate. But resignation can be an act of feminist protest….By snapping you are saying: I will not reproduce a world I cannot bear, a world I do not think should be borne.”139 Resignation is not only a feeling, but an action in this sense. It is a choice. It is a snap.
Resignation can demonstrate a willingness to let a harmful practice or belief break. In the texts of
Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson, bad feminist moments that result in resignation often allow the authors to engage in moments of personal protest, whether against oppressive societal norms or mainstream feminist ideals, while allowing them to embrace other aspects of their identities and call out the limitations of contemporary feminism.
139. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 199. 165 One can resign in order to resist the imperatives and expectations associated with what one perceives to be ideal feminism. In Gay’s work, for instance, she resigns herself to being a bad feminist. That does not mean that she resigns from the project of feminism, though. After sharing the myriad moments in which she questions and pushes back against feminist beliefs and practices, moments in which she is torn by the choices that neoliberal ideals of contemporary feminism force her to make on a daily basis, and moments in which she copes with her own traumas in a world that pressures her to overcome them and seek safety and happiness, Gay’s ultimate conclusion is that she is a feminist, but a bad one. However, in her resignation, one can also see resistance:
I don't want to buy into these myths anymore. I don't want to cavalierly disavow feminism like far too many other women have done. Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, and so I write…The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman—I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become...I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.140
For Gay, to be a bad feminist opens the doors to being a human who is allowed to prioritize other aspects of her identity, who is able to reside in the contradictions of pleasure and resistance, and who is okay with being imperfect. Her feeling of resignation opens the way for resistance against ideal feminism, against neoliberal individualism’s impacts on those ideals, and against the impulse to reject feminism altogether. Gay refuses to reproduce the issues she sees within the feminist movement, but she also refuses to reproduce the postfeminist disavowal of feminism that pervades the world around her. In a sense, this feeling of resignation makes way for Gay to not be a bad feminist, but a good enough feminist, one who is continuously trying rather than assuming her own feminism to be infallible.
140. Gay, Bad Feminist, 318. 166 Resignation can appear as boredom with one’s feminism in some moments. For example,
in The Argonauts, Nelson laments the lack of parenting and child-rearing books by women. She
takes a moment to reflect on her own complicity in this system: “Why don't I myself seek out
child-care books by women? Am I unconsciously channel-surfing for the male
weatherman?...I'm boring myself with these reversals (feminist hazard).”141 The “boredom” in
this passage indicates a resignation to the state of parenting literature, but it also signals an
exhaustion with continuous transgression. The “reversals” of self-examination feel futile to
Nelson in this moment. Although she attempts to think through her own complicity, she
ultimately decides that it wouldn’t change anything to follow that line of thought at this juncture.
Here the “feminist hazard” of boredom can be read as resignation that enables Nelson to reject
the assumption that she could or should attempt to fix the parental publishing industry.
Sometimes, even when feminists attempt to articulate their own complicity in systems of
oppression, they find themselves simply unable to fix it, and thus resigned to the ways in which
personal choice can only take projects of gender equality so far. As Gay does, Nelson resists the
idea of infallible feminism. She also, however, resists the idea that women must fix the very
systems that exclude them, suggesting that even an ideal feminist is limited by the culture she
lives in.
Resignation can also be a response to issues of racial identity and a refusal to be optimistic about white people, including white feminists. In Thick, Tressie McMillan Cottom talks about the exhaustion of being a black feminist in a world in which white supremacy still reigns, referring to her resignation as simply “knowing” how whiteness operates, refusing to
place her trust completely in white people in order to survive:
141. Nelson, The Argonauts, 44. 167 To know our whites is to understand the psychology of white people and the elasticity of whiteness. It is to be intimate with some white persons but to critically withhold faith in white people categorically. It is to anticipate white people's emotions and fears and grievances, because their issues are singularly our problem. To know our whites is to survive without letting bitterness rot your soul.142
This moment of cruel pessimism, refusing to be optimistic regarding whiteness and white people
and rejecting the comfort of faith in others, offers a sense of resignation. There is no optimism
regarding the potential for change in this passage, only resignation to the importance of knowing
one’s whites. In offering this sense of resignation, McMillan Cottom also resists the idea that
people of color must fix that which is structured by whiteness. She points out the fact that, until
white people change systems of oppression on a large scale, there is no winning. Since whiteness
is “singularly” the problem of people of color, then to know one’s whites is to highlight the ways
in which whiteness still structures everything around us, and to unapologetically point to the
culprit. Similarly to Nelson, McMillan Cottom utilizes resignation in order to point out the
limitations of such structures, as well as the limitations of people who are oppressed within them.
Personal choice can also only take projects of racial equality so far, and black feminists can only change these systems of oppression so much when they are locked within them.
Conclusion
In the works of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom, bad feminist moments reflect the direct and insidious traumas of existing as a contemporary feminist woman along with myriad other identities that one is forced to choose between from moment to moment. When bad feminist moments are viewed as moments of feminist shattering against the walls of oppression,
we find the potential for pushback against mainstream ideals as well as mainstream feminist
ideals through feminist misattunement and cruel pessimism. When feminists act “out of tune”
142. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 103-4. 168 with other feminists and/or nonfeminists, they can open the way for improvement and change
based on personal experiences that emphasize the importance of difference-based unity.
However, since bad feminist moments are often indicative of the impacts of trauma on
feminists’ ability to cope in shattering moments, it is important to remain empathetic to the ways in which trauma shapes individual feminists’ beliefs and practices. While that trauma brings
many women to feminism, it can also act as a barrier to engaging with feminist ideals or
pushback against mainstream ideals from moment to moment. The pressure to be continuously
transgressive coupled with the traumas of contemporary womanhood, particularly for black
women and other women of color, can be overwhelming in some moments. In examining bad
feminist moments as moments in which trauma intersects with this pressure, we find that feelings
of ambivalence and resignation offer feminists the time and space to work through these
intersections when they are not entirely capable of doing so in the moment. Furthermore, these
latent feelings allow them to point out the limitations of ideal feminism that asks them to be
continually personally transgressive in an effort to somehow fix the vast structures of oppression
that shape them.
Shattering moments do not only pertain to feminist trauma, but to feminist relationships
and occupations as well. Bad feminist moments not only reflect the impact of trauma on feminist
identity, but they also reflect the important roles of personal relationships and occupational
pressures in feminist interactions and identity formations. In the next chapter, I will examine bad
feminist moments as relationship-based crisis, outlining the ways in which Gay, Nelson, and
McMillan Cottom approach feminist shattering moments that threaten their relationships with
those close to them, as well as other feminists and strangers. The traumas of contemporary 169 womanhood do not only impact one’s ability to engage with feminism, but one’s desire to do so when personal relationships are on the line. 170
CHAPTER 4. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS RELATIONSHIP-BASED CRISIS
Introduction
Bad feminist moments not only reflect the impact of trauma on feminist identity, but they also reflect the important roles of personal relationships in feminist interactions and identity formations. The traumas of contemporary womanhood not only impact one’s ability to engage with feminism, but one’s desire to do so when personal relationships are on the line. Many of the bad feminist moments of Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom center on their relationships to others. In this chapter, I first explore the authors’ bad feminist moments based in family relationships to examine the ways in which familial relationships set the stage for and complicate the authors’ relationships to feminism, as well as the ways in which their relationships to feminism affect relationships with family members. Histories of oppression and overlapping traumas produce families and bodies shaped by neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency and success to fit gender, raced, and classed social norms, and this is particularly evident in feminists’ relationships to their mothers. Bad feminist moments produced by the anxieties and pleasures associated with transgressing against one’s parents highlight the intergenerational traumas that color these relationships.
Secondly, I look at how how these traumas transition into feminists’ experiences when they become mothers themselves. Bad feminist moments associated with feminist motherhood are rife with the anxieties of contemporary feminist mother-child relationships in a world that sets unattainable ideals for mothers. As mothers, feminists still struggle with the pleasures of resistance against their own mothers and the desire to understand and connect with them as people. Coupled with the pressures of mainstream feminism influenced by neoliberal ideals of self perfection and individual success, bad feminist moments that center on feminist motherhood 171
might allow feminists to question the pressures placed upon them to be continually transgressive
and ideal in their feminism.
Finally, I situate bad feminist moments based in romantic relationships to explore the
impacts of the desire to belong, the desire to be desired, and the fraught relationships between
men and women on the authors’ feminist ideals and practices. I argue that feminist relationships
often cause bad feminist moments that reveal the fragility of those relationships, as well as the
pressures to perform feminism according to the ideals of self responsibility and success that
shape contemporary feminism. While bad feminist moments sometimes offer the authors time and space to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their relationships to other people, they can
also offer opportunities to step back from perceptions of ideal feminism to redefine their own feminist ideals.
I situate bad feminist moments based on relationships with other people as moments of potential shattering.1 In a shattering moment, feminists often face the specter of broken or damaged connections with other living beings in their lives. Not only do feminists face the possibility of emotionally shattering in moments of breakage, but they risk the possibility of breaking ties with those around them, shattering relationships that matter. It is not that feminists necessarily want those relationships to break. However, residing in a world that perpetuates rape culture and objectification in its most minute details often places feminists at odds with those closest to them, whether they be friends, family, or coworkers. The risk of losing relationships that are important to them can bring a feminist to a moment of crisis in which they feel pressured to choose between their feminist ideals and the relationships they care about. The fear of lashing
1. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 133.; Ahmed maintains that feminist fragility renders feminists’ relationships fragile as well. They frequently threaten to shatter. 172
out in anger and losing someone close to them can be overwhelming. Ahmed maintains that,
although the costs of fighting injustice can be personal and detrimental to feminists’
relationships, it is important to remember that sometimes the relationships that snap are worth
snapping for the sake of both the mental and emotional health of feminists, and for the larger
project of feminism.2 However, feminists do not always feel that the relationships that matter to
them are, indeed, worth snapping. Much like feminists in trauma-based crises, bad feminists moments that are based in feminists’ personal relationships reveal moments of indecision and struggle that buy them a little time to articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their relationships with other people as well as their relationships to feminism, reshaping and redefining what counts as ideal feminism for themselves.
In Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick, and Maggie Nelson’s
The Argonauts, there are several bad feminist moments in which the authors find themselves confronted with the anxieties of potential relationship snaps, seeking time and space to wrestle with those anxieties.3 However, when confronted with these anxieties, the authors do not, as
Ahmed suggests, allow fragile relationships to snap. If “good” feminists allow relationships to
snap in efforts for self preservation, then it appears moments in which one feels like a bad
feminist are moments that allow feminists to confront those anxieties without losing relationships
that matter. While Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson each come to moments in which they feel
the definition of ideal feminism is exemplified in the killjoy, their bad feminist moments reveal
2. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 172.
3. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Collins, 2014).; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019.; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015). 173
how the killjoy does not always suit their needs or fit their relationships. Bad feminist moments not only offer the authors time and space to consider their desires for connection and belonging
in their relationships to others, but they also offer them the potential to redefine their feminist
ideals in ways that support such connection. In contending with seemingly conflicting desires to
belong and to transgress against normativity, Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom each utilize
their feelings of being a bad feminist to explore their relationships, redefining and shaping them
as needed, ultimately redefining their own definitions of ideal feminism in the process.
The Family Table Revisited
To understand the nature of feminist family relationships, I return to Ahmed’s image of
the family table. The family table is often that which sets the stage for and brings women to
feminism. However, it is also fraught with potential shifts in relationship dynamics. As women
become feminists, they are frequently faced with moments that challenge their relationships with
family members. As seen in Chapter 3, Ahmed suggests that many women first come to
feminism around the family table. Let us revisit this description to break it down:
I would begin this story with a table. Around the table, a family gathers. Always we are seated in the same place: my father one end, myself the other, my two sisters to one side, my mother to the other. Always we are seated this way, as if we are trying to secure more than our place. We are having polite conversations, where only certain things can be brought up. Someone says something you consider problematic. At first you try not to say anything.4
Ahmed's image of the family table exemplifies the moments that shape women as they become
feminist, moments in which they are faced with the fragility of their family relationships. The
family table depicted by Ahmed is one of a heteronormative, patriarchal, nuclear family setting.
The father sits at the head of the table; the women surround it. There is a sense of repetition, for
4. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 37. 174
they are “always” seated this way; the family dynamics that set this table are always present.
Only certain topics can be brought up for conversation, out of a desire to keep the peace, to keep things polite. There is significant constraint in this image. For many feminists, their early feminist experiences are those of constraint, trying not to disrupt family dynamics or disturb the seemingly still waters of politeness. However, toward the end of the passage it is revealed that
these waters are not, in fact, still at all. Underneath the placid surface of the family table, there is
unrest. The killjoy is trying not to show herself. When she does reveal herself, she is often
construed as family disruption. Ahmed goes on:
However she speaks, the one who speaks as a feminist is usually heard as the cause of the argument. She stops the smooth flow of communication. It becomes tense. She makes things tense. We can begin to witness what is being locked in this dynamic. The problem is not simply about the content of what she is saying. She is doing more than saying the wrong thing: she is getting in the way so something, the achievement or accomplishment of the family or of some we or another, which is created by what is not said. So much you are supposed not to say, to do, to be, in order to preserve that we.5
The inherent “we” in family often serves to keep feminists from disrupting the presumed civility of family connection. Growing up “locked” in this dynamic can produce moments of frustration for feminists who wish to share their ideals and beliefs with family members who do not always understand or appreciate what is at stake. In moments such as that described above, feminists are faced with a choice between connecting with their families by ignoring/supporting beliefs and practices that hurt other people or disrupting the polite family dynamic, eroding their family relationships even further. Ahmed, for instance, speaks of breaking her bond to her father because of her queer identity. She shares, “I stopped doing the work of reconciliation because I
5. Ahmed, 37. 175 wanted the bond to snap; I was exhausted by that bond; a bond can be a bind.”6 Many feminists, especially queer feminists, are faced with the decision to break ties with family members altogether, with varying degrees of willingness. Allowing fragile bonds to snap can offer relief from the pressure to go in directions feminists are not willing to take. For Ahmed, such a decision, “gave me a freedom to get on with the life I wanted to live: a feminist and queer life. It meant leaving the family table behind, even if I keep carrying it with me, writing about it, that table memory, or that table as memory; even if other family tables would end up taking its place.”7
Ahmed’s family dynamics are not necessarily representative of every feminist’s family dynamics, however. There are many different types of family structures, structures that greatly influence how feminists come to feminism. McMillan Cottom’s mother, for instance, plays a much more dominant role in her family. Mcmillan Cottom refers to her as “the Vivian,” a force to be reckoned with, the matriarch of the household. Her relationship with Vivian is not nearly as strained as that of Ahmed’s relationship with her father. Perhaps this is because Vivian was a single mother and worked to make her home a safe space for her child. McMillan Cottom shares, however, that this safe space was a product of her mother’s sexual abuse as a child. Vivian does not allow men into their house without direct supervision, and she consistently warns her daughter to be careful of men.8 McMillan Cottom shares how she had to “gauge” her mother’s emotional needs in order to understand these attitudes and help her create that safe space for the
6. Ahmed, 193.
7. Ahmed, 194.
8. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 40. 176 both of them.9 Nelson also speaks much more about her mother than her father, who died when
Nelson was young. Her relationship with her mother is complicated, as Nelson shares how she struggles with resentment she feels toward her for leaving her father shortly before his death.10
Gay’s family structure more closely resembles Ahmed’s. She describes her “conservative Haitian parents” as wanting “the best for their kids,” but also being “very wary of American permissiveness.”11 Gay shares how, because of this, “I was American at school and Haitian at home,” a dynamic that required “negotiating a fine balance” that she was not always able to achieve.12 Gay most frequently refers to her parents as a unit, and she seems to struggle against their collective expectations while simultaneously bearing sympathy for their intentions and fears for her. If, as Ahmed claims, some bonds are binds for feminists, perhaps then writers who embrace their feminist limitations within these bonds serve to remind us that not all bonds are binds. Perhaps, as we will see in this chapter, some bonds serve to challenge feminists to disrupt the binaries of feminism/antifeminism and embrace empathy as a feminist ideal. Bad feminist moments reveal the ways in which well-intended parental expectations can create complicated desires for rebellion along with desires for understanding and empathy.
Embodied Imperatives and Desires
The primary family figures threaded throughout all three works are the authors’ parents.
As mentioned in Chapter 3, histories of intergenerational violence and trauma overlap in these works, and that overlap is often located at the site of the parent-child relationship, particularly
9. McMillan Cottom, 8.
10. Nelson, The Argonauts, 107.
11. Gay, Bad Feminist, 63.
12. Gay, 63. 177
the mother-daughter relationship. Feminists’ identities and relationships with the world around
them are not only shaped by the direct and insidious traumas of gendered and raced violence, but
by the compounded insidious traumas of historical sexism and racism that shaped the lives of
their parents and grandparents. They learn lessons about how to interact with the world long
before they understand it. Take McMillan Cottom’s statement, for instance, that, “Decades
before I valued myself enough to be careful for myself, I was careful so that my mother would
not worry.”13 Vivian’s experiences with sexual abuse shaped their relationship, her trauma overlapping with her daughter’s as McMillan Cottom is introduced to a world in which she discovers black women’s bodies are always endangered by the men around them.
The specter of the worried parent, most often the worried mother coping with her own direct and insidious traumas, haunts the life experiences of each author and influences the decisions they make. In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed points to the parental imperative of happiness as a primary source of sustaining existing social structures. Parents want their children to be happy, so they often insist their children do whatever it takes to select the easier path, to not deviate from the mainstream, to not cause unnecessary discomfort or hardship for themselves in a cruel world. According to Ahmed, “To want happiness is to want to avoid a certain kind of future for the child. Avoidance too can be directive. Wanting happiness can mean wanting the child to be in line to avoid the costs of not being in line.”14 Since feminism is predicated on
deviation from social norms in order to disrupt existing social structures of oppression, parents of
feminists are often uncomfortable with their choices and beliefs, sensing the myriad ways they
13. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 40.
14. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 51. 178
are stepping out of line. For queer feminists, the added layer of parental worry over deviating
from well-trodden heteronormative pathways can overshadow their very being.
For immigrant feminists, the added expectation of happiness in return for the price their
parents have paid for that happiness adds to the pressure not to deviate from social norms. In The
Promise of Happiness, Ahmed argues that the “unconventional” child of immigrant parents,
encouraged to assimilate into American culture, provides a conventional form of hope in
deviating from the cultural norms of their parents’ homelands and adapting to mainstream
American culture.15 She revisits this argument in Living a Feminist Life to situate the
experiences of queer immigrant children, for whom “custom and culture become things that this
brown queer child has to leave behind; happiness is assumed to require getting out. Translation:
happiness becomes proximity to whiteness.”16 Happiness, then, is not only an imperative that
generally serves to uphold existing social structures, but it also serves to specifically uphold the
ideals of white supremacy by assuming white, western cultures to be more accepting and of
queer people, while non-white cultures from which immigrants hail are not. In adopting
whiteness, the immigrant child is depicted as also adopting acceptance and subsequent
happiness. This aligns with Andrea Smith’s argument that people of color in America are
“trapped” within the three pillars of white supremacy (Slavery/Capitalism,
Genocide/Colonialism, and Orientalism/War) because they are “seduced with the prospect of
15. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (London: Duke University Press, 2010): 137-38.
16. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 52. 179
being able to participate in the other pillars.”17 Smith offers three examples of how this
seduction works:
For example, all non-Native peoples are promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling indigenous lands. All non-Black peoples are promised that if they comply, they will not be at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. And Black, Native, Latino, and Asian peoples are promised that they will economically and politically advance if they join US wars to spread “democracy.”18
In this light, Ahmed’s example of the queer immigrant child becomes an object and a tool of
white supremacy, promised the ability to join in the colonial project of settling Indigenous lands
in America and opportunities for economic and political advancement if they participate in
American projects of democracy. Furthermore, colonialism is predicated on heteropatriarchy.
Smith builds on the arguments of Charles Colson to suggest that colonialism depends on
heteronormativity. Colonizers naturalize hierarchies through the institution of patriarchy,
establishing elites as patriarchal nation-state rulers. Thus, Smith suggests, “Any liberation
struggle that does not challenge heteronormativity cannot substantially challenge colonialism or
white supremacy.”19 If heteropatriarchal white supremacy promotes people of colors’
engagement with capitalism and democracy at the expense of others, then happiness in such a
society insists upon such engagement. Thus, American happiness is found in proximity to whiteness, to heterosexuality, and to cisgender normativity. As such, it might appear to many parents of feminists (particularly queer feminists, feminists of color, and immigrant feminists)
17. Andrea Smith, “Heteropatriarchy and the Three Pillars of White Supremacy: Rethinking Women of Color Organizing,” in Color of Violence: the Incite! Anthology, eds. Incite! Women of Color Against Violence (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2006), 66-69.
18. Smith, “Heteropatriarchy,” 69.
19. Smith, 71-72. 180
that they are endangering their own happiness by disrupting and speaking out against any of
these norms.
If part of the feminist project lies in rejecting the imperatives of happiness, then bad
feminist moments can be read as moments in which feminists simply want to be happy. If we
consider the exhaustion brought about by the intergenerational and insidious traumas of
womanhood, particularly the womanhood of women of color, then it makes sense that women of
color may not always want to resist happiness. Sometimes, they may even desire it. Gay, Nelson,
and McMillan Cottom do, in fact, often resist imperatives of happiness in their texts, but they
also frequently reject the feminist imperative to resist their desires for happiness. Bad feminist
moments in these texts reveal conflicts between the authors’ assumptions that ideal feminism
means rejecting imperatives of happiness and their personal desires for individual happiness.
This conflict is particularly prevalent in Gay’s text. As a Haitian-American daughter of
immigrants, Gay contends not only with the imperatives of happiness as a woman of color, but
also as a child of immigration. The pressure to adapt to mainstream American culture and achieve happiness is compounded by the fact that immigrant children are often not accepted as
American by other Americans, even as they are pressured to be as American as possible by their parents. Gay’s mother, for instance, gave her the hopeful nickname, “Miss America,” a name
that procured ridicule from the other children at school because of her brown skin and Haitian
family:
That was my mother’s nickname for me, Miss America. I’m her beloved firstborn, her first child born in these United States. I loved my nickname. Those popular kids laughed and laughed. For the rest of that year and into the next, they teased me mercilessly about being Miss America, asking how my campaign was going, making comments about sashes and crowns, prancing around in front of me doing the Miss America wave. They incorporated props. Those kids made it clear that I didn’t have a shot in hell at the crown, 181
but I’m stubborn and Vanessa Williams had won Miss America so I began to sincerely 20 believe I was going to become Miss America. Gay’s mother lovingly, hopefully burdens Gay with the promise of the American Dream by instilling in her the hope of becoming Miss America, the epitome of white capitalist heteronormative ideals of womanhood. While young Gay latches onto this concept in service of not only her own desires, but her family’s as well, she is also faced with the reality that the ideals epitomized in the title of Miss America are not intended for her. As discussed in Chapter 3, the objectification of women’s bodies can cause women to self-objectify and contribute to the insidious traumas of gendered and racialized violence. The ideals of femininity that women seek to obtain are classed and raced. Just as McMillan Cottom realizes that beauty is not intended for black women in Thick, Gay starts to realize at a young age that, despite her parents’ hopes for proximity to whiteness, the American Dream is not made for women who do not possess the capital of white beauty. This conflict serves to contextualize Gay’s bad feminist moments, moments in which she often feels conflicted by her desires for happiness that is not intended for her and her desires to match her image of an ideal feminist who does not need it.
Beauty ideals not only serve to define the hopes of assimilation and imperatives of happiness in immigrant families, but they can also define women’s relationships to their own bodies. Gay, for instance, shares that her relationship to her body has been shaped not only by the trauma she experienced from a gang rape as a child, but also her Haitian American parents’ expectations for her, as demonstrated through their responses to her body after the experience.
Gay shares that she hid the rape from her parents because “I was a good girl, so that’s what my parents saw when I came home a completely different person and went to my room and tried to
20. Gay, Bad Feminist, 64. 182
pull myself together enough to be the girl everyone knew.”21 The desire to meet her parents’
view of her as a “good girl” who would not have gone into the woods with her boyfriend, who
would not have allowed herself to be raped, reflects the ways in which Gay’s trauma intersects
with the pressures of parental expectations. Gay sees it as her responsibility to perform the role
of good daughter to her parents’ expectations, which is evident throughout passages about her
family.
Being a “good girl” appears to go hand-in-hand with being strong for Gay. She shares that, “people tend to think I’m strong. I’m not. And yet.”22 She goes on to share that she identifies with Katniss Everdeen from the Young Adult series The Hunger Games because “the people around Katniss expect her to be strong and she does her best to meet those expectations, even when it costs her a great deal.”23 Gay’s parents’ expectations could be viewed, in this light, as that which cost her a great deal. Gay gives the impression that her parents’ expectations are something she is expected to overcome, rather than something that leave her vulnerable.
However, it is clearly the expectations she sensed from them that leave her vulnerable when she is raped. For Gay, the desire to meet their expectations cost her a sense of connection to others, a cost that she characterizes not as a parental shortcoming, but as a personal shortcoming:
I come from a loving, tight-knit, imperfect but great family. My parents have always been involved in my life even when I pushed them away. I have wanted for little. One of my biggest weaknesses, one that has always shamed me, is that I’ve always been lonely. I’ve struggled to make friends because I can be socially awkward, because I’m weird, because I live in my head. When I was young, we moved around a lot, so there was rarely any time to get to know new people. Loneliness was the one familiar thing, making me this
21. Gay, 143.
22. Gay, 141.
23. Gay, 141. 183
bottomless pit of need, open and gaping and desperate for anything to fill me up. I should not be this way but I am.24
Gay’s reflection mirrors the imperative of happiness that causes her to feel alienated from others.
The imperative of happiness is both a product and a cause of alienation. Gay is careful not to
place blame on her parents, but this discussion takes place immediately before the story of her
rape. She uses this passage to set the stage for the rape story that is to come. Clearly she feels
some sort of connection between her parents’ expectations and her traumatic experience, but Gay indicates that readers must understand that her own unhappiness and loneliness are ultimately to blame. Gay depicts her own desire for happiness as a personal shortcoming. She “should not be” lonely, and as she was (and is) lonely, this is her failing. To Gay, good girls are not lonely. Good girls are strong. While Gay does not blame herself for that rape explicitly, she does return repeatedly to the “gaping void” inside of her and her attempts to fill it, framing these attempts as complicity. Of the sexual relationship she had been building with her boyfriend before her rape, she says:
I was not an unwilling participant. I was not a willing participant. I felt nothing one way or another. I wanted him to love me. I wanted to make him happy. If doing things to my body made him happy, I would let him do anything to my body. My body was nothing to me. It was just meat and bones around that void he filled by touching me… I was dying, but I was happy.25
The contradictory imperative of and desire for happiness and strength is at the core of Gay’s
anxiety and her shame. Here Gay embodies the ambivalence of simultaneously being victim and
accomplice, of desiring and not desiring her boyfriend’s not-entirely-consensual touch. She
characterizes her ambivalence as being “bad,” even though she was a “good girl,”: “It was so
24. Gay, 141.
25. Gay, 142. 184 very easy to hide how very bad I was becoming from my family, from everyone. Being good is the best way to be bad.”26 Again, even though Gay does not explicitly blame herself for the rape, the reverberations of her childhood shame are felt throughout her story. She situates the experience within her choices rather than the choices of the boys who rape her, characterizing them as bad. She was bad because she desired happiness, suggesting that Gay feels conflicted not only because she is not happy, as her parents want her to be, but also because she still desires that happiness and seeks it out. Perhaps this is because this seeking of happiness resulted in such a traumatic experience for her. Perhaps this is because she, as a human woman living in contemporary America, is subject to postfeminist and neoliberal emphases on personal responsibility that pervade contemporary feminist movements. I argue it is the product of both.
Neoliberal emphases on personal responsibility shape contemporary feminist self- perceptions. Although Gay logically understands the rape to not be her fault, she still can’t help but blame herself by emphasizing her personal choices and lack of what she perceives as strength. After her then-boyfriend lures her to the woods and rapes her with his friends, Gay again shares how she blamed herself for the events that led to it: “I walked home alone, pushing my stupid bike, hating myself for thinking that this boy loved me.”27 The anxieties of this moment are based in Gay’s shame, something that still shapes how she views her own body and its connection to the world around her. In this sense, her anxieties over seeking happiness (and over ultimately failing at finding it) can be viewed as bad feminist moments. This is not to say that twelve-year-old Gay saw herself as a bad feminist, or a feminist at all. However, she still
26. Gay, 142.
27. Gay, 142. 185
writes from a place of shame and self-blame as an adult woman who does identify as feminist.
She is writing about this experience through the subjective lens of her own feminist ideals,
shaped by the feminist movements around her. And this particular work is literally entitled Bad
Feminist, suggesting that what she chooses to write about in this text are indicative of all of the
qualities that make her a bad feminist. In this instance, those qualities are a lack of personal
strength and a need for happiness.
Gay’s story also reflects the ways in which contemporary imperatives of strength and
self-sufficiency serve to alienate women, as well as the embodiment of that alienation. Gay was
“bad,” for being vulnerable, for allowing her boyfriend to touch her, and for not foreseeing that
he and his friends would rape her. As such, she shoulders the blame and hides the rape from her
parents, instead “stuffing my face with Twinkies or ordering a pizza late at night, trying to fill
this ragged, ugly thing inside me that couldn’t be filled or quieted.”28 While her parents did not know about the rape, they did know about its physical effects, and this produced worry, which
Gay shares she “ignored entirely,” because “Bad things, I’d decided years earlier, could not happen to big bodies. I was not necessarily incorrect in my thinking. Eating was, in part, a survival instinct.”29 Gay seeks bodily alienation in order to achieve personal protection from
gendered violence, despite the worries of her parents, who “gave me all kinds of advice about
exercising self-control and eating properly,” attempting to police her body so it did not deviate
from ideals of feminine thinness and cause her to not achieve happiness: “Moderation, my father
would say, is the key to everything. Moderation is pretty much his favorite word. My parents
28. Gay, 142.
29. Gay, 110. 186
meant well.”30 Gay’s parents sense her embodied alienation and emphasize self control and
personal responsibility to help her achieve happiness. Gay acknowledges that her parents are
well-intentioned in this emphasis on self control, but it is this very emphasis that shapes her
perceptions of herself as a bad feminist. Just as described in Chapter 3 when Gay feels like a bad
feminist for not controlling her desires for problematic popular culture, or as seen in her bad
feminist moments surrounding her rape, self-control is at the center of her definition of not only a good feminist, but a good girl, a good woman, and a good person.
Along with the effects of her trauma and her subsequent desire for alienation, parental expectations shape Gay’s relationship to her body, even (or perhaps especially) when she rejects those expectations. In their well-intended quest for their child’s happiness, Gay’s parents send her to fat camp. Gay describes fat camp as “the worst place on earth,” a six-week heat-filled,
exhausting program that centered entirely on weight loss and gain, which Gay reports “none of
the campers really gave a damn about one way or the other because kids at fat camp don’t care
about being really or sort of fat or on the verge of fat. Their parents do.”31 In Gay’s eyes, her relationship with her body is not about its size or its weight, but about its ability to protect her.
By eating, Gay strengthens her body by rejecting societal beauty standards that leave her vulnerable. Gay feels she was not strong enough, and thus she desires to make up for that lack of strength with size. However, her parents do not see it that way. Rejecting her parents’ expectations for her body is almost empowering for Gay, and she proceeds to take up every habit her parents would not approve of. “You know what I really learned at fat camp?” Gay asks
30. Gay, 110.
31. Gay, 112. 187 readers, “I learned how to smoke. I fell madly in love with smoking. I learned how to make myself throw up. I learned how to stand on the edges of the scale to throw my weight off a little.”32 Gay rejects her parents body standards wholeheartedly while at fat camp, taking joy in the rebellion. She shares, “there is a certain thrill in corruption even though, for most of us, our corruptions had started long before we arrived at camp.”33 One can only assume that Gay is referring to the physical “corruptions” of eating that her parents did not approve of, but this passage contradicts her previous contrition at being a “bad” girl, suggesting there was perhaps always a certain joy in secretly rejecting her parents’ expectations.
Parental expectations combined with (and often based in) neoliberal contemporary ideals of self control and self perfection contribute to the childhood experiences that shape women’s relationships with their bodies later in life, and Gay is no exception. Bad feminist moments in her text reveal the ways in which contemporary feminist ideals intersect with feminist relationships to others, as well as to their own bodies. For instance, although Gay indicates that she and other campers did not care about weight during camp, she immediately follows her story of her time at fat camp with a reflection on her current relationship to her body:
I think about my body all the time—how it looks, how it feels, how I can make it smaller, what I should put into it, what I am putting into it, what has been done to it, what I do to it, what I let others do to it. This bodily preoccupation is exhausting… I don’t think I know any woman who doesn’t hate herself and her body at least a little bit. Bodily obsession is, perhaps, a human condition because of its inescapability.34
Gay refers to women’s bodily obsession as a “human condition,” something that every woman must contend with on a daily basis, often unintentionally. This passage, however, reads almost as
32. Gay, 112.
33. Gay, 112-13.
34. Gay, 113. 188 a confession of sorts, as does much of Gay’s text. Perhaps, if her bodily obsession is part of what makes Gay feel like a bad feminist, then Gay is suggesting here that the state of feeling like a bad feminist is, in itself, inescapable. When women hate their bodies, perhaps they are being bad feminists, but acceptably so, because it is a human condition; they cannot escape it. Not only does Gay reflect on her own feelings about her body, but she connects it to the condition of being a woman in general. The reflexivity of this moment broadens into connection with others, not necessarily calling for collective action or change, but allowing the latent feelings to, once again, simply hang out for her reader to take in. To be a bad feminist, in Gay’s eyes, is not only to be human, but specifically, in this instance, to be woman.
The “inescapability” of thinness and bodily obsession in women is evident throughout the works of McMillan Cottom and Nelson as well, as is the influence of parental relationships on that obsession. Nelson shares that her own obsession with thinness stems from her relationship with her mother:
It feels disingenuous of me not to acknowledge that on a literal level, having a small body, a slender body, has long been related to my sense of self, even my sense of freedom. This comes as no real surprise—my mother and her entire family line are obsessed with thinness as an indicator of physical, moral, and economic fitness.35
This “disingenuous” feeling can be read as a bad feminist moment. In introducing the passage,
Nelson indicates an unease with sharing her obsession with her body. She switches gears in this paragraph, having previously been discussing her feminist mentors and their impacts on her feminist growth. She starts with this disclaimer, likely because she felt the need to explain in the preceding paragraph that all of her feminist mentors “are or were or have been corpulent
35. Nelson, The Argonauts, 105. 189
beings.”36 In this passage, Nelson acknowledges something that she has not previously
acknowledged, something that she has perhaps been avoiding confronting up until this point: her
own relationship to her body. Owning up to such a human (and womanly, as Gay posits) flaw
might leave Nelson vulnerable to feminist criticism. Perhaps, then, Nelson is suggesting that she
is not supposed to care about her body size, that having a slender body is not supposed to be
related to her sense of self or freedom. A good feminist would not care. Like Gay, Nelson reveals
a core tenant of her personal definition of ideal feminism in discussing relationship with her
body. While, for Gay, good feminists practice self control, Nelson appears to define a good
feminist as a feminist who simply does not care about how slender she is. Clearly, definitions of
ideal feminism vary not only by subjective histories, but by feminists’ subjective relationships to their bodies.
Nelson does more than simply explain her relationship to her body here. She ties this relationship to histories of bodily objectification overlapping between herself, her mother, and her mother’s family. A large part of Nelson’s identity is situated in ideals of feminine beauty
established by her mother, her grandmother, and so on. As a marker of neoliberal self-perfection,
the thin body becomes an indicator of American success and happiness. The neoliberal
imperative of self perfection has shaped Nelson’s entire family line’s relationships with their
bodies, trickling down to her. Nelson and her mother embody the ways in which beauty norms
are inextricably tied to socioeconomic status and class mobility. We see further evidence of the
pressure of this imperative as Nelson goes on to share the extent of her mother’s attitudes toward
her body and other bodies:
36. Nelson, 105. 190
My mother’s skinny body, and her lifelong obsession with having zero fat, almost makes me disbelieve that she ever housed my sister or me inside of her. (I gained fifty-four pounds to grow Iggy—a number that appalled my mother, and gave me the pleasure of late-breaking disobedience.) One time my mother saw her shadow on a wall at a restaurant, and before she recognized it as hers, she said it looked like a skeleton. Look how fat everyone is, my mother says, her mouth agape, whenever we visit her ancestral Michigan. Her skinniness is proof that she moved up, got out.37
There is a lot going on in this passage. Firstly, Nelson’s mother situates her body in comparison to other diners as evidence of her class mobility and personal perseverance. Nelson’s mother’s relationship not only to her own body, but to the bodies of other people as well. To move up and get out when others did not is the ultimate marker of neoliberal success. Her mother’s obsession stems from a need for neoliberal self-efficacy and class mobility. Her pull-yourself-up-by-your- bootstraps narrative of leaving her hometown and improving herself is only evidenced by her thin body. She took care of herself, utilized the tools of self-perfection, and objectified her body until it became the designated size of a successful woman.
Secondly, this passage echoes Gay’s in its expression of joy in embodied rebellion against parental expectations. Nelson expresses pleasure in the “late-breaking disobedience” of gaining weight during pregnancy. Although she admits in the earlier passage that she is obsessed with her own body, she finds comfort in moments where she can push back against the bodily ideals of her mother. Nelson’s mother’s attitudes toward her own body and expectations for her body shape her relationship to it. Furthermore, her desire to rebel against those expectations and be something different from her mother also defines her sense of self as a woman and as a feminist. Perhaps, then, feminists’ relationships with their mothers also shape their sense of what counts as rebellion. As feminism is predicated on rebellion against oppressive social structures, it
37. Nelson, 105. 191
only makes sense that feminist ideals would, in large part, be rooted in rebellion against beauty
norms, particularly those laid out by parental figures. If the feeling of being a good feminist rests
in the satisfaction of rebellion, then bad feminist moments just might be moments in which
feminists either do not want to or cannot rebel.
Tressie McMillan Cottom’s text reveals what happens when feminists do not rebel
against parental expectations for their bodies. Her mother also greatly influenced her body and her attitudes toward it. McMillan Cottom grew up with a birth defect that causes her to be both
“pigeon-toed and bow-legged.”38 Doctors informed her mother that they could fix it with a several-year series of surgeries, casts, and braces. However, her mother decided to forgo such an extensive treatment: “My mother could not fathom the cost of fixing me. But she could count the cost of teaching me to fix myself.”39 As a poor, southern descendant of slavery, McMillan
Cottom’s mother is familiar with fixing problems herself. As McMillan Cottom sets the scene of
her birth and growth, she is careful to first explain her family’s history for readers to better understand her mother’s attitude. “We were respectable,” she shares, “We went to church and paid tithes and wore slips and we drank but had the good sense to be ashamed that we did. We whispered when we said bad words and we valued hard work and education as evidence of our true worth. We did not want to be problems.”40 McMillan Cottom’s mother, in an effort not to be
a problem, attempted to teach her daughter to fix her own problems, including her physical
problems. Much like Nelson’s mother, McMillan Cottom’s mother sees how her daughter’s body
contributes to her class mobility. However, as a black woman, this class mobility is inextricably
38. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 13.
39. McMillan Cottom, 13-14.
40. McMillan Cottom, 12. 192
bound to her proximity to whiteness. McMillan Cottom’s mother’s goal is not only to enable her
to move up, but to allow her to blend in and keep her from being a “problem.” McMillan Cottom
describes how her mother taught her to fix her feet, and thus fix herself:
I have several mantras committed to memory, but the one that I remember first and most is my mother’s voice shouting, “fix your feet.” Every time I stood up the voice said, “fix your feet.” Every time I got tired and lazy, reverting to bowed-back legs and crooked toes, it whispered, “fix your feet.” When I started walking and then later started strutting, I would hear it, “fix your feet.” It meant straighten your toes, adjust your hips, lock your knees, and walk like a normal person.41
McMillan Cottom’s mother, in an effort to normalize her, taught her to move her body in ways that would later prove detrimental to her health. “I fixed my feet my whole life,” McMillan
Cottom shares, and she later started to see the effects of what physical therapists “kindly call my
extreme maladaptation.”42 As illustrated in Chapter 3, the regular objectification of women’s bodies can lead to self-objectification, body surveillance, and body shame in ways that contribute to the insidious traumas of gendered violence in women.43 McMillan Cottom’s text demonstrates
not only the insidious traumas of self-objectification, but the intersecting intergenerational
traumas of race and class. She literally embodies these traumas, and the ways in which women,
particularly women of color, and especially women of color from lower socioeconomic statuses
are forced to adapt in traumatic and harmful ways to the world around them. In this passage,
histories of oppression intersect with neoliberal imperatives of self improvement and personal
success, producing bodies that have maladapted to survive.
41. McMillan Cottom, 13-14.
42. McMillan Cottom, 15.
43. Haley Miles-McLean, et al., “ ‘Stop Looking at Me!’: Interpersonal Sexual Objectification as a Source of Insidious Trauma,” Psychology of Women Quarterly, 39, no. 3 (September 2015): 363–74, doi:10.1177/0361684314561018. 193
These intersections of oppression not only contribute to feminists’ relationships to their
bodies and their families, but they also lend to the bad feminist moments in which feminist women feel they might not be meeting their perceived feminist ideals of resistance and disruption. Let us return to Nelson’s passage for a moment. The feminists in her life had all
“been corpulent beings,” and had experienced the pleasure of disobedience to the imperative of thinness, something she had only managed to feel during pregnancy.44 In shifting to a discussion
of her own obsession with thinness, she focuses primarily on her mother’s actions and beliefs
rather than her own, reflecting the discomfort she feels with admitting to her potentially
unfeminist attitudes toward her body. Gay also situates her obsession with her body as a personal
failing, potentially unfeminist in nature. McMillan Cottom appears to be the only one of these
authors not to take a sort of feminist joy in rebelling against her mother and her mother’s
expectations for her body. This is perhaps because her mother was a matriarchal figure,
somebody that McMillan Cottom looked up to and wanted to be like. After all, she does not
often refer to her as “mother” in this text, but instead uses the deferential, “The Vivian.”
Although her relationship to her mother has clearly shaped her relationship to her body, the lack
of a bad feminist moment for not wanting to resist her mother’s expectations reveals that she has already started working through that relationship. While Gay mentions that her parents “meant well,” and Nelson suggests that her mother’s expectations are deeply influenced by her family history and desire for class mobility, McMillan Cottom opts for a more empathetic approach to her mother’s expectations. She is careful to explain the family history that has shaped her mother, and reflects on how her mother “could not fathom the cost of fixing me. But she could
44. Nelson, The Argonauts, 105. 194
count the cost of teaching me to fix myself.”45 She attempts to engage with her mother’s choices
empathetically and reflexively, and in doing so is able to offer the same empathy and reflexivity
toward her own body.
Perhaps, if the bad feminist moments of Gay and Nelson reveal the impact of the
pressures of neoliberal ideals of self perfection and success on feminist ideals and values, then
the lack of a bad feminist moment in McMillan Cottom’s discussion of her body demonstrates
the potential such moments hold for generating reflexivity and empathy for other people, as well as oneself. McMillan Cottom’s essays were rewritten for Thick, so she definitely had the time to
carefully think through her reflections. One can only assume she has long ago contended with the
bad feminist moments that might have arisen from her relationship with her mother and its
subsequent impact on her relationship with her body. Each feminist’s journey is different, and
bad feminist moments occur at different junctures for each.
Feminist Motherhood and “Getting it Right”
Aside from the family that feminists grew up with, feminists also often expand their families and/or establish new families as they grow. These families can take many forms.
Feminist women carry the intergenerational traumas, imperatives of happiness and self- sufficiency, and feminist ideals all into their new family dynamics with them. If feminists become mothers, they also bear the burdens of public motherhood and neoliberal ideals of motherhood, not to mention the often conflicting ideals of feminist motherhood.46 Mothers are
held responsible for their child’s well-being and happiness in a world that is rife with gendered
45. McMillan Cottom, 13-14.
46. See Chapter 3 of this dissertation for a fuller discussion of these dynamics. 195 and racialized violence, particularly if they have daughters. I am reminded of Roxane Gay’s discussion of the group rape of a young girl in Texas, the media reports of which largely placed blame on the victim. The media outlets that covered the story did not only place blame on the child, but also on her mother for allowing it to happen. Gay remembers, “there were even questions about the whereabouts of the girl's mother, given, as we all know, that a mother must be with her child at all times or whatever ill befalls the child is clearly the mother's fault.
Strangely, there were no questions about the whereabouts of the father while this rape was taking place.”47 Gendered family roles contribute greatly to the expectations of motherhood. Mothers, perceived as natural caregivers, are expected to continuously focus on their children, and are often held responsible when they are unable to do so.
From moment to moment, experiences of motherhood are impacted by feminists’ relationships to others, including their own parents. Nelson, for instance, the only one of the authors who was a mother at the time these books were written, reflects on her experiences of motherhood, amidst other aspects of her identity, from pregnancy to birth and beyond into her son’s early childhood. Several of the moments she shares reflect the tensions of being a mother and a daughter simultaneously, attempting to forge her own identity as a mother without snapping relationship ties to her own mother. Intergenerational traumas impact this relationship frequently, as Nelson’s mother shares her “prophylactic anxiety” with Nelson again and again, such as the repeated ways she brings up a trip to the Killing Fields of Cambodia:
Recently my mother visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia. After she returned, she sat in our living room showing me her trip photos while Iggy motored around the shaggy white rug, doing “tummy time.” I barely want to tell you about this, because of the baby, she said, nodding in his direction, but there was a tree there, an oak tree, called the Killing Tree, against which the Khmer Rouge would kill babies by bashing their skulls.
47. Gay, Bad Feminist, 129. 196
Thousands and thousands of babies, their brains smashed out against this tree. I get the point, I say. I’m sorry, she says, I really shouldn’t be telling you this. A few weeks later, talking about her trip again on the phone, she says, Now, there’s something I shouldn’t really mention, because of the baby, but they had this tree there, at the Killing Fields, called the Killing Tree…48
In these scenes, Nelson’s mother is not simply relating a story that makes her anxious, but she is
offering her a warning. She repeats more than once that she doesn’t feel like she should be
sharing this story, not because it could affect her daughter, but because it could increase anxiety
over the baby. However, she still feels it is necessary to share this information. Her daughter is,
after all, ultimately held responsible for all that happens to that baby. Nelson recognizes this
impulse as well:
I know my mother well enough by now to recognize, in her baby-killing-tree Tourette’s, her desire to install in me an outer parameter of horror of what could happen to a human baby on this planet. I don’t know why she needs to feel sure I have this parameter in mind, but I have come to accept that she feels it necessary. She needs me to know that she’s stood before the Killing Tree.49
Nelson’s mother’s anxieties not only contribute to her own, but also bring up her personal
limitations as a mother. There is a lot of violence in the world, and a mother can only protect her
child so well, even though she is expected to protect them completely. Nelson’s mother tries to instill this sense of responsibility in her by pressing the issue of violence and repeatedly
reminding her of what can happen to children in this world. In particular, Nelson’s mother
appears to need Nelson to know that she herself has witnessed this violence, this danger that
children face. Perhaps, in reminding her daughter of her role as a mother, Nelson’s mother feels
she is somehow doing her motherly duty, passing the torch of responsibility. In order to be a
48. Nelson, The Argonauts, 121.
49. Nelson, 121. 197
good mother, Nelson’s mother feels it to be her responsibility to remind Nelson what a good
mother is: responsible for her children’s safety.
Nelson has clearly accepted her mother’s need to instill this sense of responsibility in her,
attempting to work through her mother’s motives to understand them. Although she is not
entirely successful and admits she doesn’t know why her mother has this need, she is clearly
attempting to work through this relationship and develop some empathy for her mother,
especially as she is now a mother herself. After Nelson shares the story of Iggy’s birth, she again reflects on the connections between her relationship to her son and her relationship to her mother in the form of a quote from Eula Biss:
The mother of an adult child sees her work completed and undone at the same time. If this holds true, I may have to withstand not only rage, but also my undoing. Can one prepare for one’s undoing? How has my mother withstood mine? Why do I continue to undo her, when what I want to express above all else is that I love her very much?50
Nelson leaves these questions unanswered, resting in the ambiguity of experience. As a mother,
Nelson feels the pressures to be an ideal woman more keenly, and thus starts to identify with her mother and question her own choices in their relationship. Unlike previous passages, where
Nelson indicates a joy at subverting her mother’s expectations, this passage reveals the tensions
that underly the joy of subversion. Like Gay, she is indicating that she understands her mother
means well, and like McMillan Cottom, she is attempting to take her mother’s feelings and
motives into consideration. However, she depicts it as an almost universal experience between
mothers and their children; needing to undo a mother’s work in order to experience the joy of
subversion. While McMillan Cottom situated her mother’s experiences sociohistorically, making
empathetic connections to the structures of oppression that shaped her mother’s response to her
50. Nelson, 140. 198 birth defect, Nelson simply rests in the ambiguity of what she assumes to be universal experience. This is perhaps because whiteness assumes generalizable experience; to be white is to have the privilege of understanding the relationship between mother and daughter as universal and natural, rather than embedded in social structures that shape them. While she understands her relationship with her father to be borne of heteronormativity and patriarchy, she does not feel the need to query the white racial frames that structure her relationship to her mother.
Nelson is not only a mother and a daughter, but she is also a queer woman, a spouse, a poet, an academic, and a feminist, amongst other things. As a feminist, she not only feels the pressures of ideal motherhood from her mother and the rest of the world, but she also feels the pressure to be an ideal feminist mother who pushes back against the compulsion to focus entirely on motherhood:
It’s easy enough to say, I’ll be the right kind of finite or sodomitical mother. I’ll let my baby know where the me and the not-me begin and end, and withstand whatever rage ensues. I’ll give as much as I’ve got to give without losing sight of my own me. I’ll let him know that I’m a person with my own needs and desires, and over time he’ll come to respect me for elucidating such boundaries, for feeling real as he comes to know me as real. But who am I kidding? This book may already be doing wrong.51
Doing motherhood “right” is easier said than done from any perspective, including a feminist one. As discussed in Chapter 3, feminists who use mainstream methods of family-building, such as marriage and childbirth, often face feelings of anxiety and guilt due to the binary expectations of normative vs. transgressive performance. Nelson appears to define a feminist mother as a mother who is in charge of her own pleasure, who prioritizes her own well-being. However, she’s unsure she can achieve this in the way she is supposed to. This can be read a bad feminist moment, as Nelson questions her abilities to perform feminist motherhood in the “right” way.
51. Nelson, 140. 199
She admits that she may already have undermined this image of the sodomitical mother simply
by writing about it, by oversharing her experiences as a mother.
Feminists have spent so long fighting against the narratives of women as merely child bearers and domestic caregivers that they frequently face paradoxical emotions during pregnancy and motherhood regarding the balance of motherhood and personal happiness. As seen above, the bad feminist moments in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts are often prime examples of these
anxieties, which began as she started trying to get pregnant:
For all the years I didn’t want to be pregnant—the years I spent harshly deriding the “breeders”—I secretly felt pregnant women were smug in their complaints. Here they were, sitting on top of the cake of the culture, getting all the kudos for doing exactly what women are supposed to do, yet still they felt unsupported and discriminated against. Give me a break! Then, when I wanted to be pregnant but wasn’t, I felt that pregnant women had the cake I wanted, and were busy bitching about the flavor of the icing. I was wrong on all counts—imprisoned, as I was and still am, by my own hopes and fears. I’m not trying to fix that wrongness here. I’m just trying to let it hang out.52
Here we see Nelson’s attitudes evolve over time, shifting with her personal experiences.
Becoming feminist is not linear and tidy, but takes place in a series of moments in which one
changes and shifts over time.53 Once again, a bad feminist moment is used to recognize the
impulse of the killjoy and, instead, to set her down and allow something else to come up. In this
case, that something else is Nelson’s personal desire. In acknowledging her personal desires and
the role they have played in her previous feminist performances, instances in which she felt she
was being the righteous killjoy and judging others, she recognizes her own complicity in the
oppression of mothers. This bad feminist moment demonstrates but one aspect of her feminist
52. Nelson, 80.
53. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 173.; Ahmed maintains, “We don’t always become feminist killjoys early on. She can catch up with you at any time.” 200 journey, her growing understanding of the oppressions of mothers. She reflects on her complicity in those oppressions due to her own personal desires. In this bad feminist moment, Nelson not only shares her shortcomings as a feminist, but takes us through her reasoning, not to excuse or fix it, but to share it with others. Sometimes bad feminist moments are simply moments in which feminists recognize the role that personal desire plays in their feminist performances, exposing their complicity and providing an outlet through which one can simply let it “hang out.”
This is not to say that personal desire occurs independently of one’s feminism. But, in
Nelson’s text, it appears that the acknowledgment of personal desire is integral to challenging the assumed binaries of transgressive vs. normative behavior. As discussed in Chapter 3, those occupying transgressive identities, such as queer identities, often feel pressure to be continuously transgressive in all of their choices, regardless of personal desire. Nelson speaks to the history of this binary development in The Argonauts:
I’ve heard that, back in the day, Rita Mae Brown once tried to convince fellow lesbians to abandon their children in order to join the movement. But generally speaking, even in the most radical feminist and/or lesbian separatist circles, there have always been children around (Cherrie Moraga, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, Karen Finley, Pussy Riot…the list could go on and on). Yet rather than fade away with the rise of queer parenthood of all stripes, the tired binary that places femininity, reproduction, and normativity on one side and masculinity, sexuality, and queer resistance on the other has lately reached a kind of apotheosis, often posing as a last, desperate stand against homo- and heteronormativity, both.54
The “tired binary” to which Nelson refers not only informs her stance in The Argonauts, but also reflects the primary struggle she is attempting to convey in her bad feminist moments. Nelson’s placement of resistance as standing in direct opposition to normativity echoes Gay’s criticisms of
“essential feminism.” In Bad Feminist, Gay builds on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to
54. Nelson, The Argonauts, 75. 201
suggest that not only is there a socially agreed upon, untenable, monolithic way of performing womanhood, but there are also socially agreed upon, untenable, monolithic expectations for performing feminist womanhood. She refers to this as “essential feminism,” or “the notion that there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist and that there are consequences for doing so.”55
Gay maintains that essential feminism suggests:
anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman, or at least a proper, white, heterosexual feminist woman—hate pornography, unilaterally decry the objectification of women, don’t cater to the male gaze, hate men, hate sex, focus on career, don’t shave. I kid, mostly, with that last one.56
Gay refers to this description of feminism as “nowhere near accurate,” but suggests that the
movement has been warped by these misperceptions so much that “even people who should
know better have bought into” this image.57 As Gay points out, these expectations for feminists
are rooted in white supremacy, heteronormativity, and classism. This aligns with the choices
feminists are often forced to make between their racial and feminist identities, as discovered in
Chapter 3. As a white woman, Nelson does not feel forced to choose between her racial and
feminist identities. She feels forced to choose primarily between feminine reproduction (which
she argues aligns with perceptions of normativity) and masculine sexuality (which she argues
aligns with perceptions of resistance). As a queer woman and a queer studies scholar, it makes
sense that she her binaries would rest in gender identity. However, she once again appears to
ignore the racial and class-based assumptions that these binaries entail. After all, as McMillan
Cottom suggests in her discussion of beauty standards, normative feminine ideals are not
55. Gay, Bad Feminist, 304.
56. Gay, 304.
57. Gay, 304. 202
available to black women in this country; black feminists are not given the option of being
normative in this way. That does not mean that they do not want to be, however, as Gay’s
passage indicates. Perhaps, then, it is not feminine normativity itself that these bad feminist
moments are rooted in, but the desire for it.
For example, Nelson shares a brief story about the time a friend of hers found a mug that
Nelson’s mother had given to her as a gift, a mug with a picture of her family on it. In the photo,
Nelson is seven months pregnant, and she poses at a performance of The Nutcracker, along with
her recently transitioned partner, Harry, and his son, each dressed up for the occasion. Once again, we see the specter of the mother figure and Nelson’s desire to rebel against her in the name of feminism. What we also see in this story, though, is a latent desire for a normative nuclear family, and the subsequent tensions that underlie that desire. Nelson shares that she was
“horrified” when her mother sent her the mug. However, it still bothers her when her friend finds it and comments on it: “Wow, my friend said, filling it up. I’ve never seen anything so
58 heteronormative in all my life.” Nelson bristles at this comment: But what about it is the essence of heteronormativity? That my mother made a mug on a boojie service like Snapfish? That we’re clearly participating, or acquiescing into participating, in a long tradition of families being photographed at holiday time in their holiday best? That my mother made me the mug, in part to indicate that she recognizes and accepts my tribe as family? What about my pregnancy—is that inherently heteronormative? Or is the presumed opposition of queerness and procreation (or, to put a finer edge on it, maternity) more a reactionary embrace of how things have shaken down for queers than the mark of some ontological truth? As more queers have kids, will the presumed opposition simply wither away? Will you miss it?59
58. Nelson, The Argonauts, 13.
59. Nelson, 13. 203
Nelson works through the variety of ways in which her friend’s statement could be interpreted.
Being assumed as normative and in opposition to transgression bothers her enough to devote an entire section of The Argonauts to interrogating it. In fact, she returns to this binary again and again, making it a central concern of the book. This bad feminist moment, where her friend made her question such a small decision, morphs into a book-length reflection of transgressive performance and the nature of queer authenticity. In this moment, Nelson does not flat-out reject her friend’s accusation, but instead questions what is behind it. She breaks the perceived feminist transgression down into its parts: the capitalist use of personalized gifting; the participation in normative traditions; the implication that her cisgender, heterosexual mother accepts her family as nondeviant. There is a lot that is being assumed as normative here beyond heteronormativity.
Nelson appears to be defining heteronormativity by many different standards, including social class and religion, suggesting that she sees these assumptions of normativity in several arenas in the use of the term “heteronormativity.” She troubles the word by questioning what lies behind its use.
She does not stop there, however, but takes the inquiry into her pregnancy, the same experience she herself had previously referred to as “the seduction of normalcy,” and her pregnant self as “compromised and radiant.”60 Although Nelson clearly viewed her own experience with pregnancy as normative, her friend’s accusation of normativity causes her to stop and rethink this position. If being pregnant and having a family that engaged in outwardly normative capitalist traditions make her a bad feminist, then Nelson questions whether being feminist is really as transgressive as one would expect. Perhaps Nelson is suggesting here that
60. Nelson, 90. 204
the desire for normalcy is not inherently normative. But she is also clearly suggesting that
appearances of normativity often belie the truth. In another bad feminist moment, she points out
this feeling more directly as she discusses a seemingly normative family dinner immediately
following Harry’s top surgery:
Our last night at the Sheraton, we have dinner at the astoundingly overpriced “casual Mexican” restaurant on the premises, Dos Caminos. You pass as a guy; I, as pregnant. Our waiter cheerfully tells us about his family, expresses delight in ours. On the surface, it may have seemed as though your body was becoming more and more “male,” mine, more and more “female.” But that’s not how it felt on the inside. On the inside, we were two human animals undergoing transformations beside each other, bearing each other loose witness. In other words, we were aging.
While Nelson does not express quite the embarrassment, guilt, or level of questioning in this passage as in other bad feminist moments, she does indicate that she feels her outside gender
performances do not match her intentions or feelings. While the waiter assumes she and Harry to
be a heterosexual, cisgender couple, both she and Harry know this not to be true. Again, she
situates this as an almost universal experience, suggesting that, although they are not a heteronormative couple, she and Harry are, in fact, still normal people. They experience change
and transformation over time just as everyone else does. In this moment, however, they can hide their differences, assume the guise of normativity, and, as Nelson expresses she felt several times
in her pregnancy, explore the glow of normative acceptance. If being a good feminist is being
continuously transgressive, then perhaps being a bad feminist is not merely desiring and enjoying
normativity. Perhaps to feel like a bad feminist is also to acknowledge that things are not always
as they appear, including one’s feminism. Not every performance—whether normative or
transgressive—is authentic, and we cannot always know which is which. 205 Problems of Authentic Transgression in Feminist Relationships
Questions of performance and authenticity frequently arise in the authors’ bad feminist
moments, particularly in regard to transgressive feminist identity. As seen in Nelson’s
reflections on motherhood, these moments frequently provide outlets for letting one’s wrongness
simply hang out for others to see. In others, however, it also provides space for the authors to
push back against binary feminist assumptions of transgression vs normativity. Ahmed suggests
that the assumption that one is always a killjoy is problematic in that it can cause feminists to
“stop hearing what we think we know.”61 Feminists can become so accustomed to struggling that they assume to already know what is coming; they assume their own oppositionality in advance.
In assuming one’s own oppositionality, feminists are often protecting themselves, but in doing
so , they “might not notice our own agreements, if they are histories that are still.”62 Ongoing
systems of oppression rooted in histories of gendered and racialized violence frequently
contribute to feminists’ abilities to hear each other, to identify areas of agreement, and to assume
superiority to other feminist positions. Trans-exclusionary feminists, for example, “create an impression, that of being lonely radical feminist voices struggling against the tide of social opinion,” in order to support hateful positions against trans-identified people who are already facing ongoing struggles against societal structures that attempt to erase and harm them.63
Ahmed warns feminists: When you assume your own oppositionality too quickly, you can inflate a minority into a majority, hear an injury as a lobby; interpret a fight for survival as the formation of an industry… Activism might need us to involve losing confidence in ourselves, letting
61. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 174.
62. Ahmed, 174.
63. Ahmed, 174. 206
ourselves recognize how we too can be the problem. And that is hard if we have a lifetime of being the problem.64
Perhaps, then, moments in which feminists question their feminism become moments in which
they recognize the killjoy impulse. Take, for instance, Nelson’s discussions of queer
motherhood. In these moments of shaken confidence in her feminism, Nelson recognizes how
sometimes, the killjoy can actually be a source of conflict rather than a solution. In Nelson’s text,
the killjoy is a figure of oppositionality that is not always beneficial and often exclusionary. This
contradicts Ahmed’s assumption of the killjoy as the ultimate feminist image. Nelson’s bad
feminist moments suggest the killjoy is but one face of feminism. Sometimes, the killjoy can do
more harm than good, as she assumes oppositionality without empathy. Bad feminist moments
allow for the development of this empathy that Nelson argues feminism needs.
The killjoy, or the assumption of oppositionality, can also be read as feminist performance. As Gay reminds us in this passage, it is not feminism itself that feminists are forced to choose, but the performance of mainstream ideal feminism (or essential feminism if we borrow from Gay). Gay reflects on the pressures of feminists to perform transgression in accordance with the “prescribed set of rules” outlined above:
Alas, poor feminism. So much responsibility keeps getting piled on the shoulders of a movement whose primary purpose is to achieve equality, in all realms, between men and women. I keep reading these articles and getting angry and tired because they suggest there's no way for women to ever get it right. These articles make it seem like, as Butler suggests, there is, in fact, a right way to be a woman and a wrong way to be a woman. The standard for the right way to be a woman and/or a feminist appears to be ever changing and unachievable.65
64. Ahmed, 174-75.
65. Gay, 310. 207
The pressures placed on feminists to perform transgression the right way intersect with the pressures placed on women to perform womanhood the right way. As usual, the burden for transgression is placed on the shoulders of the oppressed, particularly when those who are oppressed are women, even more so when they are women of color, and most acutely when they are queer women of color. When feminists question themselves as feminists, they are not only responding to the unrealistic pressures of these standards, but they are exposing the contradictions inherent in these standards.
This exposure is brought sharply into focus in bad feminist moments in which the authors purposely let their potential complicity and wrongness simply hang out without clear resolution.
In resisting the urge to assume the killjoy, Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom allow themselves to be wrong, to be human, and to struggle with that humanity, even when the struggle is painful.
For example, when Gay discusses the potential complicity of perpetuating rape culture in her own works that depict sexual violence:
At times, I nauseated myself in the writing and by what I am capable of writing and imagining, my ability to go there. As I write any of these stories, I wonder if I am being gratuitous. I want to get it right. But how do you get this sort of thing right? How do you write violence authentically without making it exploitative? I worry I am contributing to the cultural numbness that would allow an article like the one in the Times to be written and published, that allows rape to be such rich fodder for popular culture and entertainment.66
In this passage, Gay expresses an almost physical discomfort with her potential for complicity.
She desires to “get it right,” and be ideal in her depictions, but she admits she is not always sure how to do so. She goes on to discuss the importance of careful language usage in depictions of
66. Gay, 135. 208
rape and sexual assault.67 However, she notably does not offer a formula or solution for achieving ideal language usage. Like Nelson, she simply lets this moment “hang out” for readers to reflect upon themselves. In order to address the larger issues of language choice in perpetuating rape culture, she identifies her own potential for complicity, recognizing how she too could be contributing to the problem. In sharing this potential, she also exposes the contradictions inherent in assumptions of authenticity.
The question of transgressive authenticity not only impacts feminists’ performance of feminism, but it also impacts their abilities to empathetically engage with other feminists.
Assumed oppositionality can leave feminists suspicious of work that does not reflect their experiences and/or the work of feminists who are not part of the same identity groups. Gay, for
example, shares that she has trouble trusting the work of writers who write about fat experiences
when they are not fat themselves and white writers who attempt to depict non-white experiences.
Several of Gay’s bad feminist moments are moments in which she questions others’ authenticity, exposing her own expectations for authentic representation. For instance, although Gay shares that “writing difference is complicated,” that it “requires a delicate balance, and I don’t know how we strike that balance,” she still finds herself upset over problematic representations of race written by white people who don’t quite get it right.68 She interrogates these feelings within light
of her belief that writers should challenge themselves to write beyond their own experiences:
“when it comes to white writers working through racial difference, though, I am conflicted and
far less tolerant than I should be. If I take nothing else from the book and movie in question [The
67. Gay, 135-36.
68. Gay, 216. 209
Help], it’s that I know I have work to do.”69 An ideal feminist, in Gay’s mind, is more tolerant of writers attempting to write beyond personal experience and navigate issues of race in creative works. When she is unable to be so, Gay decides she has work to do on herself as a feminist.
While Gay’s impulse is immediately to summon the killjoy, to assume oppositionality that ignores the difficulty of getting difference right, she interrogates that impulse to articulate a more precise opinion on the matter: “I don’t expect writers to always get difference right, but I do expect writers to make a credible effort.”70 Gay’s ability to identify her assumptions of opposition allows her to more clearly articulate the nuances of the problem; that while white writers should be encouraged and capable of trying to write across difference, many of them simply do not make a concerted effort to get it right. This bad feminist moment is clearly a moment of feminist redefinition for Gay. While many of her other bad feminist moments suggest that the killjoy is the feminist ideal, her personal definition of ideal feminism does not rest on the killjoy alone. Perhaps, then, bad feminist moments can allow feminists like Gay to define their own feminist ideals, such as empathy.
Bad Feminist Moments as Feminist Self-Assembly
The question of authenticity in transgressive performance is compounded by pressures to perform other aspects of identity authentically, such as gender, race, and class. Oftentimes, women find themselves at crossroads of gender, race, and class performances that might alternatively align with, conflict with, or complicate their feminist performances. In Thick,
McMillan Cottom reminds her readers:
69. Gay, 217.
70. Gay, 217. 210
You cannot separate what it means to be a 'woman,' often used to mean a performance of acceptable femininity, from the conditions that decide what is and is not acceptable across time and space. We all do this kind of performance of ourselves, be it our gender or race or social class or national identity or culture. As we are doing it, we are always negotiating with powerful ideas about what constitutes a woman.71
Feminist women’s experiences are intricately entangled with the expectations and experiences of
other aspects of their identities. Ahmed refers to this entanglement as the “messy” nature of
feminist biography.72 She posits feminism as “DIY: a form of self-assembly,” in which feminists
put the pieces of identity together, reassembling and rearticulating their personal identities that
shatter as they recognize the limitations of binary identity expectations (such as the binaries of
73 woman vs man, straight vs queer, etc.). In this light, bad feminist moments can be read as moments of feminist self-assembly, in which feminists attempt to work through the expectations for feminist performance along with expectations for performance of other aspects of identity. Take, for instance, McMillan Cottom’s response to black women who called her out for her article on Miley Cyrus and white beauty:
Sisters weren’t really angry about my breakdown of just how dangerous Miley Cyrus’s performance on a televised award show actually was. They weren’t exactly angry that I pointed out the size and shape of the black woman dancers behind her. What many black women were angry about was how I located myself in what I’d written. I said, blithely, as a matter of observable fact, that I am unattractive. Because I am unattractive, the argument went, I have a particular experience of beauty, race, racism, and interacting with what we might call the white gaze. I thought nothing of it at the time I was writing it, which is unusual. I can usually pinpoint what I have said, written, or done that will piss people off and which people will be pissed off. I missed this one entirely.74
71. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 62.
72. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 19.
73. Ahmed, 27.
74. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 38. 211
The anger of the black women (and some men) that reacted to McMillan Cottom’s article was
directed primarily at her assumption that, as a black woman, she was unattractive. Students at the
HBCU she later lectured at had a similar response, chastising her because “we had fought too
long, worked too hard, come too far to concede that what white people have said about us is
true.”75 McMillan Cottom characterizes these moments where she is called out by fellow black
women for conceding to white narratives of black beauty as “brutal,” as they came from people
she loves and identifies with.76 The brutality experienced by McMillan Cottom in these moments
suggests a breaking point in which she feels conflicted by her feminist opinions of beauty as
capital and her experiences as a woman of color who does not wish to internalize and perpetuate
racist narratives.
In deciding to share her personal reactions to these bad feminist/bad black woman moments, McMillan Cottom enacts a form of feminist self-assembly, situating her experiences and feelings within existing social structures of oppression to pushback against others’ expectations and illustrate the capitalist imperatives of beauty that hurt all women, especially
black women. She shares the conflicted feelings that prompted her to engage in self-questioning:
“I am accustomed to men and white people being angry with me. That is par for the course. But
when black women are mad at me it is a special kind of contrition, and I take the time to figure
out my responsibility.”77 The “contrition” McMillan Cottom feels for possibly betraying black
women prompts her to step back, examine her work, and carefully rearticulate her position
regarding feminist work on beauty standards. She points out how the feminist work on beauty
75. McMillan Cottom, 55.
76. McMillan Cottom, 39.
77. McMillan Cottom, 38. 212
standards over time frequently reinforces the position that beauty is for white women. Instead of
letting her possible complicity “hang out” as Gay and Nelson do in the above passage, McMillan
Cottom actively risks rher elationships to the black feminists that chastised her in order to engage in feminist self-assembly and challenge the feminist narratives of r ace and beauty that
she sees as ultimately harmful to everyone by opting to challenge their views on beauty and who
gets to be beautiful rather than agreeing with them and apologizing. Similar to Gay’s
rearticulation of her position on trigger warnings in Chapter 3, McMillan Cottom acknowledges
a “special sort of contrition” that she feels, but she does not stop at that feeling. Instead, she
pushes forward, actively rethinks her position, and then further explicates it. She takes the
opportunity to rearticulate her relationships to beauty, to whiteness, and to feminism. This bad
feminist moment does not only allow her to take the time and space to think through her possible complicity, but it allows her to articulate a new definition of complicity, one her readers may not
agree with. This is the very picture of feminist self-assembly, disarticulating one’s definitions of
ideal feminism to rearticulate new definitions that reshape and redefine feminist landscapes that
defy popular understandings. While feminists are not always ready to actively negotiate their
feminist ideals and definitions, each author utilizes at least one major bad feminist moment to
engage in feminist self-assembly at some point in their text. Similar to McMillan Cottom’s
rearticulation and redefinition of feminist complicity, Nelson attempts to redefine transgression
and push back against her own (and her feminist friends’) binary assumptions regarding
feminism, and Gay articulates controversial opinions on trigger warnings and defines an essential
feminism that questions who gets to decide what is feminist and what is not. 213
Negotiating Desire
As demonstrated above, the desire to be a good feminist often conflicts with desires for
normalcy, desires for acceptance, and desires for understanding. While the authors often feel they
are bad feminists for not assuming the killjoy, they paradoxically also feel like bad feminists when they do embrace the killjoy but feel the killjoy limits their abilities to empathize with
others or articulate their feelings. The authors utilize bad feminist moments to rework their
personal definitions of feminism that make room for more than the killjoy. The bad feminist
moments of these authors demonstrate not only the feminist imperative for transgression, but of the pleasure in that transgression. However, that pleasure often conflicts withs desires to connect,
to understand, and to belong, along with the attendant pleasures that stem from belonging. The
desire to belong and the desire to be desired shape the authors’ feminist ideals while
simultaneously conflicting with their images of ideal feminism, producing moments of feminist
crisis. As McMillan Cottom points out, “we have yet to make strides toward fleshing out a
theory of desirability, the desire to be desired, in black feminist theory or politics.”78 I would argue that we have yet to make strides toward fleshing out a theory of desirability in feminist theory in general, something that we need to consider in examining feminist works and practices.
The desire to be desired and belong structure feminists’ relationships to other people, to their
bodies, and to their feminist ideals. For McMillan Cottom, Gay, and Nelson, bad feminist
moments frequently center on their desires for connection and community in a world that
emphasizes individuality and self-sufficiency, even within feminist movements.
78. McMillan Cottom, 52. 214
The Desire to Be Desired
Feminists’ desires to be desired are often complicated by the formative traumas of gendered and racialized violence. Rape culture not only situates women as victims responsible for their own victimization, but it also situates men as natural predators. In her essay “The
Spectacle of Broken Men,” Gay shares stories of athletes forgiven for drug, alcohol, and rape allegations, and a father who beat another man to death when he found him sexually assaulting his daughter. She points out that:
Mostly, this story shows us how broken men are everywhere—on ranches in central Texas, in elite football games, both on the field and on the sidelines. And alongside these broken men are the women who all too often become broken too. It’s a spectacle in every way.79
The “brokenness” of men and women can complicate their relationships with each other. Men are simultaneously expected to be women’s protectors and their predators. Or, as Gay puts it,
“Men want to protect women—unless, of course, they want to grab those women's asses.”80 And, as such, women are often uncomfortable with strange men, angry men, and sometimes just men in general.
The desire to be desired, however, is compelling, and bad feminist moments represent the duality of desire and fear in women’s relationships to men. From moment to moment, women fear men’s anger and retaliation. Gay, for example, in discussing a lighthearted Scrabble tournament, describes an instance in which a male opponent lost a game to her, growing upset and refusing to shake her hand: “I thought he was going to throw the table over. Male anger makes me intensely uncomfortable, so I tried to sit very still and hoped the uncomfortable
79. Gay, Bad Feminist, 159.
80. Gay, 191. 215
moment would pass quickly.”81 Previously in this passage, Gay had characterized her mood as
“giddy.”82 She was playing her first Scrabble tournament and was excited at the prospect of
winning a game so soon. However, in winning against a man, her mood quickly shifts to
discomfort in anticipation of his anger and retaliation. Although nothing comes of it, this
moment represents the myriad small moments of fear and discomfort that women, including
feminist women, experience daily. A mood can change quickly when a man becomes angry. And like Gay, many women react by simply sitting still and hoping nothing comes of it.
Feminists may stay silent not only in the face of men’s anger, but also in the face of
men’s other sexist and problematic behaviors. Speaking up against men, especially groups of
men, can be intimidating. As described in Chapter 3, McMillan Cottom depicts a scene in Thick
in which she “fought with friends, men I adored and respected,” who dismissed her arguments
and responded as if she were a “crazy woman.”83 Marginalized people who speak out against oppression are frequently gaslighted into believing they are seeing something that does not exist.84 As Ahmed suggests, feminists who speak up against oppression are often viewed as the
real problem: “Feminists: looking for problems It is as if these problems are not there until you
81. Gay, 39.
82. Gay, 39.
83. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 181-82.
84. Paige L. Sweet, “The Sociology of Gaslighting,” American Sociological Review 84, no. 5 (2019): 851.; Sweet defines gaslighting as “a type of psychological abuse aimed at making victims seem or feel “crazy,” creating a “surreal” interpersonal environment.” She makes the argument that gaslighting is most effective when rooted in social inequalities, particularly inequalities of gender and sexuality, and when executed in intimate relationships with unequal power dynamics. 216
point them out; it is as if pointing them out is what makes them there.”85 While McMillan
Cottom uses the story of a fight with the men in her life to discuss the insidious traumas of
growing up as a black girl, she also reveals the ways in which the men in feminists’ lives can
silence them by making them feel like they are overreacting, crazy, or unfair to men. These moments shape feminist women’s relationships to men in a variety of ways.
Bad feminist moments that center on their relationships to men often indicate that the authors feel simultaneously desirous of speaking out against oppressive behavior and desirous of not disrupting their relationships with men. As feminists, Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson each feel it their feminist responsibility to overcome these barriers and speak out against those who perpetuate sexism and racism. However, they also frequently feel unable to do so, whether due to desire, hope, or exhaustion. Gay, for instance, shares:
Despite what people think based on my opinion writing, I very much like men. They’re interesting to me, and I mostly wish they would be better about how they treat women so I wouldn’t have to call them out so often. And still, I put up with nonsense from unsuitable men even though I know better and can do better.86
Note in this passage how Gay does not state that men can do better. She wishes they would, but she ultimately takes responsibility for “putting up” with their behaviors. As a feminist, Gay indicates that she knows better than to put up with such behavior. To Gay, good feminists do not put up with problematic male behavior. Gay suggests here that, in order to be a good feminist,
the killjoy must always come up when needed, and feminists must always take oppositional
stances to problematic behaviors in their relationships with men. But what happens when they do
not? Gay’s bad feminist moment bears an air of exhaustion. She does not wish to never need to
85. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 39.
86. Gay, Bad Feminist, 316. 217 call men out, for occasional confrontations would be manageable. Her wish is to not have to call them out so often. Gay is exhausted by repeatedly beating against the walls of oppression in her relationships with men. So, she puts up with it despite her feminist beliefs.
The neoliberal emphasis on personal responsibility and self-improvement greatly influences feminists’ beliefs that they may not be feminist enough in romantic relationships. As we see above, Gay blames herself for putting up with men’s problematic behaviors, rather than the men who engage in those behaviors. Her bad feminist moment reveals the ways in which feminists might feel pressured to take on responsibility for their problematic relationships with men. In genderqueer relationships, such as Nelson’s, issues of feminist responsibility and self- perfection are most evident in the bad feminist moments surrounding gender performance in romantic relationships. As discussed in Chapter 3, queer women are often expected to be continuously transgressive, even when they do not want to be or do not know how to be. For
Nelson, this dynamic is most evident in her conflict over pronoun usage for her partner. She depicts a scene in which her friend is browsing the Internet on her behalf to find out how to refer to her genderqueer partner going through transition, something she felt too embarrassed to ask herself:
She's going to see if the Internet reveals a preferred pronoun for you, since despite or due to the fact that we're spending every free moment in bed together and already talking about moving in, I can't bring myself to ask. Instead I've become a quick study in pronoun avoidance.87
This brief scene extends into the future relationship:
Expert as one may become at such a conversation, to this day it remains almost impossible for me to make an airline reservation or negotiate with my human resources
87. Nelson, The Argonauts, 7. 218
department on our behalf without flashes of shame and befuddlement…How can the words not be good enough"88
In both instances, Nelson expresses shame and guilt over her lack of knowledge and ability. As
a partner in a genderqueer relationship, she realizes it may be assumed that she always knows the
appropriate terminology and practices for such a partnership. However, the daily practices are
not so simple, and her failure as a queer authority leaves her feeling ashamed. Nelson does not
place blame on the societal lack of language when it comes to genderqueer relationships and
daily interactions. Instead, she blames herself for not already being informed. To Nelson, good
feminists are always informed, particularly when they hold transgressive identities aside from
that of woman.
Good feminists are also frequently expected to be transgressive in their behaviors toward
romantic relationships with men in general. The fight for (primarily white, middle-class) women’s equal employment rights emphasized women’s need for personal fulfillment outside of the home.89 Many queer feminists and separatist feminists called for complete romantic and
sexual separation from men in order to break free from the chains of domestic labor and
gendered violence.90 To this day, the binaries of romance/domestic bliss and work/career
fulfillment have not been completely worked out in feminist circles. Add to this confusing
dynamic the contemporary widespread postfeminist preoccupations with work-life balance based
88. Nelson, 7.
89. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell Publication, 1963).; For further discussion of how this evolved over time, see Chapter 1.
90. Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 106-108.; Amber Hollibaugh and Cherríe Moraga. "What We're Rollin’ Around in Bed With: Sexual Silences in Feminism,” in Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality, eds. Ann Snitow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (Monthly Review Press, 1983), 58. 219
on neoliberal ideals of individual fulfillment and perseverance, and one sees how modern-day
feminists are faced with a host of contradictory imperatives.91 Feminists do not exist within a
vacuum, and they are affected by the ideals of the societies they occupy. Feminism itself is, in
fact, greatly influenced by these ideals, and contemporary feminist works that emphasize the
need for women to achieve personal fulfillment outside of the home regardless of the amount of
support they receive from partners and family within the home can leave many feminists feeling
that they must choose between family and work, even in the face of contradictory demands to
balance both equally. Bad feminist moments based in conflicting ideals regarding romance and
career reveal the tensions created by this rhetoric. Take, for example, Gay’s bad feminist
moment in which she shares a desire to stay with her boyfriend instead of taking a new job that
she worked hard for:
I go to a school for a very long time and get some degrees and finally move to a very small town in the middle of a cornfield. I leave someone behind. I tell myself I have worked so hard I can’t choose a man over a career. I want to choose the man over the career.92
Gay has to “tell herself” not to choose a man over her career. Note how she does not feel the need to tell the man to choose her at this point. She depicts herself as responsible for the broken relationship, for she made the feminist choice. She speaks of it almost like she had to force herself to make what she perceives to be the feminist choice of seeking a career at the risk of breaking romantic ties. At this point, as in the above passage about her relationships with men,
91. Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How Global Elites use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Boulder: Paradigm, 2010).; Catherine Rottenberg, "Happiness and the Liberal Imagination: How Superwoman Became Balanced,” Feminist Studies 40, no. 1 (2014): 144-68, www.jstor.org/stable/10.15767/feministstudies.40.1.144.
92. Gay, Bad Feminist, 20. 220
Gay depicts the status of the relationship and its effect on her as her personal responsibility. She
does, eventually, ask said man to join her at her new job, when she returns home for the summer:
“I return to the place I moved from, spend weeks with the man I left behind. He says, Don’t go. I
say, Please follow. We remain at an impasse. I return to the cornfield.”93 At this turn, the choice
is not something she has to make alone. While Gay indicates in the previous passage that she
made the choice to leave her romantic relationship behind in the name of her career, a choice she
felt she had to take responsibility for as a feminist, this follow-up passage shifts the responsibility to both her and her partner. No longer feeling she has to choose between her relationship and her career, Gay attempts to convince her partner to join her in her new life.
However, when he refuses to do so and insists she must stay in order for the relationship to continue, Gay’s tone shifts to one of ambivalence and resignation. The two simply remain at an impasse. The imperative for individualistic neoliberal feminist resistance has been diffused because she attempted to move beyond the relationship/career binary, and this passage ends on a note of resignation rather than tension. Whereas the bad feminist moment in which she felt she had to remind herself to be a good feminist and choose her career over a man reveals the tensions contemporary feminists often feel regarding romantic relationships with men, it also allows her to seek out an alternative, even if that alternative ultimately did not leave her satisfied.
For queer feminists, the pressure to make the feminist choice in romantic relationships is
further complicated by the ambiguity of what that choice might be in a queer relationship.
Maggie Nelson, for instance, describes her decision to marry her partner:
We hadn’t been planning on getting married per se. But when we woke up on the morning on November 3, 2008 and listened to the radio’s day-before-the-election polling as we made our hot drinks, it suddenly seemed as thought Prop 8 was going to pass. We
93. Gay, 27-28. 221
were surprised at our shock, as it revealed a passive, naive trust that the arc of the moral universe, however long, tends toward justice. But really justice has no coordinates, no teleology. We Googled “how to get married in Los Angeles” and set out for Norwalk City Hall, where the oracle promised the deed could be done, dropping our small charge off at day care on our way. As we approached Norwalk—where the hell are we?— we passed several churches with variations of “one man + one woman: how God wants it” on their marquees. We also passed dozens of suburban houses with YES ON PROP 8 signs hammered into their lawns, stick figures indefatigably rejoicing. Poor marriage! Off we went to kill it (unforgivable). Or reinforce it (unforgivable).94
The pressure of being transgressive manifests in the double bind of unforgivability Nelson
describes. To get married while queer simultaneously refutes heterosexual norms surrounding
marriage rights and reinforces marriage as an institution, something feminists have been fighting
against for a long time. As Nelson goes on to share:
There’s something truly strange about living in a historical moment in which the conservative anxiety and despair about queers bringing down civilization and its institutions (marriage, most notably) is met by the anxiety and despair so many queers feel about the failure or incapacity of queerness to bring down civilization and its institutions, and their frustration with the assimilationist, unthinkingly neoliberal bent of the mainstream GLBTQ+ movement, which has spent fine coin begging entrance into two historically repressive structures: marriage and the military…If there’s one thing homonormativity reveals, it’s the troubling fact that you can be victimized and in no way be radical; it happens very often among homosexuals as with every other oppressed minority.95
As we see in the passage above, queer feminists in relationships often keenly feel the effects of the double bind of queer transgression. To sleep with whomever you want—or to marry whomever you want—is not inherently transgressive. Therefore, those who make those choices
may not feel they are being transgressive enough, no matter what decision they make. Bad
feminist moments such as this remind us that feminists in queer relationships can never get it
right.
94. Nelson, The Argonauts, 23.
95. Nelson, 26. 222
The Desire to Belong
The desire to be desired not only contributes to feminists’ romantic relationships, but also
to their relationships with their communities. McMillan Cottom suggests that the desire to be
desired can translate to a desire for community in her discussion of her time at an HBCU:
At this institution I could be a kind of beautiful: normal, normative, taken for granted as desirable. It is one of many reasons that I loved my HBCU… feeling desired opened up new avenues of inclusion that shaped my sense of self.96
McMillan Cottom’s sense of self is shaped by the communities to which she belongs. She
belongs to these communities because she is desired by them, because they want to include her,
because they make her feel that she belongs. In particular, her HBCU community made her feel
desired romantically, and thus made her feel desired communally. The two are not mutually
exclusive. To be desired in these ways suggests to McMillan Cottom that she is not deviant, as
she has been taught by white people all her life, but she is, in fact, normal. Often, the desire for
belonging is simply the desire for normalcy. As discussed above, this desire for normalcy often conflicts with feminist desires and imperatives for continual personal transgression against normativity.
In this light, it becomes clear that the desire to belong is not only rooted in the desire to be desired, but also in the desire to survive. As the authors’ parents knew to be true, normalcy often means survival. However, a sense of belonging does not always translate to mainstream belonging. McMillan Cottom reminds readers that group belonging can afford much needed resources to marginalized people: “We want to belong. And not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and
96. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 53-54. 223
employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on.”97 In this sense,
group belonging can afford resources and support for feminists, especially when they are
struggling against intersecting histories of oppression.
Refusing someone the benefits of community can translate to refusing them resources
and support, particularly for women of color. McMillan Cottom describes the ways in which she
was rejected by her community growing up, particularly by her teachers in school, who framed
her as deviant simply for existing as she grew into her black woman’s body:
I was, like many young women, expected to be small so that boys could expand and white girls could shine. When I would not or could not shrink, people made sure that I knew I had erred. I was, like many black children, too much for white teachers and white classrooms and white study groups and white Girl Scout troops and so on.98
White women in positions of authority enforced the imperatives of white normalcy and beauty
on McMillan Cottom by repeatedly telling her “how wrong or dangerous or deviant,” her body
was and punishing her for it.99 As a deviant body, McMillan Cottom was singled out and not offered the same resources and support that white children received. She reminds readers that
“when beauty is white and I am dark, it means that I am more likely to be punished in school, to receive higher sentences for crimes, less likely to marry, and less likely to marry someone with equal or higher economic status.”100 When group belonging is denied to marginalized people, they are more likely to experience further marginalization and less likely to survive, let alone achieve neoliberal ideals of success.
97. McMillan Cottom, 165.
98. McMillan Cottom, 7.
99. McMillan Cottom, 40-41.
100. McMillan Cottom, 72. 224
Feminists must contend with conflicting desires to belong, even when the communities they turn to are not the ones they expected. Gay, for instance, only joined the Scrabble club because she was lonely. She had moved to a new place in a small town with a new job. The groups she already belonged to, her family and friend groups back home, mocked her for her decision to join the club, making her feel it was necessary to explain her motives even to her readers. She writes:
You have to understand. I was lonely in a new town where I knew no one. I wanted to be back home, with my boyfriend, in our apartment, complaining about how SportsCenter seems to air perpetually or listening to him nag me about my imaginary Internet friends. My apartment was empty, no furniture, because I left my sad graduate-student furniture behind. After work, I’d sit on my lone chair, a step above sad, purchased at Sofa Mart, wondering how my life had come to this. When my new colleague invited me to her home to play with her Scrabble club, I was so desperate I would have agreed to just about anything—cleaning her bathrooms, watching the grass grow in her backyard, something smarmy and vaguely illegal involving suburban prostitution, whatever.101
The experiences that bring feminists to their communities are individual and subjective.102 Like anybody else, feminists often feel the need to justify their subjective positions aligning themselves with any group. The fact that Gay feels the need to justify her desire for group belonging to her reader indicates that she finds it necessary to justify her desires, even when they are as harmless as desiring to join a Scrabble club.
As we see in Gay’s passage, place is a significant factor in community identification.
Feminists’ needs are often defined by their physical and social locations, especially when they find themselves in new and unfamiliar places. Nelson also expresses the subjective need for
101. Gay, Bad Feminist, 31.
102. See Chapter 2 of this dissertation for an in-depth discussion of feminist subjectivity. 225
belonging in a new place in the description of her partner, Harry’s, desire to go see a queer porn
film in theaters:
You were feeling lonely, longing for a sense of community, identification. Unlike the close-knit, DIY queer scene you were once at the center of in San Francisco, the queer scene in LA can feel like everything else in LA: partitioned by traffic and freeways, oppressively cliquish and bewilderingly diffuse at the same time, hard to fathom, to see.103
Queer communities, like any communities, do not look the same from place to place. In this
passage, Nelson exposes the ways in which transgressive communities widely vary. There is no
monolithic queer community.
There is also no monolithic feminist community. The desire to belong to feminist
communities can influence feminists’ self perceptions. They might come into a feminist
community expecting communion and connection only to find difference and confusion. As
Nelson points out, “Even identical genital acts mean very different things to different people.
This is a crucial point to remember, and also a difficult one. It reminds us that there is difference
right where we may be looking for, and expecting, communion.”104 Since feminist communities
consider themselves to be transgressive communities, the definitions of transgression vary wildly
from community to community. As we will see in Chapter 5, the pressure to get it right coupled with the desire to belong can contribute to the sense that one is a bad feminist. As discovered in
Chapter 3, that sense can be compounded when the feminist community one belongs to advocates for beliefs and behaviors that contradict the values and practices of other groups one belongs to, forcing feminists to make choices between being an ideal feminist and being an ideal
103. Nelson, The Argonauts, 63.
104. Nelson, 93. 226 woman, an ideal black person, an ideal partner, an ideal mother, an ideal queer person, an ideal friend, or an ideal whatever-else-you-identify-as.
Conclusion
Many of the bad feminist moments of Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom center on their relationships to others. Bad feminist moments based in family relationships set the stage for and complicate the authors’ relationships to feminism and to other people. While feelings of alienation and the accusations of destruction might render relationships fragile, and may sometimes result in the breaking of relationships, these feelings hold the potential to make room for feminist growth. However, the emotional toll is sometimes more than feminists are ready to bear. While feminists sometimes choose to let bonds snap in order to obtain release and seek freedom, others might not be ready to break off exhausting family relationships. Therefore, bad feminist moments can be read as products of the frustrations and anxieties of feminist misattunement within relationships.
Histories of oppression intersect with imperatives of happiness to produce families and bodies that have been shaped by neoliberal ideals of self-sufficiency and success to fit gender, raced, and classed social norms. These intersections of oppression not only contribute to feminists’ family dynamics, but they also cause bad feminist moments in which the intergenerational imperatives of happiness coincide with feminist values that refuse those imperatives. These moments reveal feminists’ desires to transgress against parental expectations, and how these desires shape their definitions of ideal feminist transgression. Furthermore, these moments reveal the ways in which feminists embody the inherent contradictions in desires to connect with and understand the women who have shaped their lives from childhood coupled with desires to rebel and transgress against them. Feminists carry the intergenerational traumas, 227 imperatives of happiness, and feminist ideals that trickle down from their mothers into their new family dynamics with them as they grow older. As feminists become mothers, they bear the burdens of public motherhood, neoliberal ideals of motherhood, and the often conflicting ideals of feminist motherhood as they attempt to negotiate their relationships with their children and other partners. For feminist mothers, especially queer feminist mothers, questions of transgressive authenticity impact their feminist performances.
These questions of transgressive authenticity also shape how feminists define their feminism and their transgression. While feminists may feel that, in order to be a good feminist, the killjoy must always be present in their relationships, bad feminist moments offer them a chance to step back and redefine their feminist ideals, including ideals such as empathy and connection. The experience of bad feminist moments can offer opportunities for feminist self- assembly in which feminists work through their own expectations along with others’ expectations of feminist performance. Both the desire to belong and the desire to be desired often conflict with the feminists’ ideals and beliefs, producing moments of crisis within their personal relationships.
As we will see in Chapter 5, the desire to belong also shapes feminists’ relationships with each other. Feminist shelters are inherently fragile, as they are built to change the very structures in which they exist. Feminists’ definitions of transgression vary wildly from community to community and from feminist to feminist, and the pressure to get transgression right coupled with desires for community can contribute to the sense that one is a bad feminist. In the next chapter, I explore the relationships of Gay, McMillan, and Cottom, to the spaces they often turn to for feminist connection and feminist work, but that often leave them feeling like they cannot do either feminism or work right: academic spaces. The traumas of contemporary womanhood 228 and the fragility of feminist relationships all intersect in academic feminist women’s work.
Relationships with other feminists are often articulated through occupational distinctions. As well, definitions of ideal feminism are complicated within the neoliberal academy that emphasizes individual self-promotion and capitalist value systems that often do not align with or foster feminist work. Simultaneously, the burden of responsibility for doing feminist work is placed on the shoulders of those whom it most impacts. I attend to the ways in which academic work, diversity work, non-academic writing, and public backlash shape the bad feminist moments shared by Nelson, McMillan Cottom, and Gay. I also explore the ways in which these authors choose to share and address these moments (or not) in efforts to articulate and rearticulate feminist communities. 229
CHAPTER 5. BAD FEMINIST MOMENTS AS OCCUPATION-BASED CRISIS
Feminists who are also academics have to contend with conflicting identities throughout their education and subsequent careers. As academic feminists, Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan
Cottom, and Maggie Nelson not only have to contend with the insidious traumas of womanhood and the complicated impacts of feminist relationships, but they must also contend with the oppressive structures inherent in the very spaces they often turn to for feminist work and community: the academy. Beginning in undergraduate programs and extending throughout their academic careers, each author expresses the contradictions and tensions they experience on a daily basis. Each author comes from a different background, but they all express moments in which they are made to feel that they do not belong in the academy, whether due to their marginalized statuses as women (especially women of color), their working-class backgrounds
(for some), or their feminist values.
While academia has slowly progressed in its inclusion of women and people of color, it is still rife with racist, sexist, and classist practices. These practices are compounded by contemporary neoliberal ideals that emphasize individualism, self-promotion, and personal perfection. As I introduced in Chapter 1 of this dissertation, feminist academics are increasingly experiencing feelings of “ongoing restlessness” in higher education. 1 Their feminist values do not always align with their job descriptions nor the reward systems utilized by universities.
While many universities have adopted the language of diversity, the actual work of increasing institutional diversity is usually placed squarely on the shoulders of those whom it most affects:
1. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad, Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Flights, Fights and Failures, eds. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Secaucus, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 230
people of color and women. Women (particularly women of color) who are also feminists that
work in university settings are expected to engage in diversity work that is thankless and
exhausting. While diversity work might align with their values as feminists, it does not often
advance them as academics. As evidenced by the bad feminist moments of these texts written by
academic feminists, this can leave academic feminists feeling like they are constantly forced to
choose between their occupational and feminist priorities.
In this chapter, I explore the impacts of these conflicting occupational practices, systems,
and ideals in Gay’s Bad Feminist, McMillan Cottom’s Thick: And Other Essays, and Nelson’s
The Argonauts.2 I zero in on the ways in which these experiences inform and shape the authors’
feminist identities, their relationships to others, and their perceptions of who and what defines
academic feminist authority. I argue that, as diversity workers, academic feminists engage in
accessible, experience-based, public-facing scholarship as a form of feminist snap, breaking with
traditional practices and definitions of authority that perpetuate racist, sexist, and classist
structures of oppression in higher education. Furthermore, I argue that sharing bad feminist
moments in such scholarship can also serve to loan out the privileges of education and academic
language, make connections and build community, and challenge others to engage in collective
feminist snap that resists the perceived binaries of feminist identity. Ahmed defines feminist snap
as a refusal of the inheritances of the past and “a way of thinking more creatively and
affirmatively about breaking points,” within systems of oppression. 3 A snap can be the result of
not only inherited histories of oppression, but also the result of one’s own past complicities. “A
2. Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays (New York: Harper Perennial, 2014).; Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick.; Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts (Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2015).
3. Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (London: Duke University Press, 2017), 186-87. 231
snap can be directed at one’s own past bearing,” Ahmed maintains, “You can snap because you
are exhausted by having not snapped thus far and by what you have had to put up with. You
can’t bear what you have borne for too long.” 4 Bad feminist moments can reveal feminists’
struggles with their own complicities, and in opting to share autoethnographic knowledge with
wider audiences, feminists can not only address their own complicities within academic
citational practices, but they can also disrupt them, snapping the traditions their careers are built
upon.
Diversity Work In the first section of this chapter, I examine bad feminist moments as products of the diversity work of each author in the sense of diversity work as “the work we do when we do not
quite inhabit the norms of an institution.”5 To “not quite inhabit the norms of an institution,” can
be experienced as what Ahmed refers to as the sense of being in question. To be in question is to
be experienced as a question. This can mean simply being constantly questioned by others about
one’s identity (where are you from? What is your relationship? Are you really the professor?).
Alternatively, it can also mean that one is pressured not to block the work of an institution by
asserting one’s own culture, relationships, or experiences. This pressure is “lived as a demand to
pass or integrate,” according to Ahmed, and it can be an affective experience:
…you experience the potential nervousness as a threat; you avoid the nervous glance by not fulfilling its expectation. Maybe you don’t wear a sari; you don’t want prayer time off, and so on. Or maybe if you do these things, because not doing them is not an option, then you find other ways of not rocking the boat. 6
4. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 198.
5. Ahmed, 89.
6. Ahmed, 130. 232
The pressure Ahmed describes to “pass” as an academic and not rock the institutional boat is
present in all three of the works I examine. Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom each express
several instances in which they feel thrown into question, pressured to assimilate, and assumed to
be out of place within the university. Frequently, this affects their decisions on when and how to engage in diversity work, bringing up bad feminist moments that illuminate the incongruities
between their desires to engage in diversity work and their abilities to do so.
In Living a Feminist Life, Ahmed reminds readers that “to live a feminist life is also to be
a feminist at work.” 7 To work as a feminist often means working for organizations and
institutions that do not have feminist commitments, and thus for many feminists their work is
focused on transforming those organizations and institutions. The work one does to transform
these institutions, or to simply to exist within them, is what Ahmed defines as diversity work.
She draws from her 2012 study, On Being Included: Diversity Work in Higher Education, to
explore the ways in which academic diversity workers come up against walls of oppression and
use these experiences with walls to ask what they can teach us about power. 8 Ahmed describes
diversity work as having two related senses. Firstly, diversity work is “the work we do when we
are attempting to transform an institution.”9 Secondly, as previously mentioned, diversity work is
“the work we do when we do not quite inhabit the norms of an institution.”10 In doing the work
7. Ahmed, 115.
8. Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (London: Duke University Press, 2012).
9. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 91.
10. Ahmed, 91. 233
of transforming and existing within institutions, diversity workers generate knowledge about
those institutions.
Ahmed speaks primarily about the role of diversity workers in higher education. This is
particularly relevant to my project, as Gay, Nelson, and McMillan Cottom are all academics,
employed by universities, engaging in academic scholarship, and doing the work of transforming
institutions as well as simply existing within them as marginalized people. The walls of
oppression within academia are uniquely situated in historical traditions coupled with
contemporary values that rarely align with diversity work. Although universities use language
and documentation that encourages diversity work, their practices and priorities often do not
align with that language. Sexist and racist citational practices, institutional defense systems that
further marginalize diversity workers, and neoliberal ideals that promote personal perfection and
individualistic success all contribute to the experiences of feminist academics.
Diversity work is embodied work. By appearing in ways that are inconsistent with the
norms of an institution, some bodies stand out more than others, forced to prove they belong. 11
Formal institutional arrangements shelter some bodies more comfortably than others, for they are not designed for all bodies. Because of these formalized institutional arrangements, Ahmed posits that “you can become a stranger within an institution,” and thus, “Diversity work is then the work you do because you do not fit with a series or arrangement.”12 Diversity workers who
do not fit within institutional arrangements that are not designed for their bodies are what Ahmed
11. Ahmed, 125.
12. Ahmed, 125. 234
refers to as misfits.13 To be a misfit is to create, and thereby become, an institutional incongruity,
revealing not only whom institutional arrangements are designed to house, but also whom they
are designed exclude. 14 Ahmed compares an institution to an old garment because “It acquires
the shape of those who tend to wear it; it becomes easier to wear if you have that shape.” 15
Universities were built upon the assumption that elite heterosexual cisgender white men would
be attending them, working in them, and contributing to them. Over time, they have acquired the
shape of those for whom they were intended. Scholarly traditions and practices are shaped by
them. Women, people of color, queer people, and people of lower socioeconomic status are
institutional interlopers in higher education, academic misfits who not do not fit comfortably
whose presence highlights the exclusionary practices and traditions in academe.
Women’s bodies often stand out, throwing capable, intelligent, highly educated women—
who might otherwise be respected and included—into question. As discovered in Chapter 3,
women’s bodies are heavily policed, and rendered especially public when they become mothers.
Nelson’s experiences as a pregnant academic bring the nature of this spectacle within the university setting sharply into focus. She reflects on a moment in which her pregnant body suddenly becomes the focus of her scholarship and throws her in the middle of a presentation:
Place me now, like a pregnant cutout doll, at a “prestigious New York university,” giving a talk on my book on cruelty. During the Q&A, a well-known playwright raises his hand and says: I can’t help but notice that you’re with child, which leads me to the question—
13. Ahmed, 125.; Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “The Story of My Work: How I Became Disabled,” Disability Studies Quarterly 34, no. 2 (Spring 2014): 8, doi:10.18061/dsq.v34i2.4254.; Ahmed refers to disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s description of a misfit to suggest that this concept reveals an “incongruous relation” between bodies and things or bodies to worlds.
14. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 125.; Ahmed maintains, “when you try to fit a norm that is not shaped to fit your body, you create an incongruity. You become an incongruity.”
15. Ahmed, 125. 235
how did you handle working on all this dark material [sadism, masochism, cruelty, violence, and so on] in your condition?" Ah, yes, I think, digging my knee into the back of the podium. Leave it to the old patrician white guy to call the lady speaker back to her body, so that no one misses the spectacle of that wild oxymoron, the pregnant woman who thinks. Which is really just a pumped-up version of that more general oxymoron, a woman who thinks. 16
Nelson feels the assumptions behind this question, intended to throw her into question. As a woman, she is already held to a higher standard of intelligence and objectivity than her cisgender male peers. As a pregnant woman, such demanding intellectual work seems improbable, if not impossible, to those around her. The ways in which her body appears inconsistent with institutional norms renders her hypervisibly as a misfit, which is assumed to also render her mentally and emotionally fragile, not capable of doing the work of the institution.
Those around her will not let her forget that. While Nelson might otherwise have felt welcomed and respected in this environment, she leaves feeling angry and out of place, her pregnant body rendering her an academic misfit.
Some types of misfitting are more visible and conspicuous than others from moment to moment. Nelson’s feminine body is rendered more sharply visible in its pregnancy. She has experienced gendered misfitting before. She speaks of the “gendered baggage” of constantly including apologies and other “tics of uncertainty” in her writing and daily work. 17 At one point, she even shares how she started writing primarily because speaking up as a woman caused people to roll their eyes. She shares how she largely retreated into silence because of the conspicuousness of being an opinionated woman in the academy. 18 While these are clearly also
16. Nelson, The Argonauts, 90-91.
17. Nelson, 98.
18. Nelson, 47-48. 236
moments of academic misfitting, they are not really based in physical presence. Prior to her
pregnancy, Nelson had been rendered conspicuously misfitting only when she spoke up and
made herself noticeable. This is why she retreated into silence and apology, allowing herself to
blend in and become less conspicuous. Once pregnant, she is clearly thrown by the experience of
being so physically conspicuous simply via presence in an academic space. She depicts herself as
being like a “pregnant cutout doll,” revealing how sharply conspicuous her very presence is
against the other bodies in the room. Some bodies stand out more than others by virtue of their
presence. One might not be able to as easily recognize a queer academic misfit if they are also white. However, for people of color, standing out against a sea of white colleagues, misfitting is rendered more instantly and sharply visible.
Political and organizational attempts at disrupting these exclusionary arrangements and diversify academic institutions are often used to further exclude academic misfits. For people of
color, one such attempt is the policy of affirmative action. Designed to eliminate bias and
discrimination in selection processes (hiring and education practices in particular), affirmative
action is often assumed by white academics to be a practice aimed at favoring marginalized
people who do not deserve it.19 The undergirding assumptions in this attitude are based in white
supremacy, suggesting that white people (particularly white men) are inherently more deserving
and better suited to such positions. Academics of color are frequently thrown into question by
white people who assume they must have been selected for a program or job due to affirmative
action, rather than their abilities and quality of work. As a result, academics of color have to
move through their workplaces and academic spaces with the knowledge that many of the white
19. Cornell Law School, “Affirmative Action,” Legal Information Institute, Accessed April 10, 2020, https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/affirmative_action. 237
people in the room question whether they belong. This can impact their perceptions of
themselves as academics. In Bad Feminist, Gay shares a formative moment in which she was
thrown into question by this attitude:
In graduate school, early on, I once overheard a classmate talking in her office as I walked by. She didn’t know I was there. She was gossiping about me to a group of our classmates and said I was the affirmative-action student. I went to my office, trying to hold it together until I was alone. I was not going to be the girl who cried in the hallway. As soon as I crossed the threshold, I started sobbing because that was my greatest fear, that I wasn’t good enough and that everyone knew it. Rationally, I know it was absurd, but hearing how she and maybe others saw me hurt real bad. 20
Gay is clearly thrown by this moment. It throws her so much that she has to run into her office to cry. Part of the reason it threw her so much is because it reinforced narratives she had already believed. The early experiences of women of color who are thrown into question by their white teachers can shape their attitudes about their own abilities. Take, for example, McMillan
Cottom’s discussion of how white women policed her black body in early childhood and taught her early in life that her body was “deviant.”21 These moments do not occur in a vacuum; they
build. Diversity work, according to Ahmed, involves working to transform questions into a
“catalog,” or “a way of hearing continuities and resonances” in the questions that throw one’s
being into question.22 To create a catalog is to pay attention to how questions accumulate and the
effects of that accumulation. The requirement to repeatedly explain and prove oneself can wear
down diversity workers. Gay, for instance, reports that these experiences of being thrown into
question have impacted her far beyond graduate school, wearing her down emotionally:
At work, I constantly worry, Do they think I’m the affirmative-action hire? I worry, Do I deserve to be here? I worry, Am I doing enough? I have a PhD I damn well earned, and I
20. Gay, Bad Feminist, 13.
21. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 41-42.
22. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 132. 238
worry I am not good enough. It’s insane, irrational, and exhausting. Frankly, it’s depressing. 23
Gay creates a catalog in this passage. She identifies continuities and resonances in the questions she has been asked, the questions that have been asked about her, and the unspoken questions she has sensed. She identifies the common themes of belonging, of being deserving, and of not working hard enough to prove she belongs. In creating a catalog, she also pays attention to the effects of that accumulation: exhaustion, worry, depression. Gay deals with these effects by simply working harder. She shares that, after the experience with her graduate school classmate, she tripled the number of projects she was involved in and published extensively. Yet, she reflects, “no matter what I did, I heard that girl, that girl who had accomplished a fraction of a fraction of what I had, telling a group of our peers I was the one who did not deserve to be in our program.” 24 The feelings of estrangement in this statement are palpable. The group of peers to which Gay refers stand in stark contrast to herself, causing her to stand out amongst them whether she wants to or not. This catalog sticks with academic feminist women, consistently feeling they have to prove themselves as academics while simultaneously proving themselves as feminists. The bad feminist moments produced by these tensions reveal the profound senses of confusion, exhaustion, and desire for belonging that color academic women’s feminisms.
Bad Feminist Moments as Academic Disorientation Ahmed characterizes these moments in which one’s relationship to the world around them becomes characterized by feelings of displacement and estrangement as disorientation.
Disorientation involves disturbing “the whole picture” of institutional belonging simply by
23. Gay, Bad Feminist, 13.
24. Gay, 13. 239 arriving and existing, which in turn can disturb the one who arrives. 25 “Bodies that do not follow the line of whiteness, for instance,” explains Ahmed, “might be stopped in their tracks: this does not necessarily mean you are stopped from getting somewhere, but it does change your relationship to what is here.” 26 Let us return to Gay’s passage above. In it, she is not stopped from engaging in academic work, but her relationship to it is forever changed, marked by the individual and collective voices of those who continuously call her being into question. In
Chapter 3, I established bad feminist moments as shattering moments, in which feminists come up against the walls of oppression and embrace fragility. In considering Ahmed’s explanation of disorientation as a shattering experience predicated on the experiences of institutional hostility, bad feminist moments can also potentially be seen as moments of disorientation.27 As moments of disorientation, bad feminist moments reflect feminists’ experiences of being disassembled by the forces of oppression that make them question their places within their work spaces.
Throughout the works of McMillan Cottom, Gay, and Nelson, we find elements of disorientation within higher education, exposing the disassembly work of these institutions. For instance, McMillan Cottom discusses the ways in which she was forced to pry apart her racial and class identities in a doctoral program at Emory University, which also happened to be her first experience with a Predominantly White Institution (PWI). She refers to Emory as a
“mausoleum of whiteness,” that advertises diversity in all of its marketing materials without a
25. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 133.
26. Ahmed, 133.
27. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 133.; Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto, 2008).; Ahmed draws from the work of Frantz Fanon to illustrate how the experience of disorientation can be read as “the experience of being an object among other objects, of being shattered, of being cut into pieces by the hostility of the white gaze.” 240 clear understanding of what diversity actually is. 28 She discusses the impact this experience had on her: “For the first time in my educational career, I was attending a predominantly white school. And, also for the first time, I had reason to become intimately juxtaposed against
29 different class hierarchies that pried apart my racial identity from my class identity.” This prying apart can be read as disassembly. The various aspects of McMillan Cottom’s identity are disassembled by the expectations of those around her. Whereas her experiences of blackness and poorness had often gone hand-in-hand prior to her time in graduate school, her entry into academia exposed her to the messy nature of identity hierarchies. This is especially evident in her experiences with the Black Graduate Student Association on campus, which she sought out
“in search of survival.” 30 What she found, however, demonstrated just how deeply the divides between social classes really are in such an institution, and how they are often defined in terms of race, demonstrating the elitism of institutional definitions of race. When someone in the Black
Graduate Student Association asks where the “local black-black people go” to hang out in town, it is not to learn where to go for safety and communion, but “so that it could be avoided.” 31
McMillan Cottom shares her reaction to this question:
I was taken aback. I identified with those local black-black people. In fact, the high density of local black-black people was a big part of why I had chosen a school located in Atlanta, Georgia. The comment went unremarked upon, taken for granted as a reasonable concern for the group. That is when I looked more closely at the room. 32
28. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 137-38.
29. McMillan Cottom, 136.
30. McMillan Cottom, 138-39.
31. McMillan Cottom, 138.
32. McMillan Cottom, 138. 241
Here, McMillan Cottom is thrown as her being is called into question within a space she expected protection and safety from. Her closer look reveals that blackness is “broadly defined” by such universities. 33 Emory had a “preference for students who could be both black and some other kind of diverse category,” so many of the students in the room were black and some non-
American ethnicity. 34 Elite universities like Emory, although they promote diversity, tend to see black non-American students as more prepared for graduate work than black American students.
McMillan Cottom recalls an instance in which a Duke University professor told her that “African students appreciate their educations,” a statement she took to mean “black ethnic students presumably cause fewer problems than regular blacks.” 35 The reverberations of Western colonialism, racial elitism, and histories of slavery echo throughout this moment. McMillan
Cottom goes on to explicate these reverberations:
It is a sticky thicket to discuss, but for many reason, black ethnic students and faculty can bring cachet to a university that plain black students, like me, cannot…That is because class matters, and so does culture. Those are deeply intertwined, class and culture. Graduate school moved me up a rung or two in social class mobility. There is not much money attached to doctoral studies, but social class is about more than money. It is about attitudes and culture and tastes. 36
McMillan Cottom reminds readers in this passage that academia exposes the messiness of race and class in America. Higher education in America not only reflects but perpetuates structural inequalities under the guise of diversity. To question one’s belonging in an institution that touts diversity yet oppresses black Americans reminds one of how diversity work is often simply a
33. McMillan Cottom, 138.
34. McMillan Cottom, 138.
35. McMillan Cottom, 139.
36. McMillan Cottom, 139-40. 242
fight to exist and survive within those institutions. For feminists like McMillan Cottom, attempting to resist and subvert these structural inequalities while simultaneously attempting to fit into the institutions that perpetuate them can cause moments of disjunction, as their values often do not align with the values of their institutions. Doing feminist work can be difficult when one is forced to fight for their very existence within an institution.
The diversity work of survival can take many forms. For McMillan Cottom, it took the building of what she refers to as “mental and emotional buffers” for interactions with others.37
For Gay, it took the form of working twice as hard to prove her place within higher education.
She refers to the worries that motivate her as not only exhausting, but “irrational” and “insane.”38
Her feelings and reactions, no matter how justified, are still not good enough. This bad feminist
moment rests on the assumption that she simply can never get resistance right. To get it right
would be to have rational thoughts, to be sane and calm, to let go. Letting go of disorientation is
exceedingly more difficult than one might expect. Take, for example, Nelson’s formative
experiences in the academy. As a woman who was loud, passionate, and outspoken before
college, her early experiences in academia threw her and called her being into question. She
shares:
Shame-spot: being someone who spoke freely, copiously, and passionately in high school, then arriving in college and realizing I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again. It took some time and trouble, but eventually I learned to stop talking, to be (impersonate, really) an observer. This impersonation led me to write an enormous amount in the margins of my notebooks—marginalia I would later mine to make poems. Forcing myself to shut up, pouring language onto paper instead: this became a habit. 39
37. McMillan Cottom, 141.
38. Gay, Bad Feminist, 13.
39. Nelson, The Argonauts, 47-48. 243
While McMillan Cottom copes with emotional buffers and Gay copes with excessive work,
Nelson reveals a third coping mechanism: silence. Each is a form of institutional passing,
minimizing signs of one’s difference from the institutional norms that throw one’s being into
question.40 Much like Gay’s characterization of her forms of institutional passing as “irrational,”
Nelson characterizes her own forms as a “shame-spot.” In this bad feminist moment, she is
ashamed of her own need for institutional passing, for forcing herself into silence. Although she
really just moved her voice to the pages of her poetry, she clearly feels this is not enough. A
good feminist, Nelson assumes, resists at all costs and speaks up vocally. Bad feminist moments
such as this reveal the impacts of institutional passing on feminists’ perceptions of their abilities to embody their feminist ideals. As revealed in Chapter 4, ideals of contemporary feminists require continuous transgression and resistance. In academic feminists’ bad feminist moments, the desire to be the ideal feminist killjoy not only conflicts with the traumas of being a woman, but with the particular traumas of being an academic misfit, one who is expected to prove their belonging without disrupting the status quo.
Nelson does eventually get better at speaking up by finding an aspect of her academic work in which she feels somewhat safer doing so. She continues, “But now I’ve returned to copious speaking as well, in the form of teaching.”41 The pleasures of teaching appear to mediate
the pressures of institutional passing. Ahmed suggests that feminists come up with creative and
new ways to enact their feminism and address the discomfort of disorientation, often even
making an entire profession out of it.42 Academic feminists might see academia as a way to
40. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 131.
41. Nelson, The Argonauts, 48.
42. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 131. 244 create a profession out of their feminism despite (or perhaps because of) the discomforts of academic disorientation. Moments like Nelson’s demonstrate how a bad feminist moment can reveal an opportunity to claim one’s feminism in new ways. Take Gay’s enjoyment of problematic popular culture, for instance. Many of Gay’s bad feminist moments explored in
Chapter 3 centered on popular culture that reinforced racist and sexist narratives. However, Gay actively critiques multiple forms of popular culture in Bad Feminist, and she ultimately concludes that enjoyment of these narratives is human, but that does not mean that more diversity, more accurate representation, more attempts at getting it right, simply more is needed.
So, Gay offers more. Even before writing Bad Feminist, Gay had been writing fictional narratives, and in 2017, she made her first foray into the comic book world, cowriting Marvel’s
Black Panther: World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates. She has since issued another comic series, The Banks, produced more works of personal nonfiction, and is currently working on a television show with Amazon. Gay’s bad feminists moments not only reveal the complexities of enjoying pop culture while feminist, but also reveal to her the need for more variety in popular culture, variety she has taken it upon herself to offer. Furthermore, they emphasize the need for feminists to come together in order to amplify works that offer more. She and McMillan Cottom have come together to provide such amplification in their popular podcast, Hear to Slay, which helped to launch the Luminary platform and covers multiple aspects of life as black women, featuring feminist writers, activists, celebrities, and more. This also aligns with the shift in
McMillan Cottom’s attention from primarily academic work to public-facing work with a purpose. In Thick McMillan Cottom addresses moments in which she feels like a bad feminist for drawing the criticism of other black feminists, moments which she revisits in order to revise and rethink her feminist positions and ideals. For example, the essay “On Beauty,” was completely 245
rewritten in response to the criticisms of black feminists who accused her to white beauty
standards. However, in this moment, McMillan Cottom realizes that the problem lies not
necessarily in her approach to beauty standards, but in her ability to articulate her thoughts in
ways that make sense to her readers. She has since found multiple outlets for rendering her ideas
more applicable to wider audiences. Aside from the Hear to Slay podcast she and Gay have
become so well known for, she also helped to assemble and serves on the steering committee for
the University of Virginia Commonwealth’s Race, Space, and Place Initiative, a collaborative
that fosters scholarly discussions with academics and practitioners outside of traditional means.
Bad feminist moments, when expounded and reflected upon, clearly offer these authors means of
not only identifying their own limitations as feminists, but of identifying the ways in which they
can claim feminism in new ways that address the sociocultural structures that contribute to those
limitations.
In this sense, the disassembly that occurs in disorienting experiences can also be seen as
opportunities for reassembly. Discomfort, Ahmed reminds readers, “allows things to move.”43
Ordinary feelings of discomfort in moments of disorientation generate movement, making room
for reorientation. 44 Perhaps, then, bad feminist moments that involve disorientation can also offer the promise of reorientation. Institutions are shaped and moved in ways that make the “chair” of institutional work well-worn and comfortable, molded to fit those that have previously occupied it, mainly elite white men. 45 It is not designed for those who do not fit this mold. The discomfort
experienced by those who attempt to occupy it but do not fit can bring up important questions
43. Ahmed, 133.
44. Ahmed, 132-33.
45. Ahmed, 43. 246
(Why does this not fit? What happened here?). Ahmed situates this kind of discomfort as “the
beginning of a story: something is missing; you perceive something.” 46 What happens when such
a story begins with discomfort, and the questions that arise reveal what is missing, what needs to
be done? Diversity workers are motivated by these questions. This is where the sense of diversity
work as not quite inhabiting institutional norms morphs into the sense of diversity work as
transformation work. The two inform each other. Bad feminist moments may be rooted in
moments of academic disorientation, but as such they offer the potential for reorientation, as seen
in the subsequent works of Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom. Whether that reorientation takes
the form of teaching, scholarship, public intellectualism, or new forms of activism, it is crucial to
the winding journey of becoming feminist.
Although many feminists come to academic work like teaching and scholarship in order
to enact institutional change and empower other academic misfits, the discomfort of being
academic misfits themselves can stem from being held responsible for and forging paths for
other academic misfits. While the motivation to forge paths for others brings many feminists to
academia, in practice, this work is often exhausting and institutionally under-rewarded. The bulk
of diversity work is placed on the shoulders of women and people of color, the very same people
that diversity work is intended to support. 47 Paradoxically, people from marginalized groups that are affected by histories of sexism and racism in the academy are expected to fix it themselves through diversity work. This might make more sense if diversity work were rewarded within
academia, such as in faculty tenure reviews. While academics are often expected to engage in
46. Ahmed, 133.
47. Ahmed, On Being Included. 247
some acts of institutional “service” on committees and councils that keep universities running,
not all service appointments are diversity work. Women and people of color are
disproportionately asked to serve in diversity work-focused service, such as advising
appointments for student organizations dedicated to marginalized populations, or committees
dedicated to addressing issues of equity and diversity on campus. Many feminist academics do
not necessarily mind these appointments, as they align with their feminist ideals and values, but
this type of service is often frustrating, underrecognized and lacking in prestige. It should also
come as no surprise, then, that academic diversity work is not exactly highly sought-after. There
is an astonishing ratio of how much diversity work there is to do in comparison to the small
percentage of faculty jobs that are held by people of color to do it. This often thankless work is
expected on top of their service as teachers and researchers.
This dynamic is exhausting for feminist academics, and it can deplete their desires to do
the feminist work that initially drove them to academia. Gay reflects on just how exhausting this dynamic can be, a lesson she learned back in graduate school:
In graduate school I was the adviser of the black student association. There was a negligible black faculty presence on campus (you could count them on one hand), and those folks were either too busy or burnt out or completely uninterested in the job. After four years, I understood. The older I get, the more I understand lots of things. Advising a black student association is exhausting and thankless and heartbreaking. It kind of destroys your faith after awhile. 48
Gay acknowledges how this kind of work affects those who do it, as well as how it contributes to the desire to simply opt out. Diversity work is emotionally draining, and there are precious few
rewards for doing it. The desire to opt out often results in academic feminists questioning their
abilities to further their feminist ideals in the academy. Furthermore, in choosing not to engage in
48. Gay, Bad Feminist, 6-7. 248
diversity work, feminists may find themselves held responsible for complicity in systems of
oppression, either by themselves or by other feminists. Take Gay’s discussion of the exhaustive
nature of diversity work as a woman of color, for instance. While she demonstrates an
understanding of why faculty members would not want to engage in it above, she doesn’t show
quite as much sympathy when she addresses another black woman academic who openly refuses
to engage in it:
A new black faculty member came to campus a couple years in, and I asked why she didn’t work with the black students. She said, “That’s not my job.” That person said, “They’re unreachable.” I hate when people say something is not their job or that something isn’t possible. We all say these things, sure, but some people actually believe they don’t have to work beyond what is written in their job description or that they don’t have to try to reach those who seemingly cannot be reached. I get my work ethic from my tireless father. When it comes to showing young black students there are teachers who look like them, when it comes to mentoring and being there to support students, I feel it’s everyone’s job (regardless of ethnicity), and if you don’t believe that as a black academic, you need to check yourself, immediately, and then check yourself again and keep checking yourself until you get your head on right. 49
Gay holds this black faculty member who did not want to help with the black student union accountable for her complicity. This passage demonstrates that, although Gay understands the exhausting nature and limitations of diversity work, she holds little sympathy for those who opt out of it. Interestingly, she attributes this attitude on the work ethic taught to her by her father,
rather than her feminist beliefs. However, her description of why it is important not to opt out of
this work is definitely a feminist argument for representation, support, and institutional
transformation.
The contradictions of the above passage set the stage for Gay’s academic bad feminist
moments, which reveal how difficult she finds it to live up to her own feminist ideals. While Gay
49. Gay, 7. 249 feels that everyone should be participating in diversity work, she holds black academics especially accountable for not doing so. This might be why she concludes her discussion on black student associations with a bad feminist moment in which the responsibility for diversity work is redirected back to herself: “As a faculty member, I haven’t sought out the black student association yet because I’ve been trying to summon the energy. I feel guilty about how I’m dragging my feet. I feel this sense of responsibility. I feel weak and stupid.”50 Although Gay understands why black faculty might not seek out diversity work, her feeling that black scholars are especially responsible for doing it makes her feel like a bad feminist for not doing so herself.
She uses some fairly harsh words to describe herself here: guilty, weak, stupid. Not performing diversity work to her own feminist standards stirs a great deal of guilt in Gay. A good feminist, in Gay’s mind, is one who summons the energy to engage in institutional transformation even when she doesn’t have it. As I demonstrate in Chapter 4, bad feminist moments offer the potential for feminists to redirect their feminist expectations from feminist companions to themselves. In the passage above, Gay’s chastisement of another black woman’s failure to engage in diversity work is clearly redirected in this bad feminist moment to chastisement of what she sees as her own failure. In sharing her feelings about this failure, she renders herself vulnerable to her readers, revealing the emotionally taxing nature of diversity work and the pressures feminists feel to engage in it despite the personal costs.
Citational Walls
According to Ahmed, academic diversity work often entails pointing out racist and sexist citational practices, including both citation in written texts and inclusion of speakers at events.
50. Gay, 11. 250
She describes citations as “the academic bricks through which we create houses,” and when those practices become habits, “bricks form walls.”51 A uniquely academic form of the brick walls of oppression discussed in Chapter 3, citational walls are comprised of the figures and traditions deemed authoritative and worthy within academic practices and ideals. In examining academic feminists’ bad feminist moments as occupation-based crises, bad feminist moments that center on citational habits can also be read as citation-based crises. Pointing out the sexism and racism of institutional citation habits and attempting to break down the brick walls formed by them is often construed as creating the problem rather than calling it out. As we have seen repeatedly throughout this dissertation, the feminist is once again seen as being the problem by calling out the problem. This extends into the workplace. In particular, it extends into university work because university work is predicated on racist, sexist, heteronormative, and classist histories. As with the pressure to uphold traditions without complaint for the sake of ones’ relationships with others, the pressure to engage in traditional citation practices without complaint can build. The brick walls of oppression formed by traditional academic citation practices can wear down and exhaust feminists who come up against them again and again, especially when each time they are seen as the being problem themselves.
In some moments, feminist academics might opt not to call out problems in order to survive within an institution, causing them to question their commitment to their feminist values.
However, as evidenced by the bad feminist moments of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson, these moments also offer the potential for creative methods of addressing and subverting oppressive traditions. Each of the authors discusses academic citational practices in their works
51. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 148. 251
to illustrate the effects they have had on them personally, as well as the effects they have had on
marginalized people in general. They do not, however, stop at criticism. When the authors
experience moments in which they question their feminism because of citational practices, they
utilize these bad feminist moments to identify potential areas of personal and collective action
While Ahmed suggests citational practices are uniquely academic in nature, these texts
reveal how the citational practices of academics bleed into the citational practices of public
intellectual work. McMillan Cottom devotes an entire essay to citation in public intellectualism.
She points out the lack of women of color in op-ed writing and suggests that this is largely
because women of color are not considered to be authorities, especially when their ideas do not
already address or build upon the ideas of the white men that society has designated as
professional smart people. She illustrates the irony in how legitimacy in critiques of elitist higher
education is established and defined by whiteness, maleness, and elitism:
For many reasons, well-educated opinion writers like to critique the system of elite higher education that produced their social class. The rest of us in higher education are merely put-upon to live with the stereotypes that feel as foreign to us as a David Brooks imagines fancy deli sandwiches feel to most working-class Americans. And that is the rub. I do not get much value from the intellectual class at prestige publications, but as a thinker in public, I have to respond to them. My friends and I may be smarty pants, but David 52 Brooks is the legitimate intellectual. That is how legitimacy works. McMillan Cottom uses David Brooks, a conservative Canadian-American cultural and political commentator, to demonstrate how citational practices serve to establish legitimacy and keep out illegitimate interlopers (anybody that doesn’t engage with someone like David Brooks). She responds to white men who are considered intellectual authorities, even when they offer nothing of real value to our understanding of structural inequalities, because she has to in order to obtain
52. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 202. 252 legitimacy. Not only are citational practices designed to sustain social structures that privilege whiteness, maleness, and elite social status, but so do the citational practices of works that critique those very issues. McMillan Cottom goes on:
As being taken seriously becomes a form of reputational capital in a culture where reputation is like the Bitcoin of status cultures, being taken seriously is real work. The royal “we” take our cues about what ideas matter from whom we must recognize before we ourselves can matter. 53
The very people that are most affected by and have insight into structural inequalities are excluded from conversations about those structures unless they first engage the arguments of those who benefit from them. One can see how feminist women, and particularly feminist women of color, might be frustrated and exhausted by these patterns. Behind one brick wall, they simply find another brick wall. Perhaps this is why Ahmed maintains that diversity work can feel like merely “scratching at the surface,” of the brick walls of oppression. 54
Becoming the Problem
Nelson, McMillan Cottom, and Gay each write about moments in which they question citational practices only to be chastised as the real problem themselves. They learn that they will be perceived as the problem early in life. Returning to Nelson’s “shame-spot,” one can see the origins of becoming an academic misfit. When Nelson speaks too much, challenges too much, she realizes “I was in danger of becoming one of those people who makes everyone else roll their eyes: there she goes again.”55 Nelson heads off this danger, silencing herself to not become that person. The feminist academic is often viewed as “one of those people,” who makes
53. McMillan Cottom, 211.
54. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 138.
55. Nelson, The Argonauts, 47-48. 253
people’s eyes roll because they are perceived as being willfully disruptive, overly sensitive, or
simply selfish. She learns this lesson in college, and it shapes the rest of her academic career.
These lessons can make feminist academics wary of becoming willfully disruptive. In spaces
where feminists are engaging in what they consider to be feminist work, such as academic
spaces, it can be difficult to parse out when they are being the willful feminist who is perceived
as the problem, and when they are simply assuming the killjoy for the sake of what they perceive
to be ideal feminism. As discovered in Chapter 4, feminists do not always want to be the killjoy.
Sometimes they want to belong, and their workplace is no exception to that desire. Bad feminist
moments offer the potential to see past the binary of transgression vs. complicity. Academic feminists who share those bad feminist moments with others attempt to break the cycle of silence by challenging others to question these binaries for themselves. McMillan Cottom, Gay, and
Nelson each contextualize their occupation-based bad feminist moments within citational practices that shape their worlds, both inside and outside the academy.
Part of the reason that this is so difficult to determine is because women in general are often characterized as being the problem for speaking up at all. Women who call out others are perceived as mean and unlikeable. Gay illustrates this when she characterizes the early lessons of becoming the problem as an issue of feminine likeability:
Even from a young age I understood that when a girl is unlikeable, a girl is a problem. I also understood that I wasn't intentionally being mean. I was being honest (admittedly, without tact), and I was being human. It is either a blessing or a curse that those are rarely likeable qualities in a woman. 56
Once again, the lessons of likeability are learned early in life. Women don’t have to intend to be mean to be taken as such. As Ahmed reminds readers, hurt feelings have historically been used,
56. Gay, Bad Feminist, 84. 254
especially by white people, “as a way of not hearing, a way of making something about oneself,
a way of not listening to others.”57 Frequently, accusations of meanness and unlikability are actually methods of defending and maintaining existing social structures. If a feminist woman is just being mean, then she is the real problem. Therefore, no problem exists; nothing needs to change.
Aside from meanness and unlikability, calling out oppressive citational practices is also often perceived as selfishness, particularly when personal experience is used to back up one’s claims. McMillan Cottom points out the ways in which women’s modes of sharing, especially black women’s modes of sharing, have been characterized and dismissed as “self-indulgent,” and inapplicable to general audiences. 58 She devotes an entire essay in Thick to black women’s use
of the personal essay to illuminate structures of oppression and understand them within the light
of personal experience. 59 Although women have historically used the personal essay to
autoethnographically situate their experiences and disrupt existing social structures that inform
those experiences, these works are often dismissed as selfish navel-gazing. McMillan Cottom
suggests that this dismissal is due to the perception that the women who write personal essays to
60 point out structural inequalities are the real problem. Dismissing feminists as being the problem for calling out problems is not only a way of refusing to hear, but also a method of
57. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 178.
58. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 18.
59. McMillan Cottom, “Thick,” Thick: And Other Essays (New York: The New Press, 2019): 1-32.
60. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 156.; Ahmed makes a similar argument that women and people of color are often accused of self-obsession when calling out racist and sexist practices that affect people like them. 255
actively reinforcing the citational practices they are calling out. As seen in McMillan Cottom’s
earlier passage on public intellectual citation practices, those most affected by structural
inequalities are excluded from conversations about those structures. Even on issues of gendered
and raced inequities, white men are still seen as the primary idea-makers and problem-solvers.
Dismissing feminists who call out the ways in which these citational practices perpetuate systems of inequality serves to reinforce them.
Moments in which feminists are dismissed as the problem for calling out problems reveal academic perceptions of authority and who is allowed to claim it. In The Argonauts, Nelson suggests that those who call out injustice are often dismissed as “identitarian,” a dismissive term attributed to “anyone who refuses to slip quietly into a ‘postracial’ future that resembles all too closely the racist past and present.” 61 Nelson maintains that academics do not listen to women on
these subjects, especially queer women and women of color, in order to preserve their Western
male philosophies and protect the status of those who created them:
Calling the speaker identitarian then serves as an efficient excuse not to listen to her, in which case the listener can resume his role as speaker. And then we can scamper off to yet another conference with a keynote by Jacque Ranciére, Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, at which we can meditate on Self and Other, grapple with radical difference, exalt the decisiveness of the Two, and shame the unsophisticated identitarians, all at the feet of yet another great white man pontificating from the podium, just as we've done for centuries. 62
The excuse not to listen to a woman who speaks not only serves to resume traditions, but to
unseat the one who speaks and replace her with someone who is considered a real authority: the
one who dismisses her. As Ahmed puts it, “sexism and racism become systems of inheritance in
61. Nelson, The Argonauts, 54.
62. Nelson., 54. 256 which white men are freed up to take the place of other white men.” 63 In dismissing women who speak up as the real problem, white men are freed to take up their inheritance, what they see as their rightful place in the academic hierarchy. One can see why someone might be motivated to dismiss feminists who point out structures of inequality; in doing so, they become the authority.
Authority is cherished in the academy. However, in this passage we see Nelson not only question the authority of these thinkers, but she almost seems to mock them and dismiss them entirely as just more great white men “pontificating from the podium.” This image of puffed-up white men being exalted for producing ideas that get hashed out repeatedly over centuries hints at her opinion that these well-known and oft-cited scholars are nothing more than links in the chain of white authority that becomes redundant. It is this redundancy that she seeks to interrupt, the established traditions of authority that don’t effect any real change.
Traditions of establishing authority in academia lend themselves quite well to contemporary neoliberal goals of individual achievement and competition that often undermine the values of feminist academics who seek equitable change rather than redundant, exclusionary tradition. While theoretically promoting feminist pursuits, contemporary universities often instead pressure their workers, including their diversity workers, to affectively position and assert themselves as legitimate scholars, goals that many feminists feel undermine and devalue diversity work. 64 Feminist academics frequently feel they must assert themselves in paradoxical
63. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 158.
64. Sarah Burton, “Writing Yourself In? The Price of Paying the (Feminist) Game in Academia,” in Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Fights, Flights, and Failures, eds. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad (Secaucus, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 115 – 36.; Heather Shipley, “Failure to Launch? Feminist Endeavors as a Partial Academic,” in Feeling Academic in the Neoliberal University: Feminist Fights, Flights, and Failures, 18. 257 and contradictory ways that disadvantage women and people of color. 65 Take Gay’s essay on a
“Typical First Year Professor,” for instance. In it, she explores the various aspects of academic life and reflects on the practices that she is expected to engage in. She devotes a paragraph to the paradox of resistance in an institution that requires proof of conformity:
The goal, we are told, is tenure. To that end all faculty, even first-year professors, have to compile an annual portfolio. I assemble a record of one semester’s work of worth. I try to quantify my professional worth. My colleagues write letters to attest to my various accomplishments, verifying I am on such and such committee, that I participated in such and such event, that I am a valuable and contributing member of the department. I update my vita. I clip publications. I buy a neon-green three-ring binder. This is how I rage against the machine. I spend an afternoon collating and creating labels and writing about myself with equal parts humility and bravado. It’s a fine balance. Later, I tell a friend, “It was like arts and crafts for adults. I went to graduate school for this.” 66
The “fine balance” of self promotion through proof of authority and accomplishment is paradoxical. As an academic misfit, one can only imagine how difficult it is for Gay to authoritatively prove that she belongs in this institution that upholds exclusionary traditions that are not intended to allow her authority. Yet, every year she is expected to prove that she belongs, to speak of her many accomplishments, to fight for her place at the table and prove that authority utilizing these exclusionary traditions. Academic worth is quantified through the practices of self promotion and individual accomplishment, something academic misfits may not find comes to them naturally. This may be why Gay concludes this essay with the following statement:
I have no idea how I got to be the one at the front of the classroom, the one who gets to be in charge of things. Most of the time, I feel like the kid who gets to sit at the adult table for the first time at Thanksgiving. I’m not sure which fork to use. My feet can’t reach the floor. 67
65. I discuss the various works that exemplify these paradoxes in Chapter 1 of this dissertation.
66. Gay, Bad Feminist, 27.
67. Gay, 28. 258
Paying for a seat at the table when one is not intended to be there can result in exhaustion, self- doubt, and unwilling co-options into hegemonic practices that contradict feminist academics’ beliefs. 68 When one is consistently thrown into question, becoming an authority can feel like an impossible task. As seen in the previous examples, when feminist academics’ being is repeatedly called into question, they experience feelings of self-doubt and imposterism, such as that expressed by Gay. The tools, or “forks” made available to them are not tools that are intended for them. To be an academic feminist woman of color is to be handed tools that were not designed for you. But if an academic feminist woman of color wants to be taken seriously, to establish authority, and to keep her job, she must use them.
Academic vs. Feminist Identity
When feminists attempt to mitigate feelings of imposterism, they might engage in contradictory practices that make them feel like they are betraying their feminist values. To become the authority, feminists must contend with hegemonic citational practices, repeated encounters with brick walls, and neoliberal ideals of competition and self-promotion. As feminists seek to disrupt traditional citational practices that perpetuate structures of oppression and contribute to the freedom of all, these practices can feel counterproductive to the project of feminism. In the works of Gay, Nelson, and Mcmillan Cottom, bad feminist moments that center on the practices promoted by neoliberal universities reveal how the authors frequently feel torn between their identities as feminists and as academics. While many feminists go into transgressive academic disciplines like Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies or Queer
Studies (like Nelson), others try to approach traditionally non-transgressive fields in feminist
68. Burton, “Writing Yourself In?,” 115-36. 259
ways (such as Gay’s feminist analyses of literature and McMillan Cottom’s feminist approach to
sociology). No matter which approach feminist academics take, however, the citational practices
and pressures to compete can feel contradictory to their feminist values, which is evident in the
bad feminist moments they experience in academic settings.
Nelson’s text exemplifies how the contradictions in transgressive scholarship predicated
on the works of white men can contribute to the feeling that feminists who participate in these
fields are not feminist enough. Take, for example, Nelson’s embarrassment over her position in a field that reveres Western men who are considered to be transgressive philosophers. In her discussion of the scholarly work done on the ‘symbolic order’ of lesbian motherhood, she concludes:
Honestly I find it more embarrassing than enraging to read Baudrillard, Žižek, Badiou, and other revered philosophers of the day pontificating on how we might save ourselves from the humanity-annihilating threat of the turkey baster (which no one uses, by the way; the preferred tool is an oral syringe) in order to protect the fate of this endangered 'sexed being.' And by sexed, make no mistake: they mean one of two options...These are the voices that pass for radicality in our times. Let us leave them to their love, their event proper. 69
Although Nelson once again dismisses these thinkers as redundant figures of citational authority,
she also expresses embarrassment at participating in a field in which such figures are so revered.
In this bad feminist moment, Nelson assumes the appropriate reaction to the academic worship
of such scholars should be anger. A good feminist, to Nelson, would be enraged by this
problematic work being passed off as disruptive simply because of who wrote it. Much like we
saw in Chapter 4, Nelson appears to define ideal feminism as the killjoy. However, she feels
more embarrassed than angry. After all, she participates in this field. She engages with these
69. Nelson, The Argonauts, 79. 260 scholars. In this bad feminist moment, however, she comes to a similar realization as McMillan
Cottom did in her discussion of public intellectuals: she has to engage with them as part of an occupational hazard. Authority is purchased through citation. To pay for her seat at the table,
Nelson must not only know these works, but actively engage with them, whether she believes them to be valuable or not. This bad feminist moment reveals a feminist academic misfit who is embarrassed at the price she has to pay to be taken seriously as a scholar in a field that is supposed to disrupt the systems that make that price necessary. Sometimes a bad feminist moment is simply the recognition of the price an academic feminist has to pay in order to be given a seat at the table, the limitations of being someone who seeks to make change from within existing structures of oppression.
While academic feminists who engage in radical scholarship might feel embarrassed at the work they have to engage with, those who do not engage with radical scholarship quite so much can also feel guilty about their lack of what they consider to be important feminist knowledge. In these texts, what counts as important feminist knowledge is often defined as academic feminist knowledge. Take Gay’s literary work, for example. As an English professor,
Gay’s work is not strictly feminist work. Therefore, Gay shares that she feels inadequate in terms of feminist knowledge. Part of her definition of a bad feminist demonstrates this feeling:
We forget the difference between feminism and Professional Feminists. I openly embrace the label of bad feminist. I do so because I am flawed and human. I am not terribly well versed in feminist history. I am not as well read in key feminist texts as I would like to be. 70
Gay reminds her readers in this passage that she is not a “Professional Feminist.” She is simply a feminist. In Gay’s opinion, a good feminist is one who is well versed in feminist history and
70. Gay, Bad Feminist, x-xi. 261 reads a lot of “key” feminist texts. While she does not define what she considers to be “key” feminist texts, we can assume, as an academic, she is referring to the feminist texts cited by academics like Nelson and McMillan Cottom, texts that make up the syllabi of universities’ feminist coursework, and texts that inform contemporary feminist scholarship. This is not part of her academic work, and thus she decides she is not a professional feminist. This may come as a surprise to readers of her public works, like Bad Feminist, which is literally a feminist text and engages with other feminist texts. However, even those who engage with feminist works and theories can feel like they are not feminist enough when they are not well versed in academic feminism. Gay’s passage also reveals that many academic feminists’ definition of ideal feminism is really just feminism as a primary academic disciplinary concern, rather than a set of values and beliefs.
McMillan Cottom also differentiates herself from what she sees as Professional
Feminists, specifically Professional Black Feminists. As a sociologist, the bulk of McMillan
Cottom’s work has focused on diversity and capitalism in Higher Education. Although she states that she has cultivated an identity as a “socialist black feminist,” she still differentiates herself from other black feminists.71 Consider the example of her response to Leslie Jones’s Saturday
Night Live skit introduced in Chapter 3. While most people sharply criticized Jones for what appeared to be tone deaf references to slavery that made light of countless enslaved women’s experiences, McMillan Cottom saw histories of hurt that echoed in Jones’s depiction of the violence of white beauty standards. “Perhaps I caught what others missed,” she reflects, “because
I am something different from Patricia Hill Collins or Joan Morgan or other important black
71. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 203. 262
women scholars of black feminism.”72 Hill Collins and Morgan are both frequently cited in academic feminist work and taught in women’s studies classrooms. In this bad feminist moment,
there is no embarrassment like we see in Nelson’s passage. But McMillan Cottom does
purposefully differentiate herself from black academic feminist authorities. Interestingly, she
chooses not to explicitly state how she differs from scholars like Hill Collins or Morgan. Instead,
she explains her cultural roots. Immediately following this statement, she adds:
I am dark, physically and culturally. My complexion is not close to whiteness and my family roots reflect the economic realities of generations of dark-complexioned black people. We are rural, even when we move to cities. Our mobility is modest. Our out- marriage rates to nonblack men are negligible. Our social networks do not connect to the elite black social institutions. When we move around in the world, we brush up against the criminal justice system. I am not located at the top of hip-hop’s attenuated beauty hierarchy. I am, at best, in the middle.73
Professional Black Feminists, in McMillan Cottom’s view, have complexions, social locations, and/or networks that are all in closer proximity to whiteness. Like the non-black-black students
in McMillan Cottom’s PhD program at Emory University, Professional Black Feminists do not
hail from the rural United States and histories of slavery that still impact black American
communities, even if they are still affected by the reverberations of those histories. Professional
Black Feminists have some distance. In this sense, McMillan Cottom decides she cannot be a
Professional Black Feminist; she is too black. She does not have that distance; the histories are
too immediate within her home, her family, and her body. While McMillan Cottom situates her
distance as an issue of proximity to whiteness, Gay posits her distance from professional
feminists as an issue of academic feminist knowledge,. The two issues are not mutually
72. McMillan Cottom, 51.
73. McMillan Cottom, 51-52. 263 exclusive, however. As we have seen, academic traditions are rooted in citational practices and traditions that secure the authority of whiteness. In this bad feminist moment, the impact of elitist, racist academic histories is felt, even in the very fields that are meant to reveal, address, and disrupt those histories.
Academic Feminist Shelters
The distinctions the authors draw between themselves and what they consider to be professional academic feminists reveal the fragility of academic feminist shelters. When women come together to seek communion and share their experiences, Ahmed refers to these spaces as feminist shelters. Feminists build shelters to survive when they are repeatedly shattered against the walls of oppression. 74 Building feminist shelters, however, is no easy task. Feminist shelters are often built “on grounds that are not our own,” explains Ahmed; university spaces, grassroots organizations, already established institutions shaped by neoliberal capitalism and founded upon sexist and racist values. 75 As such, Ahmed maintains “you have less time to do things in the building when you are constantly doing building work,” since the point is to “transform the very ground on which we build.”76 She uses academic women’s studies as an example of a fragile feminist shelter. When women already have to fight for their existence outside of feminist shelters, their relationships with each other can become oppositional, as they are founded in work that is oppositional. Just because academic women desire to belong to the group of feminism writ large, or to specific feminist subgroups, this does not mean that they always agree with other feminists within those groups. The desire to belong to feminism can produce bad feminist
74. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 175-76.
75. Ahmed, 175.
76. Ahmed, 175-76. 264 moments when one disagrees with other feminists, feels policed or attacked by other feminists, or is rejected by other feminists.
This is particularly acute for feminists of color. As demonstrated in Chapter 1, mainstream feminist conversations have always centered on white women’s experiences, suggesting that feminism is rendered too complicated or distracting when it attempts to consider issues of difference. 77 As I explained in Chapter 3, though, feminist misattunement makes way for feminists to push back against mainstream feminist practices and ideals, and reveal the ways in which ideal feminism has been predicated on the ideals of white supremacy and neoliberal individualism. In academic feminist shelters in particular, bad feminist moments offer potential for not only feminist misattunement, but also potential for feminist redirection in moments of academic disorientation. McMillan Cottom, Gay, and Nelson each position themselves as academic misfits in order to differentiate themselves from other academic feminists. The bad feminist moments that derive from such differentiation, however, often result in redirection of impatience, annoyance, or frustration with their academic feminist companions toward themselves. The bad feminist moments that occur within academic feminist shelters can make way for feminists to take ownership of their own feminisms, disarticulating and rearticulating their relationships to each other and the academy simultaneously.
Potential for Redirection and Rearticulation
Given that feminist shelters are difficult to build and maintain, feminists relationships with their feminist friends, mentors, and family members are often fragile, fraught with accusations and expectations that can be difficult to contend with. Feminists expect and need a
77. Ahmed, 177.; Feminists of color, in this sense, can be what Ahmed refers to as “a feminist killjoy who kills feminist joy,” getting in the way of feminist happiness and harmony. 265 lot from each other, especially from feminist mentors. If we view feminist mentors as feminist companions, then we reveal the potential for feminist relationships predicated on their potential to enable feminists to proceed on paths less trodden. Those feminists that inspire other feminists to action, that bring others to feminism, that teach other feminists what it means to be feminist, are companions that never really leave us. Feminists expect and need a lot from their companions, and their standards for their feminist companions are often even higher than their standards for themselves.
Bad feminist moments might occur when a feminist unfairly or impulsively expects something their feminist companions are unable to give. For example, Nelson shares stories about her feminist companions, each of which come from the academy, and whom she alternately refers to as her “good witches,” her “sappy crones,” and the “many-gendered- mothers” of her heart. 78 She tells the story of one such companion, a professor she took a class with and befriended in college named Christina:
A few years ago, she told me the story of a subsequent feminist theory class that threw a kind of coup. They wanted—in keeping with a long feminist tradition—a different kind of pedagogy than that of sitting around a table with an instructor…So they staged a walkout and held class in a private setting, to which they invited Christina as a guest. When people arrived, Christina told me, a student handed everyone an index card and asked them to write “how they identified” on it, then pin it to their lapel. Christina was mortified. Like Butler, she’d spent a lifetime complicating and deconstructing identity and teaching others to do the same, and now, as if in a tier of hell, she was being handed an index card and a Sharpie and being told to squeeze a Homeric epithet onto it. Defeated, she wrote “Lover of Babe.” (Babe was her dog, a mischievous white lab). As she told me the story, I cringed all over—for the students, mostly, but also because I was remembering how, when I was Christina’s student, we had all wanted her to come out in a more public and coherent fashion, and how frustrated we were that she wouldn’t.79
78. Nelson, The Argonauts, 56-58.
79. Nelson, 59. 266
Christina does not perform queer feminism to the standards that her students use to define ideal queer feminism. Nelson’s cringe-y reaction to this story is not only a reaction to the awkwardness of the situation, but also to the shame she feels for her own expectations of
Christina when she was a student. The bad feminist moment experienced here is based in empathy for her feminist companion’s humanity, as she now sees the pressures placed on feminist mentors to perform feminism to the standards of those who look up to them. In this moment, Nelson is also recognizing the tensions in Christina’s academic feminism. While
Christina teaches her students how to deconstruct and destabilize gender identity, her students are looking for their gender identities to be seen and understood. As an academic feminist looking back, Christina can now see the tensions inherent in a field that is ever-shifting, and thus her empathy not only stems from a recognition of Christina’s humanness, but also from her recognition of Christina as a feminist academic, attempting to negotiate her own feminist positions within the academy.
Feminists often need and expect feminist companions, especially academic feminist companions who are supposed to be all-knowing feminist authority figures, to enact the changes they want to see in the world on their behalf. Gay’s discussion of queer role models explains this phenomenon:
Perhaps we expect gay public figures and other prominent queer people to come out, to stand and be counted, so they can do the work we’re unwilling to do to change the world, to carry the burdens we are unwilling to shoulder, to take the stands we are unwilling to make.…We expect role models to model the behaviors we are perfectly capable of modeling ourselves. 80
80. Gay, Bad Feminist, 168-69. 267
While Gay is referring to public figures here, I argue that this expectation for modeling is particularly relevant for teachers. Those who teach are seen as the ultimate role model, as their job is literally to model, scaffold, and assess their students’ performances. Feminist teachers impart their knowledge to students, often acting as the entry point into feminist theory and practice. In this sense, feminist academics who teach are often feminist companions for many students, whether or not they see themselves as such. However, academic feminist companions do not (and cannot) always offer their feminist mentees what they want or need simply by virtue of their fragile status as role models. Bad feminist moments rooted in guilt for unrealistic expectations can reveal the pressures feminists place on other feminists to be what they want to be themselves, so they do not have to do the difficult work. As Ahmed suggests, “staying close to other killjoys is thus not about being on the same side. It is how we can ask more of ourselves; it is how we can be and stay vigilant. Our crossness can and should be directed at ourselves. We get things wrong. I did. I do.”81 Bad feminist moments such as that expressed by Nelson in the above paragraph reveal the potential for bad feminist moments to not only disrupt and render feminists’ relationships with each other fragile, but to also redirect upset over unrealistic standards to the appropriate party: oneself. This perhaps explains the bad feminist moment immediately following Gay’s frustration as a graduate student with the black professor who did not want to get involved with the black student union. In articulating her own feelings of guilt over not getting involved with the organization herself as a faculty member, Gay redirects responsibility for doing diversity work from the assumed feminist companion toward herself.
81. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 245. 268
In redirecting feminists’ impatience and frustrations with their feminist companions to
oneself, feminists are freed to explore their relationships to feminism and its attendant values and
beliefs. Gay’s bad feminist moment regarding the black student union, for example, allowed her
to articulate her values as a feminist academic. To Gay, feminist academic work should not only
include responsibility for doing diversity work, but that responsibility should belong to everyone.
As well, to Gay, the responsibility for doing diversity work does not melt away when one is
exhausted by the nature of diversity work. Even when exhausted, Gay still feels the
responsibility of diversity work, which drives her discussion of teaching and becoming a
workaholic in the following pages. She may not advise the black student union anymore, but Gay
makes it clear that she is still doing diversity work, both in the sense of existing within the university and in the sense of trying to transform it. Gay’s methods, however, have shifted to teaching. “I study my teaching evaluations,” she shares, “trying to make sense of my imperfections so that next time, I might get it right.”82 While her bad feminist moment had ended
in ambivalent resignation, letting her guilt hang out, the following passages about her teaching
reveal that this moment did, in fact, allow her to rearticulate her feminist values and sense of
feminist responsibility by expanding on the ways in which her academic priorities have changed.
Like Gay, McMillan Cottom uses her bad feminist moments to rearticulate her feminist
values and redirect her sense of feminist responsibility from those companions to herself.
McMillan Cottom’s reaction to black feminists calling her out for referring to herself as ugly, for
example, can also be read as redirection. She experienced not anger over their reactions, but a
“special kind of contrition,” one in which she recognized the needs of other feminists for their
82. Gay, 12. 269 feminist role model to perform feminism in accordance with their feminist ideals. 83 Although she does not ultimately decide her statement was wrong, McMillan Cottom does utilize her feelings of contrition to further explore her reasoning and strengthen her convictions about neoliberal imperatives of white beauty. This bad feminist moment reveals the needs of feminists that their role models cannot always fulfill, as well as the power of critically engaging with those needs, interrogating them, and making space for exploration of them.
As demonstrated in McMillan Cottom’s passage, feminist companions are not only defined by their works, but by their identities as well. This is particularly true in academia, as its traditions are designed to exclude those who hold marginalized identities. Take McMillan
Cottom’s differentiation of herself from what she considers to be Professional Black Feminists.
McMillan Cottom acknowledges that the feminist classics written by Professional Black
Feminists are foundational, and she refers to their writings throughout Thick. However, she demonstrates how many feminist classics are written by feminists companions who are in some way in closer proximity to whiteness and elitism. This is because a lot of the feminist thought that contemporary feminists ascribe to has been written by feminist academics, and academic work is built upon oppressive structures of authority. And, of course, feminist companions are only human, subjected to the same oppressive forces as their feminist mentees. As a result, contemporary feminist academics—like Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson— often feel the need to simultaneously engage with and differentiate themselves from their academic feminist companions.
83. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 37-38. 270
Bad feminist moments can not only disrupt and render fragile the relationships between feminists and their companions, but they can also be used to redirect upset over unmet feminist
standards to themselves. Since the limitations of academic feminism often lie within the
traditions and practices of their institutions, perhaps when feminists utilize bad feminist moments
to differentiate themselves from their academic feminist companions, they are also attempting to
differentiate and distance themselves from oppressive academic structures of authority in an
effort to redirect responsibility for trying to subvert them. In this sense, bad feminist moments
can not only redirect feminist criticism to oneself, but they can also redirect feminist
responsibility to subvert oppressive academic structures to oneself. Ahmed draws on the work of
Audre Lorde to suggest that part of the project of being a killjoy is to resist being used to
perpetuate these structures:
We strike at what is still. Audre Lorde titled an essay with a proclamation: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” In that unflinching “will never” is a call to arms: do not become the master’s tool!84
I had always read Lorde’s proclamation as a call to resist the urge to use the tools created by
oppressors to dismantle the structures of oppression they built with them. However, Ahmed
offers another view of sthis tatement: to dismantle s ystems of opprf ession, eminists must resist
becoming the tools that maintain those structures. Becoming feminist then entails resistance to
becoming a citational tool of authority. Bad feminist moments that redirect the responsibility for resistance to oneself might be instances of feminists answering Lorde’s call to resist becoming
the “master’s tool.”
84. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 160.; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Trumansburg, Y: Crossing Press, 1984), 110-13. 271 Public Scholarship as Intergenerational Feminist Snap
In resisting the pressures to become tools that reinforce oppressive structures in higher
education, the recent trends of feminist academics turning to wider, more accessible forms of
public scholarship might be read as a form of academic feminist snap. Academia is not
particularly respectful of autoethnography, nor public scholarship. Public-facing accessible works
are rarely counted for academic merit or tenure, and autoethnography is seldom encouraged as a
research method.85 However, feminist academics are increasingly turning to autoethnographic
methods and nonacademic publication venues.
Academic feminists have repeatedly questioned the ability of academic feminism to effect
change based on its oppressive traditions. 86 Contemporary feminists are also increasingly
questioning the institutional reward model of university work, the impetus on academics to self-
promote in order to obtain those institutional rewards, and the unequal distribution of rewards
and pressures to scholars who occupy marginalized statuses.87 Many believe the only way to
work around these issues is to engage in feminist snap, “speaking back” to these systems of
oppression in alternative ways not offered, encouraged, or rewarded within academe. These
alternative forms might be popular press publications, personal essays, open access publications,
or accessible, public-facing digital scholarship (such as blogs or social media feeds).
Contemporary feminist scholars also believe that the creation of accessible public scholarship is
85. Anjali J. Forber-Pratt, “ ‘You’re Going to Do What?’ Challenges of Autoethnography in the Academy,” Qualitative Inquiry 21, no. 9 (November, 2015): 821–835, https://doi- org.ezproxy.bgsu.edu/10.1177/1077800415574908.; Carol Rambo, “Handing IRB an Unloaded Gun,” Qualitative Inquiry 13, no. 3 (April, 2007): 353-367, doi: 10.1177/1077800406297652.; Sarah Wall, “Easier Said Than Done: Writing an Autoethnography,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 7, no. 1 (2008): 38-53, doi:10.1177/160940690800700103.
86. I explore the histories of feminists questioning the abilities of academic feminism in Chapter 1 of this dissertation.
87. Yvette Taylor and Kinneret Lahad, Feeling Academic. 272
imperative to situating feminist issues within formats and languages that non-academic feminists
can understand and identify with. Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life, for instance, arose out of
her feministkilljoys blog, where she discussed her own experiences as a feminist while recruiting
others feminists’ stories and thoughts, engaging with readers’ comments in clear, accessible
ways via an accessible, easy-to-use format. 88 Both the format and method of Ahmed’s scholarship can be read as forms of feminist snap, creative approaches to thinking and communicating about systems of oppression.
In this sense, the works of Nelson, Gay, and McMillan Cottom I examine in this dissertation can also be seen as forms of feminist snap. Each is a public-facing work published by a nonacademic press. Nelson’s work, which she refers to as a form of “authotheory,” was published by the independent, nonprofit publisher Gray Wolf Press. Known for publishing poetic heavyweights, Graywolf Press had previously acquired and reissued Nelson’s The Red Parts:
Autobiography of a Trial, a lyrical account of the trial of her aunt’s killer, almost ten years after
its original publication by The Free Press, a for-profit publisher. Graywolf acquired Nelson’s next two works, including The Argonauts. In publicizing The Argonauts, Gray Wolf characterized Nelson as a public intellectual on par with Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, utilizing personal experience to work through dense theory in a relatable, engaging way. 89 Gay’s work, a collection of essays that had appeared in multiple well-known press venues, is the only one of these texts published by a for-profit company, Harper Collins. Specifically, Bad Feminist was published by Harper Perennial, an offshoot of Harper Collins aimed at promoting new and
88. Sara Ahmed, feministkilljoys (blog), accessed April 10, 2020, https://feministkilljoys.com/.
89. “The Argonauts,” Graywolf Press, https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/argonauts. 273
upcoming voices like Gay’s. Already having become fairly well known in the media circuit for
her op-ed pieces, Gay’s text is intended to be read by wider audiences, and Harper Collins had
the means with which to promote it as such. Both Gay and McMillan Cottom’s works are not
only public-facing, but they are revised collections of essays that were produced as part of their
work as public intellectuals. As such, they not only address issues of structural inequality in
accessible ways that appeal to wider audiences, but also incorporate responses to their works in
their revised editions. However, McMillan Cotton’s work is intended to address those structures
of inequality more pointedly. Published by a nonprofit progressive publisher, The New Press,
Thick is promoted as a work that starts important conversations that promote social justice.
Despite the fact that McMillan Cottom’s text did not have the for-profit promotion power behind
it that Gay’s did, readers still identified with and responded to Thick on a massive scale, making
it wildly popular across academic and nonacademic audiences. The New Press had also
previously published McMillan Cottom’s 2017 book, Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-
Profit Colleges in the New Economy¸ a still accessible but more academically-minded
sociological look at the money-making structures and harmful dynamics of for-profit colleges.
While Lower Ed has received a great deal of critical and academic attention, it has not seen nearly the public response that Thick has. McMillan Cottom speculated in an author spotlight
with the New Press that she felt Thick, and its accessible style, have changed how she is seen in the field, bridging her work in a way “that finally makes what I have done legible.”90 By sharing
personal experiences to situate social structures, these authors render difficult subjects legible
and relatable to nonacademic audiences.
90. McMillan Cottom, “Author Spotlight: Tressie McMillan Cottom,” The New Press, March 29, 2019, https://thenewpress.com/news/author-spotlight-tressie-mcmillan-cottom. 274
In doing so, each of these authors effectively transforms their works of individual snap into works that exemplify collective snap. They revisit bad feminist moments in an effort to reflect on them, redirect responsibility for feminist action to themselves, and rearticulate their values and ideals as feminists, ultimately redefining ideal feminism for themselves in ways that invite their audiences to do the same. McMillan Cottom shares that, in selecting essays for Thick, she “chose essays that were robust enough to warrant additional thinking—and then I threw them all out and rewrote them all from scratch, save one.” 91 In rewriting these essays, McMillan
Cottom revisits the bad feminist moments that arose from them. In her rewritten essay on beauty, for example, she not only reflects on the whiteness of beauty standards, but directly addresses the responses of black feminists to her opinions on those beauty standards. Her feminist ear is attuned to the feminist snap of others, and she utilizes it to reshape and refine her own inquiry.
Gay’s work is also a collection of essays that are not only revised for publication, but that are revised and rethought multiple times beforehand. In interviews, Gay has shared how she utilizes social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr to initiate her thoughts, freeing her up to think without a deadline in an open and honest manner in the “immediate and responsive setting” that the internet offers. 92 Unlike the texts of McMillan Cottom and Gay, Nelson’s work is not a collection of essays, but of autoethnographic poetry. She actively reflects not only on her own experiences, but on the perceptions and experiences of others, including her partner, child, mother, coworkers, friends, fellow academic thinkers, and fellow feminist theorists. The text
91. McMillan Cottom, “Author Spotlight.”
92. Roxane Gay, “Roxane Gay's Bad Feminist Is a ‘Manual on How to Be a Human,’” interview by Nolan Feeney, Time, August 5, 2014, https://time.com/3082038/roxane-gay- interview-bad-feminist/. 275 itself is comprised of multiple forms of work Nelson had already produced for wider audiences, including a graduate talk, a zine, and several magazines, reworked and brought together in The
Argonauts.93 Each of the works analyzed in this dissertation are not only accessible forms of feminist scholarship based on personal experience in and of themselves, but they are also comprised of multiple forms of feminist scholarship based on personal experience that have been reworked and retooled to invite audiences to generate collective feminist snap, the creation of feminist bonds through a collective practice of feminist telling and feminist hearing. 94
In both methods and form, feminist autoethnographic public scholarship breaks from many academic traditions. It often centers personal experience rather than citational authority. It is created with wider audiences in mind, rather than academic audiences. It seeks to empower the masses rather than self-promote. For these reasons, it is not very well-respected in academe.
Feminist academics are well aware of this; they are taught to avoid it early on in their careers.
Nelson writes about an early experience with a feminist academic mentor, Christina, who discouraged her from doing this kind of work as a graduate student:
Back then, she said she was willing to be my thesis adviser because I struck her as serious, but she made it very clear that she felt no kinship—indeed, she felt a measure of repulsion—at my interest in the personal made public. I was ashamed, but undaunted. 95
In this passage, Nelson reflects on the shame of being a feminist academic interested in personal experience, a shame brought about primarily by her academic feminist companion. To be a good feminist is sometimes to be a bad academic. Good academics, in Christina’s view, are “serious” academics, unconcerned with frivolous issues of personal experience. When Nelson comes to her
93. Nelson, “Acknowledgments,” in The Argonauts, 144.
94. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 200-10.
95. Nelson, The Argonauts, 60. 276 looking for kinship in her interest in the personal made public, she finds only repulsion.
Although she is “undaunted” by this interaction, Nelson reveals the tensions between academic feminists and their companions. Even one’s feminist mentors might contribute to the uncertainty of doing feminist academic work. Interestingly, Christina’s attitude changes over time. Nelson reflects on this change:
But as the times changed, Christina changed. She got together with a younger, more activist scholar who is more vocal about queer issues, about being queer. Like most academic feminists, Christina now teaches “gender and sexuality studies” rather than women’s studies. Perhaps most moving to me, she is now writing autobiography— something she never would have dreamed of doing back when she was my mentor. 96
Christina’s change over time indicates two important things. Firstly, it indicates the potential for younger, newer feminists to teach their companions. Feminist companions are often held to higher standards by the feminists who follow in the paths they have forged. However, in recognizing the humanity of their feminist companions and redirecting criticism toward themselves, feminists make room to speak back to systems of oppression that their companions might not yet be capable of snapping against. Secondly, this passage represents the non-linear journey of becoming feminist. Becoming feminist is not a progression from “bad” young feminist to “good” experienced feminist, but instead takes place through a series of stops and starts, moments that challenge and shift one’s relationship to feminism. Christina’s journey does not look the same nor follow the same progression as Nelson’s. Each feminist, including each feminist companion, is uniquely impacted by their personal daily, lived experiences.
Academic feminists are also impacted by sociohistorical moment in which they live as feminists and as academics. Christina came to her PhD in a very different world than Nelson.
96. Nelson, 60. 277
Nelson graduated with her degree at a time when feminist academics were just starting to
interrogate the impact of neoliberal ideals on the feminist movement. The rapid rise of social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter allowed for new and exciting forms of feminist activism, such as with 2004 March for Women’s Lives held in Washington to protest the erosion of women’s reproductive rights. Post-2004, the global digital connection of Web 2.0 introduced feminists to a host of new values and methods of organizing, as well as new avenues for feminist scholarship. It is during this period that feminist scholars have situated the fourth wave of feminism, believing it to have started anywhere from 2005- 2008. This movement emphasized feminist inclusion and experience and was characterized by “a sharing of voices, engagement with global politics and a focus on intersectionality.” Pre-2004 feminist academics came of age and started their feminist and academic journeys in a very different world than post-2004 feminist academics.
In light of these changes, it makes sense that contemporary academic feminists would push back against their feminist companions in an effort to break traditions of oppression. It also makes sense that they would turn to alternative forms of publication that emphasize personal experience for public audiences. However, breaking away from traditional structures of oppression in the academy is no easy task, particularly for academic feminists from marginalized groups carrying the burdens of histories of oppression and exclusion. Faced with pressure from their mentors and peers to perform traditional academic work in order to establish authority while simultaneously desiring to break those traditions, feminist academics can often feel like they are not doing either job well enough. Take McMillan Cottom’s experience with a conference attendee in graduate school, for instance:
Once I was at an academic conference. Well, I am at a many academic conferences because I am an academic. But this conference stands out for the moment when a senior 278
academic, a black woman, marched over to me and said without preamble, “You need to stop writing so much. They’re just using you.”…The point the well-meaning senior academic was making that day was a fair one. I was not a real person. The problem was that the rest of the world did not quite know that. Or, rather, if they thought I was a real person—one worthy of consideration and engagement—they did not think that it was because I was just a graduate student. 97
This passage might be difficult to understand for those who have never been graduate students, but to those who have been there, the sense that one is not viewed as a real person, one worthy of critical engagement, respect, and authority, is familiar. As McMillan Cottom describes it, “In the academy, graduate students are units of labor. They can be students, but not just students. They are academics in the making. They do not have claim to authority among scholars.”98 Graduate students, as units of labor, are not often offered the same rewards or authoritative merits that they would be allowed to receive in their potential future careers. Their work is supposed to a learning process, not serious scholarship, and as such it is not supposed to be taken seriously. McMillan
Cottom was writing for multiple national and international newspapers and media outlets, garnering massive amounts of attention for her insights into issues of higher education, race, social media, labor, and politics. She did this writing all “without express permission from gatekeepers,” and thus shares that she still feels “the tension from colleagues who cannot process
99 why I receive so much attention.” McMillan Cottom speculates that the attention and confusion over said attention arise from the fact that she was a black woman becoming a problem to Professional Smart People.
“Black girls do not cause problems,” she reflects, “for powerful white women or august
97. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 8-9.
98. McMillan Cottom, 8-9.
99. McMillan Cottom, 15-16. 279
professional publications or public discourse. Black girls have not, for most of my understanding
of our history in this nation, had the power to cause those kinds of problems.”100 She considers
the histories of black women working to build and protect black structures and people, whether
paid or unpaid. “In all our working,” she concludes, “we can sometimes work the wrong way.
That is what I was doing. I was working the wrong way…for a black woman who did not want to
become a problem.” 101 While she has since been able to work through this moment and identify
why that conference attendee stopped her, she also remembers how conflicted and hurt she felt
by it:
At the time, I was far too hurt to understand what the sister in the academic conference hall was telling me. When you are vulnerable and on the losing end of a power dynamic, all you can hear of that kind of direct, unsolicited feedback is how—despite all of your hard work—you are still doing everything wrong. But I have thought a lot about that kind of moment and all the moments that have shaped what kind of thinker I have become. That is what this book is about. 102
This feeling of doing everything wrong does indeed shape Thick. In some moments feeling like a
bad feminist determines McMillan Cottom’s responses, but in other moments, like this, the
feeling that she is a bad academic is what motivates her. Academic feminists are not only
feminists, they are also scholars, teachers, writers, and colleagues. As I demonstrated earlier, they often feel forced to choose between being a good feminist and being a good academic. In this passage, McMillan Cottom is sharing the ways in which her writing as a graduate student arose out of not only an academic impulse, but a feminist impulse. She was working as black woman working to question oppressive social structures, not just as an aspiring scholar.
100. McMillan Cottom, 10.
101. McMillan Cottom, 11.
102. McMillan Cottom, 11. 280
However, she posits this as working “the wrong way,” for someone who does not want to become a problem. As a feminist, however, McMillan Cottom does desire to become a problem, and this gives way to what one might refer to as a bad academic moment; to be a good feminist sometimes means being a bad academic, and vice versa. This text is riddled with moments that vacillate between being a bad feminist and a bad academic, revealing the tensions in academic feminist work. Throughout Thick, McMillan Cottom reflects not only on the histories and values that contribute to the feeling that black women are doing everything wrong, but also the ways in which these feelings are produced within structures designed and used to contribute to collective attitudes toward and oppressions of black women. She utilizes moments of feeling like she is doing something wrong, as well as moments in which many feminist academics (particularly black feminist academics) feel like they are doing something wrong, to resist these attitudes and effectively become a problem.
Collective Snap
When we consider the built up, exhaustive pressures of experience as feminist women within oppressive societal structures that diminish feminist women’s very existences, bad feminist moments that result in feminist snap can also be seen as a sort of pressure release valve.
Ahmed reflects “while a snap might seem to make the tongue the organ of feminist rebellion, perhaps snap is all about ears. A feminist ear can provide a release of a pressure valve. A feminist ear can be how you hear what is not being heard.” 103 I am reminded yet again of
McMillan Cottom’s empathy for Leslie Jones’s pain in her controversial Saturday Night Live
103. Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life, 203. 281
monologue. 104 This bad feminist moment of McMillan Cottom’s reflects the pain of overlapping histories of insidious trauma and reveals the potential for one’s resistance to oppressive social structures. Furthermore, it also reveals a feminist ear that hears someone else’s snap, even when that snap is deemed as the problem. McMillan Cottom’s decision to share bad feminist moments such as this suggests that when feminists choose to share their experiences of bad feminist
moments with others, they might also be contributing collective snap. If feminist snap is shared
with others, it just might be heard by others, if they have willful ears.
The fact that McMillan Cottom, Gay, and Ahmed each share bad feminist moments in
their public-facing texts suggests they are engaging in feminist snap to connect with other
feminists, generate feminist bonds, and contribute to moments of collective snap. Ahmed
suggests that feminist snap can be thought of, “not only as an action but as a method of
redistributing information that can counter what is already known; sending stuff out that will
enable a snap to be shared as a form of waking up to a world.”105 When feminist academics share their personal experiences of bad feminist moments, they not only distribute information that is not promoted in the academy, but they reframe it in a way that enables other feminists to come to their own snapping points, breaking apart feminist shelters to reform them in a collective effort to engage in feminist resistance.
In this sense, writing about bad feminist moments can be seen as an act of engaging in collective feminist snap. In particular, revisiting bad feminist moments that arise from previously written works, as all three authors have done in these texts, can be viewed as generating
104. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 49-51.
105. Ahmed, 210. 282
collective snap by approaching one’s bad feminist moments through the lens of feminist readerships. The feminist ears of these authors willfully listen to the readerships of their original
ideas, whether those moments appear on social media, in media publications, or in public
performances and readings. In Bad Feminist, Gay reflects repeatedly on the power of writing for
connection and building community. She also writes repeatedly about the power of writing to
cope with and resist essential feminism. “Bad feminism seems like the only way I can both
embrace myself as a feminist and be myself,” she shares, “and so I write.”106 The conclusion in
this statement is that bad feminist moments allow Gay to embrace herself as a feminist and as a
human, and that the act of writing is important to this project. Writing is a form of thinking and a
form of sharing. As an academic feminist committed to building community and transforming
institutions, Gay opts to write as a bad feminist for nonacademic publication venues. She goes on
to say:
I chatter away on Twitter about everything that makes me angry and all the small things that bring me joy. I write blog posts about the meals I cook as I try to take better care of myself, and with each new entry, I realize that I’m undestroying myself after years of allowing myself to stay damaged. The more I write, the more I put myself out into the world as a bad feminist but, I hope, a good woman—I am being open about who I am and who I was and where I have faltered and who I would like to become. 107
Gay turns to social media and digital writing to reflect on the seemingly mundane, daily lived experiences of her life as a black feminist academic woman. She is all of these things and more, and in sharing her daily experiences she reminds herself of this. For Gay, sharing her bad feminist experiences reveals her as human, as open, and as somebody who is trying. Perhaps this is why so many feminist women who read Bad Feminist identify with it. Perhaps this is why
106. Gay, Bad Feminist, 318.
107. Gay, 318. 283 entire syllabi have been built around it. In writing to “undestroy” herself by being exposed as vulnerable and fragile, Gay allows readers to identify their own bad feminist moments. Feminist shelters are fragile, as they are built on the very grounds they are trying to transform. For feminist academics, the choice to share their bad feminist moments with wider, non-academic audiences might serve to disarticulate feminist shelters built on assumptions of ideal feminism in an effort to rearticulate and reform inclusive feminist shelters. In writing about bad feminist moments, Gay not only reveals who she is as a feminist, but who she would like to become, inviting other feminists to do the same. In effect, Gay has become a feminist companion, and
Bad Feminist a companion text. All over the world, feminists pass around this work, wearing it from use, discussing and dissecting it repeatedly in classrooms, reading groups, and online forums. For Gay, sharing bad feminist moments becomes a way of forging paths for other feminists, paths forged by her own definitions of feminist ideals, including empathy and humanity.
McMillan Cottom’s work reminds readers that collective snap is something that black feminists have always engaged in. And this engagement has frequently taken place via the personal essay. McMillan Cottom refers to this engagement as “fixing my feet,” a phrase she takes from her experiences as a child who was born with birth defects in her legs. As explained in Chapter 4, McMillan Cottom’s childhood was filled with reminders to “fix my feet,” so that she appeared to walk normally, resulting in a physical maladaptation that still affects her. 108
Later, she extends the metaphor to discuss her work as a public intellectual:
Fixing my feet means knowing that I am no one's beauty queen and few people's idea of an intellectual, public or otherwise, and showing up anyway. Fixing my feet means knowing how badly the outcomes are likely to be for persisting and pursuing, but doing it
108. McMillan Cottom, Thick, 13-15. 284
anyway. I fix myself, even when it causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me. When I write, I am fixing my feet. I am claiming the ethos, or moral authority, to influence public discourse. 109
To write from personal experience is to claim an ethos that is not often afforded to women,
particularly women of color. As learned in Chapter 1, black women have historically used the
personal essay to speak back to structures of oppression and push back against feminist
movements that do not value or fight for women of color. In this sense, “fixing my feet” can be
read as McMillan Cottom’s version of feminist snap. This snap, however, comes at great
personal cost, both physically and metaphorically. “It is killing my hip and it may look sexy to a
subset of geriatric black men,” McMillan reflects, “but I cannot stop executing my extreme
maladaptation.”110 McMillan Cottom reminds readers that feminist action is not just exhausting
and painful but, because feminists have to throw themselves against the brick walls of oppression
again and again in order to engage in it, the expectation and need to work through the pain
becomes a way of life for many. Importantly, McMillan Cottom is pointing out that this is not
just a feminist problem; this is a particular sort of black feminist problem. Fixing one’s feet,
suggests McMillan Cottom, “is about accepting the complex reality of black life in the twenty-
first century.” 111 McMillan Cottom attributes this, in part, to the continually arising brick walls of citational authority. Coming up against these walls repeatedly in her daily experiences as an
academic and public intellectual McMillan Cottom must still engage in traditional citation
practices in order to gain a sense of authority from readers. “Excluded as I am from the ethos,
logos, and pathos of academia, literary arts, humanities, and Professional Smart People,” she
109. McMillan Cottom, 24-25.
110. McMillan Cottom, 24.
111. McMillan Cottom, 24. 285
maintains, “I have had to appeal to every form of authority simultaneously in every single thing
that I have ever written. It is how I fix my feet.” 112 Fixing her feet not only means writing to fix
herself, but it also means writing in a way that convinces others she knows how to do so, even at
great cost to herself and to communities of black women who will never be taken seriously as
authorities as long as they are forced to engage in these practices in order to obtain that authority.
Similar to Gay’s conclusion that, no matter how exhausting diversity work is, she must
still continue to engage in it, McMillan Cottom suggests that black women are not given much of
a choice about whether to engage in feminist snap. “I fix myself,” she reflects, “even when it
causes great pain to do so, because I know that I cannot fix the way the world sees me.” 113 If
feminist snap is a maladaptive form of pushing seemingly immovable forces of oppression at the expense of personal health, then perhaps when one shares these moments of snap, they are issuing a call to arms for help. Bad feminist moments can often be the revelation of vulnerability,
the acknowledgment of the harmful ways in which feminists have had to change in order to
survive while attempting to fix the systems they cannot fix alone. In sharing one’s bad feminist
moments, feminists might be calling out to each other, asking them to recognize the ways in which they have had to adapt and change to do this work, to build feminist shelters that try to change the very ground they are built upon.
For academic feminists, who are already familiar with structures of authority, writing for public audiences may also be a way of loaning out privilege to educate other feminists and
112. McMillan Cottom, 28.
113. McMillan Cottom, 25. 286
empower them to take up this call to arms. McMillan Cottom reflects on how, as a child, access
to knowledge was something her family saw as a resource to help others in their community:
We were big readers and we encouraged the girl children, especially, to go to some kind of college. Consequently, my grandmother and mother had a particular set of social resources that helped us navigate mostly white bureaucracies to our benefit. We could, as my grandfather would say, talk like white folks. We loaned out that privilege a lot. 114
The ability to “talk like white folks” is crucial to being taken seriously in academia. Entire courses are devoted to writing as an academic, doing research as an academic, and networking like an academic. Each of these courses pushes forward the message that, in order to be taken seriously, one must engage with the right people and utilize the right languages. These practices extend to public intellectual work, as well. Even though the public scholarship of women of color is not rewarded, encouraged, or respected, those who engage in it still recognize the importance of loaning out what they have learned to empower and educate others. McMillan
Cottom goes on to extend the metaphor even further to include the work that women of color do to establish authority in a world that does not grant them such. McMillan Cottom situates public intellectual work at the heart of this collective effort:
For us, the personal essay genre became a contested point of entry into a low-margin form of public discourse where we could at least appeal to the politics of white feminist inclusion for nominal representation. We were writing personal essays because as far as authoritative voices go, the self was the only subject men and white people would cede to us. We had learned or have always known that we cannot change the public, and we cannot change the minds of those on whom we rely to grant us the audience that confers moral authority to speak in public. We could not fix the world but we could fix our own feet. And so, black women writers have fixed their feet. We have shoehorned political analysis and economic policy and social movements theory and queer ideologies into public discourse by bleeding our personal lives into the genre afforded us. 115
114. McMillan Cottom, 162.
115. McMillan Cottom, 22-23. 287
The concept of collectively fixing feet is clearly a version of collective feminist snap in the form
of autoethnography, calling out to others to expose the brick walls of oppression that shape
women’s experiences. Used to break with racist and sexist citational practices that exclude
women of color from intellectual discourse, McMillan Cottom’s autoethnography utilizes the
personal to speak to the collective. Academic feminists of color who engage in public
scholarship “bleed” their personal lives into genres that offer them more avenues of authority and
an audience somewhat more likely to listen. Autoethnography as feminist snap is used not only
to understand the world around us, but to expose collective experiences that can generate
collective snap.
The Multiple Functions of Collective Snap
Such work can also demonstrate how issues that aren’t considered “serious” issues, such
as personal experience and popular culture, are, in fact, issues that matter. For instance, one
might not immediately see how Roxane Gay’s personal feelings of conflict over her enjoyment
of rap music or sexist humor would be particularly important. However, in sharing her
experiences, she advocates for the importance of understanding popular culture as a product and
perpetuator of social structures of inequality. She reflects toward the end of Bad Feminist on how
her embrace of being a bad feminist has taught her this:
Being a feminist, however, even a bad one, has also taught me that the need for feminism and advocacy also applies to seemingly less serious issues like a Top 40 song or a comedian’s puerile humor. The existence of these lesser artifacts of our popular culture is made possible by the far graver issues we are facing. The ground has long been softened. 116
116. Gay, Bad Feminist, 317. 288
In sharing and embracing her bad feminist moments over popular culture, Gay exposes herself
not only as an imperfect human, but as an imperfect feminist. She immediately follows the above statement with an explanation of how “at one point, I got it into my head that a feminist was a certain kind of woman,” a woman who hated men, was politically and personally perfect, and had no sense of humor.”117 However, she argues that, in embracing her bad feminist moments,
she has come to realize no matter how frequently she feels like she is doing it wrong, she is, in
fact, still a feminist. In establishing the idea that one can be a feminist and a human
simultaneously, Gay also disrupts the binary views of women as either feminist or anti-feminist.
Nelson’s work is also intended to disrupt binary views of women as feminist or anti- feminist, but from the perspective of queer womanhood. The Argonauts focuses more broadly on the pressures of queer individuals to perform transgression simply by virtue of their queerness. In doing so, she points out the various ways that women with transgressive identities are expected to not only engage with sociopolitical transgression, but to be that transgression as well. She demonstrates the ways in which these expectations are untenable. Therefore, many of Nelson’s bad feminist moments are moments in which she questions the expectations for transgressive bodies to be continuously transgressive in their choices. In sharing these expectations, and the moments in which she experiences them, she exposes the pressures they place on people who already do not fit societal molds of ideal humanity. Her autoethnographic poetry is used as a form of feminist snap against the expectations and pressures that contribute to the further
marginalization of queer communities. She does not simply share her own experiences, however.
117. Gay, 317. 289
She repeatedly also challenges her readers to question these binaries for themselves. Take the following passage, for example:
People are different from each other. Unfortunately, the dynamic of becoming a spokesperson almost always threatens to bury this fact. You may keep saying that you only speak for yourself, but your very presence in the public sphere begins to congeal difference into a single figure, and pressure beings to bear down hard upon it. Think of how freaked out some people got when activist/actress Cynthia Nixon described her experience of her sexuality as “a choice.” But while I can't change, even if I tried, may be a true and moving anthem for some, it's a piss-poor one for others. At a certain point, the tent may need to give way to a field. 118
In this passage, Nelson moves from her previous reflections on heteronormativity that primarily focused on her personal reactions to celebrities like Chaz Bono oversimplifying queer experiences. In this paragraph, she shifts from first-person reflection to second-person imperative. The use of “you” in this passage suggests that this is a point the reader should pay attention to and act upon. She suggests that, if she feels pressured by the binaries of transgressive/normative identity and behavior, her audience should imagine how queer celebrities and other queer spokespeople must feel about that pressure, magnified by their positions. “You,” the reader, might claim not to be complicit in the problem, but “you,” the reader are still likely a part of it. Her individual feminist snap becomes a call for collective snap.
Conclusion
The walls of oppression within academia are uniquely situated in historical traditions coupled with contemporary neoliberal values that rarely align with the diversity work that academic feminists want to (and are often expected to) engage in. Poorly supported and rarely rewarded, diversity work is emotionally draining. Sometimes, diversity work is simply the act of existing within an institution where one’s being is consistently called into question. Many
118. Nelson, The Argonauts, 74. 290
feminist women find they are not always prepared to engage in the diversity work of institutional change when simply trying to survive their institutions. Bad feminist moments that center on
moments of being thrown, being called into question in an institution, can be read as moments of
academic disorientation. The bad feminist moments that center the institutional disorientations of
Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson reflect the experiences of being disassembled by the forces
of oppression that make academic feminists question their places within their places of work.
They also reflect the guilt that comes with being held responsible for diversity work that seeks to
transform institutions. When feminist academics’ being is repeatedly called into question, they
experience feelings of self-doubt and imposterism. In order to mitigate these feelings, academic
feminists often turn to contradictory citational, organizational, and personal practices that make
them feel like they are betraying their feminist values. However, in these moments in which the
authors feel they are not being good feminists because of the exhausting nature of institutional
diversity work, they sometimes find new purpose, identifying new directions for their feminist
work within and outside of the academy.
To become academic authorities, feminists must contend with racist, sexist, and classist
citational practices, as well as neoliberal ideals of competition and self-promotion. As feminists
seek to disrupt traditional citational practices that perpetuate structures of oppression and
contribute to the freedom of all, these practices can feel counterproductive to the project of
feminism. In the works of Gay, Nelson, and Mcmillan Cottom, bad feminist moments that center
on the practices promoted by neoliberal universities reveal how they frequently feel torn between
their identities as feminists and as academics. However, in these moments of disorientation, there
is also potential for reorientation. The bad feminist moments of these authors are utilized not
only to redirect feminist criticism from feminist companions to themselves, but to redirect the 291
responsibility of subverting oppressive academic structures to themselves. In doing so, they
attempt to resist becoming tools to perpetuate structures of oppression.
Bad feminist moments that are utilized to resist the pressures to become tools to reinforce
oppressive structures in academe can be read as moments of feminist snap. However, this
resistance in and of itself can often cause personal maladaptations, as feminists attempt to change
the very structures on which their fields and their feminisms are built. In sharing bad feminist
moments and rendering their painful maladaptations vulnerable, Gay, McMillan Cottom, and
Nelson engage in feminist calls to action, producing relatable works that other feminists can
identify with, and encouraging them to engage their own bad feminist moments. I read these
public-facing, autoethnographic works as creative approaches to thinking and communicating
about systems of oppression. In recognizing the humanity of themselves, as well as their feminist
companions, the authors reveal the ways in which structural oppressions shape one’s feminism
and one’s abilities to engage with it meaningfully. They approach moments of frustration and
impatience with academic feminist companions to redirect criticism toward themselves, utilizing
bad feminist moments that arise from these frustrations to speak back to structures of oppression
that their companions might not yet be capable of snapping against. In these moments of feeling
like they are doing something wrong, as well as moments in which many feminists might feel
like they are doing something wrong, these authors attempt to resist these structures and
effectively become a problem.
When feminist academics share their personal experiences of bad feminist moments, they
not only distribute information that is not promoted in the academy, but they reframe it in a way
that enables other feminists to come to their own snapping points, disassembling fragile feminist shelters to reassemble them in a collective effort to engage in feminist resistance. Gay, McMillan 292
Cottom, and Nelson utilize bad feminist moments to loan out the privileges of education and language, make connections and build community, and challenge others to engage in collective feminist snap that resists the perceived binaries of transgressive and normative identities.
In examining the purposes and functions of bad feminist moments in the works of academic feminists, one can clearly see the daily pressures and limitations of being an academic feminist. However, one can also see the unique and creative ways in which feminist academics utilize personal experience to reach out to other feminists and encourage empathetic, self-critical reformation of fragile feminist shelters. Academic feminists may not feel like they are particularly good feminists or academics, but sharing bad feminists helps them to bridge these divides, educate non-academic feminists, and resist becoming the master’s tool. 293
CHAPTER 6. CONCLUSIONS
Roxane Gay, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Maggie Nelson each came to their academic and writing careers in a post-2004 world, surrounded by increasing global connection offered by the world wide web and social media platforms, the widespread popularization of the feminist movement, neoliberal ideals of individualism and self improvement, and the formation of what some argue to be a new, fourth wave of feminism centered on inclusion and digital methods of organizing and educating. 1 A lot has happened in the world since 2004, the year that Maggie
Nelson received her PhD and Mark Zuckerberg launched the now ubiquitous social media
platform, Facebook. 2 In a little over a decade, the world and the feminist movement had changed
significantly, and the works of feminists who embarked on their academic journeys during this
period exemplify these changes.
Each of these works can be viewed as a product of its time. However, they are
simultaneously products of decades of feminist thought and practice that centers personal
experience in order to understand collective structures. While previous generations of feminists
shared their feelings and experiences to resist mainstream feminist limitations and push back
against structures of oppression, the works of these post-2004 authors are unique in the sense that
they center the feelings associated with not being a good-enough feminist. While Bad Feminist,
The Argonauts, and Thick are not the only works in existence in which feminist academics share
1. Megan Garber, “The Internet at the Dawn of Facebook,” The Atlantic (May 17, 2012), Accessed April 6, 2020.; “Maggie Nelson,” University of Southern California, Accessed April 6, 2020, https://dornsife.usc.edu/cwphd/maggie-nelson/.
2. University of Southern California, Maggie Nelson,” USC.com, Accessed April 6, 2020, https://dornsife.usc.edu/cwphd/maggie-nelson/. 294 bad feminist moments, they are arguably some of the most widely read and discussed works that do so (in both academic and nonacademic circles).
In this project, I set out to examine moments of “bad feminist” perceptions within the academy to identify why feminist academics are having these moments, what they are doing with them, and what these moments can teach us about feminist identity in this particular moment. I read these texts as works of publicly accessible autoethnography, representative of the increasing call for feminist academics to engage in nontraditional, publicly accessible avenues of research and scholarship. These alternative methods of communication offer feminists not only new ways of communicating and organizing, but also new ways of conducting and engaging with feminist scholarship. The authors’ choices to publish public-facing autoethnographic works go hand-in- hand with their choices to share their bad feminist moments within them. In order to understand issues with contemporary feminist identity, one must consider contemporary feminists’ daily lived experiences within the contexts of the worlds in which they live, as well as the worlds in which they work. Late stage capitalism dictates that work take up most of our lives, and for academics this mindset is intensified. Academics’ identities are shaped by their work and their workspaces. Since feminists’ identities are also heavily shaped by their affiliations with feminist movements and ideals, feminist academics often feel conflicted by the contradictory demands and expectations of both. Modern-day academic feminists not only bear the traditions of pushing back against the limitations of academic work, but they now also experience the effects of neoliberal ideologies in their personal and professional lives, not to mention their feminism.
In examining the ways in which academic feminists situate their feminist identities within their personal experiences, one can tease out the nuances of contemporary feminist identity to gain a clearer picture of why some of our most well-known, influential feminist 295
academics of the day may feel inadequate in their feminist performances. As well, one can begin
to comprehend how sharing these moments with others can serve as an attempt to address the
contradictions inherent in contemporary feminist identity, particularly academic feminist
identity. Bad feminist moments reveal the diversity of women’s experiences, histories, and
relationships. In examining them as moments of crisis in the continuous journey of becoming
feminist, they also reveal the non-linearity of this journey, the messy nature of intergenerational
feminisms, and the myriad societal traumas and pressures that shape this journey.
Summary of Findings
In my examination of bad feminist moments, it has become clear that these authors,
despite (or perhaps because of) their desires to be feminist enough and act in accordance with
what they perceive to be ideal feminism, are faced with a host of barriers to doing so from
moment to moment. In part, this is because their ideals of ideal feminism are rooted within
mainstream contemporary feminist ideals that are heavily influenced by the neoliberal values of
self-sufficiency and competition. Being a woman is not easy in a world that simultaneously
objectifies and traumatizes women’s bodies while holding women responsible for protecting
themselves and overcoming the cumulative effects of histories of trauma. Being a feminist
woman is even more difficult, given modern day neoliberal influences that pressure feminists to
take responsibility for overcoming and defying structures of oppression. For feminist academic
women, academia exacerbates all of the above issues with its exclusionary practices and traditions, as well as its more direct neoliberal emphases on self promotion and individual
improvement in order to establish authority. No wonder Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson
frequently feel they are not doing particularly well at being a woman, a feminist, or an academic.
On top of all of this, each of these women also holds multiple other identities to contend with 296
and prioritize from moment to moment. Racial identity, sexual identity, regional identity, and
class identity all play into feelings that they can simply never be enough.
Bad feminist moments remind us that becoming feminist is not merely an issue of will,
but that it is also an issue of timing and space. The direct and insidious traumas of gendered and
raced violence often leave feminists too fragile to undo the careful self-protection work they
have engaged in to be the feminist killjoy from moment to moment. Bad feminist moments also
reveal the inequitable desires inherent in experiences of sexuality, gender, and race. When
feminists desire the pleasures associated with the cultural products and relationships that
perpetuate cultures of gendered violence, they can often feel like their enjoyment and pleasure
make them into some sort of feminist traitor. The contradictions inherent in these moments
reflect the direct and insidious traumas of existing as a contemporary feminist woman along with
myriad other identities that they are forced to choose between from moment to moment. In this
sense, bad feminist moments can be seen as moments of feminists shattering against the walls of
oppression. When feminists shatter against the walls of oppression, the ensuing fragments can be
reassembled to rearticulate their definitions of ideal feminism. I found the authors often utilize
these moments to act “out of tune” not only with mainstream culture, but with other feminists,
making way for inquiry, improvement, and change.
In examining these moments, I learned it is important to remain empathetic to the ways in
which trauma shapes individual feminists’ beliefs and practices. While traumas are often the
very things that bring many women to feminism, they also frequently form barriers to engaging with feminist ideals from moment to moment. The pressure to be continuously transgressive coupled with the traumas of contemporary womanhood, particularly for black women and other women of color, can be overwhelming. In looking at bad feminist moments as moments in which 297
trauma intersects with this pressure, I found that the feelings of ambivalence and resignation
produced in bad feminists moments can offer feminists the time and space to articulate and work
through these intersections when they are not entirely capable of doing so in the moment.
Shattering moments do not only pertain to feminist trauma, but they also pertain to
potential shattering within feminist relationships and occupations. Bad feminist moments reflect
the important roles that personal relationships and occupational pressures play in forming
feminist identity and shaping feminist interactions. The traumas of contemporary womanhood
can not only impact one’s ability to engage with feminism, but can also impact one’s desire to do
so when personal relationships are on the line. I found that many of Gay, Nelson, and McMillan
Cottom’s bad feminist moments revolved around their relationships to others. These bad feminist
moments centered on personal relationships revealed the tensions of being feminist in a society that views feminism as disruptive to the harmony and well-being of personal relationships.
Furthermore, they revealed the contradictory nature of feminist transgression in personal relationships. While the authors frequently desired to transgress against parental figures, particularly their mothers, bad feminist moments often revealed underlying desires to understand and connect with them. Intergenerational traumas that trickle down from mother to daughter shape feminists’ relationships to their families, their own children, and feminism. Feminists carry the intergenerational traumas, imperatives of happiness, and feminist ideals that trickle down from their mothers into their new family dynamics with them as they grow older. The desire to belong and the desire to be desired contribute to the tensions surrounding feminist relationships, as they are often unprepared to allow relationships that matter to snap in the name of what they believe to be ideal feminism. In questioning their definitions of ideal feminism that call for continuous transgression, the authors utilized misattunement with other people and groups to 298
articulate, disarticulate, and rearticulate their feminist positions, ultimately strengthening their convictions as feminists rather than eroding them.
The traumas of contemporary womanhood and the fragility of feminist relationships all
intersect in academic feminist women’s workplaces. Definitions of ideal feminism are
complicated within the neoliberal university systems that emphasize individual self-promotion
and capitalist value systems that often do not align with or foster feminist work. Feminists who
are also academics have to contend with conflicting identities throughout their education and
subsequent academic careers. As academic feminists, Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson not
only have to contend with the insidious traumas of womanhood and the tenuous nature of
feminist relationships, but they must also contend with the oppressive structures inherent in their
places of work. All three authors expressed the contradictions and tensions they experience on a
daily basis as academic misfits, those for whom academia is not built, beginning in their
undergraduate programs and extending throughout their academic careers
While academia has slowly progressed in its inclusion of women and people of color, it is
still rife with racist, sexist, and classist practices that are further compounded by contemporary
neoliberal ideals that emphasize individualism, self-promotion, and personal perfection. While
many universities have adopted the language of diversity, the actual work of increasing
institutional diversity is usually placed squarely on the shoulders of those whom it most effects:
people of color and women. Feminist women (particularly feminist women of color) that work in
university settings are expected to engage in diversity work that is often thankless and
exhausting. While diversity work might align with feminist values, it does not often advance
diversity workers as academics. Academic feminists are often left feeling like they are being
forced to choose between their occupational and feminist priorities. 299
Many academic feminists come to academia in order to do feminist work and connect
with other feminists, forming feminist shelters based on histories of academic feminist
scholarship and community. However, feminist shelters are inherently fragile, as they are built to
change the very structures in which they exist. Academic feminist shelters are rife with the
sexism, elitism, and racism that pervade the institutions in which they are founded. The
collective pressure to get transgression right coupled with personal desires for community and
academic authority contribute to the sense that one is a bad feminist. This is particularly true for
feminist companions, those whose feminism shapes that of others’ and forges paths for other
feminists to follow. Feminists can get frustrated or cross with their feminist companions when
they do not perform feminism in ways that satisfy their needs. In reading through the bad
feminist moments of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson, I was reminded not only of the
humanity and fallibility of these feminist writers, but of the humanity and fallibility of their
mentors. Bad feminist moments can stem from the realization that feminist companions are
human. This realization can in turn offer space and time for feminists to redirect those
frustrations to themselves. When feminists question their own expectations of other feminists,
they can empathize with each other’s struggles. Bad feminist moments offer a chance for
empathy and reflexivity, crucial components of feminist activism and scholarship.
One of the ways in which academic feminists resist these imperatives is through participation in accessible, experience-based, public-facing scholarship. Feminist public scholarship clearly offers opportunities for feminist snap, as feminist academics utilize it to break away from traditional practices and definitions of authority that perpetuate racist, sexist, and classist structures of oppression. Furthermore, the choice to share bad feminist moments in such scholarship can also create opportunities and spaces for feminists to “loan out” the privileges of 300
education and academic language, make connections and build community, and challenge other
feminists to engage in collective feminist snap. Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson utilize bad
feminist moments to grapple with their sense of academic disorientation. However, in choosing to share these moments with others in accessible, public-facing works of autoethnography, they also offer the promise of reorientation. They not only redirect feminist criticism from feminist companions to themselves, but they redirect the responsibility of subverting oppressive academic structures to themselves. In doing so, these authors not only distribute information that is not promoted in the academy, but they reframe it in a way that enables other feminists to come to their own snapping points, disassembling fragile feminist shelters to reassemble them in a collective effort to engage in feminist resistance. While examining bad feminist moments revealed the daily pressures and limitations of being a feminist academic, it also revealed the increasingly unique and creative ways in which feminist academics like Gay, Nelson, and
McMillan Cottom are using personal experience to reach out to other feminists and encourage empathetic, self-critical reformation of their fragile feminist shelters.
Limitations & Future Implications
This study is by no means comprehensive. I examined the autoethnographic works of only three authors. If had engaged in a larger-scale study of multiple texts, I might have been able to tease out even more areas of nuance. For example, my sample size did not include authors from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds. Gay identifies as a black Haitian American,
McMillan Cottom identifies as a “black-black” Southern American, and Nelson identifies as a white American. While race plays a central role in many of these bad feminist moments, it might have done so even more if I had included writers from a wider swath of racial and ethnic identities. Thank goodness Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson are all well-versed in issues of 301 racial and ethnic identity. Drawing from a sample of academic authors who have each written and taught on critical race theories insured that I would be provided with examples that are mindful of these different experiences, if perhaps not always deeply engaged with them.
Furthermore, a larger-scale study might have proven too unwieldy for an initial study, as I was trying to get at questions that were already somewhat unwieldy: what is a bad feminist moment?
What causes them? What functions do they serve for feminists in this moment? Keeping my sample size to three authors enabled me to engage in deep reading, multiple cycles of coding, and a cohesive analysis.
Furthermore, not all public-facing, accessible forms of feminist scholarship are as popular as those of Gay, McMillan Cottom, and Nelson. These three works have been hugely popular, and they have shaped a lot of contemporary young feminists’ definitions of and engagements with feminism. Above all, they each share bad feminist moments with their readers.
Perhaps their popularity is due to precisely this inclusion of bad feminist moments. As forms of feminist snap meant to generate collective snap, these texts might not have had the same impact without these reflexive moments in which the authors question themselves and encourage readers to do the same. Perhaps this analysis can provide the foundation for examining other texts that feature bad feminist moments, as it offers a definition of—and framework for thinking about— bad feminist moments based on the patterns identified in these three works.
I initially envisioned this project as bringing two perspectives together to complement each other: nonacademic and academic feminist experiences. I had originally intended to engage in a comparative analysis between the three autoethnographic texts and the weekly diary entries of nonacademic feminists. I felt somehow that the answers to bad feminist moments lay within the definitions of feminism offered by academia. I still feel that academic feminism’s 302 contributions have shaped contemporary understandings of feminism and professional feminism.
Given the short period of time available for funding this project, I was unable to recruit the necessary amount of nonacademic participants. This was an unforeseen limitation that actually enabled me to sharpen my focus and deepen my analysis.
Even as I recruited nonacademic diary study participants and grappled with the implications of nonacademic feminist input, I kept returning to these three texts and the question of why feminist academics are choosing to discuss their bad feminist moments in such public, vulnerable ways. In the blog posts I had originally analyzed for a conference presentation, nonacademic feminists frequently shared that they felt they did not have a right to ask such questions precisely because they were not “professional” feminists, which they largely seemed to define as academic feminists. I could not help but wonder if academic feminists also saw themselves as professional feminists. I learned the answer, in short, is no. Despite their widespread popularity as contemporary feminist authorities, McMillan Cottom and Gay actually specifically draw a line in the sand between themselves and what they view as professional feminists. Interestingly, these works did not provide any sort of cohesive view on what makes someone a professional feminist; alternatively, this image of the professional feminist is one that seems to pervade the feeling that one is a bad feminist. While feminists might be able to give examples of whom they identify as professional feminists, they often can only define the concept by simply stating what they believe it not to be: themselves. I would love to return to this concept of the professional feminist at a later juncture, finding out how we define who gets to occupy that label, if anyone.
Focusing my project on academic feminist writers provided me with the depth that I needed to not only identify such issues in contemporary feminist identity, but the influence of 303 bad feminist moments on feminist public-facing scholarship. I had always personally seen public scholarship as a form of resistance to elitist academic structures, but this project demonstrated just how strongly the feminist values of reflexivity and collective organizing influence feminist academics’ decisions to engage in this type of work. This warrants more exploration of feminist public scholarship, as it might be shaping the future of feminist scholarship in general.
As with any project, finding answers to my questions simply raised more questions. Does this phenomenon extend beyond Western feminist thought? Do people who do not identify as women ever feel like bad feminists; do these moments look the same for them? Do nonacademic women who latch onto this concept share the same reflexive intent as these authors? Although the public-facing, accessible works of feminist academic scholarship that address the authors’ bad feminist moments are clearly forms of feminist snap aimed at generating collective snap, are they succeeding in this aim? These are all questions that might be taken up in subsequent studies.
This project barely scratches the surface of what causes bad feminist moments, and what the functions of sharing them are. However, it is a start.
This project not only provides us with a start for such inquiry, but it specifically provides me personally with fodder for several future projects. Most obviously, it provided me with a host of new questions to address in those future projects. As well, it helped me to understand the purposes and features of feminist public scholarship. I am hoping to share my work on feminist public scholarship as feminist snap as part of a Lever Press anthology on public feminisms emerging from the academy. I also hope to start a social media account featuring the public scholarship of feminist academics to amplify their voices. If feminist snap is to generate collective snap, it must be heard, seen, and felt by others. 304
This project also offers a lot of pedagogical value. Empathetic critical inquiry is at the
heart of my own teaching philosophy, and feminist reflexivity is a huge part of that. One
surprising aspect of this project was the extent to which feminists are impacted by trauma in their
day-to-day decisions. If these well-known academic and public intellectuals are so strongly impacted by their personal and collective traumas on a daily basis, I can only imagine the extent to which trauma impacts the students I teach, who frequently struggle with the idea of being feminist. I would love to be able to teach a course on feminism and trauma someday, whether it be a community course or an university course (or perhaps a community-engaged course that
bridges that campus/community divide). Such a course could not only promote feminist
reflexivity in young women, but it could also offer them resources for feminist self-care. Sara
Ahmed’s Feminist Killjoy Toolkit, for example, offers a practical and useful resource for
addressing and coping with these issues.
In this project, I have offered a foundation for understanding contemporary feminist
identity through moments in which feminists question their abilities to perform what they
perceive to be ideal feminism. This might open the doors for a host of scholarship not only on
bad feminist moments, but on academic feminist identity, on feminist public scholarship, and on
the impacts of feminist public scholarship on feminist movements. At the very least, it offers a
model for empathetic inquiry into contemporary feminist thought and action. Feminists do not
act independently of the worlds in which they live; they are shaped by them just like everyone
else. If we take this into consideration, we might find more relevant and fruitful criticisms based
on realistic understandings of what it means to be a fallible human person trying to do feminism. 305
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6494.2010.00673.x. 328 APPENDIX A. TOPIC MODEL SAMPLE
[beta: 0.13084] <700> LL/token: -9.40448 [beta: 0.12903] <710> LL/token: -9.39144 [beta: 0.12763] <720> LL/token: -9.39417 [beta: 0.12914] <730> LL/token: -9.39687 [beta: 0.12994] <740> LL/token: -9.39496
0 0.35411 symbols culture's contexts shapes accounts purchase project 1 0.13421 baby harry iggy mother felt body feeling 2 11.27566 time people good make feminism kind 3 0.1393 schuyler queers earth fraiman traitor belly fantasy 4 0.79948 women black men people rape movie woman 5 0.74354 sold taste lesser happily genuine excuses author 6 0.08953 concerns amusing criminal slave flaws sentence realistic 7 0.26234 twenties dial's excess tosh called late eleven-year-old 8 0.10408 mail object respectability hand sitting identification gallop's 9 0.83798 black women people white beauty woman social
[beta: 0.12967] <750> LL/token: -9.3894
[beta: 0.12868] <760> LL/token: -9.39556 [beta: 0.12833] <770> LL/token: -9.39276 [beta: 0.12744] <780> LL/token: -9.40096 [beta: 0.1273] <790> LL/token: -9.3937
0 0.28655 domestic housing bureaucratic vivian mentioned hundreds hunter 1 0.19133 baby mother harry iggy feel feeling told 2 11.74428 time good body make women life people 3 0.11892 baby's turning photo morning argo capital blue 4 0.95799 women people men black rape woman movie 5 0.66899 expensive hide discussed jokes trigger nick choosing 6 0.14664 fraught inaccurate industry bright norway terminate plantation 7 0.11529 suggests terrible narrator sisterhood dedicated admire extra 8 0.18557 fantasy interest guess butt water tub nursing 9 1.01515 black people women white beauty social woman 329
[beta: 0.12804] <800> LL/token: -9.40561 [beta: 0.12852] <810> LL/token: -9.40389 [beta: 0.12998] <820> LL/token: -9.39899 [beta: 0.1291] <830> LL/token: -9.39014 [beta: 0.12771] <840> LL/token: -9.39423
0 0.21589 truth ideologies international fewer ain't demands statistics 1 0.24613 baby mother harry iggy queer feeling sedgwick 2 12.32491 time good people capitalism make life don't 3 0.18286 earth hot style girl argued fantasy gave 4 1.07712 women people men black rape movie woman 5 0.39659 submissive culturally point set alarming science matches 6 0.34553 endings carefully display fruit punish necessarily lemon 7 0.21094 exists daniel pervasive jerry flagrantly jordan goodness 8 0.28044 object we're capital months her's slide cruelty 9 0.86709 black women people white beauty social woman
[beta: 0.1286] <850> LL/token: -9.3835 [beta: 0.12812] <860> LL/token: -9.39751 [beta: 0.12714] <870> LL/token: -9.39086
[beta: 0.12814] <880> LL/token: -9.39912 [beta: 0.12932] <890> LL/token: -9.38488
00 0.12402 groups elissa scarcity cat well-meaning located tiger 11 0.28042 baby other harry iggy mother told sedgwick 22 12.62829 ti e people good it's don't make life 33 0.08673 schuyler ordinary style chest puppies weeks sa 44 1.15585 wo en black men rape movie people feminism 55 0.32964 ground contract earn sisterhood secret a y acknowledge 66 0.21875 co plex memories contraception mavis roles plot exist 77 0.30528 fil spends expensive album pervasive universally rises 88 0.20464 hot fantasy shit turned ginsbe g biola argonauts 99 0.99895 black wo en white people beauty woman social 330
[beta: 0.12897] <900> LL/token: -9.38628 [beta: 0.13043] <910> LL/token: -9.3886 [beta: 0.12891] <920> LL/token: -9.38999 [beta: 0.12906] <930> LL/token: -9.39503 [beta: 0.12923] <940> LL/token: -9.40994
0 0.24467 presentable beauty's cases walk bell sociologists anxious 1 0.10441 baby mother harry iggy feel sedgwick queer 2 12.90909 time good capitalism make don't life people 3 0.12371 house fraiman concept belly bottom nursing form 4 0.8331 women people black men woman rape movie 5 0.25053 scale nebraska freed openly defy punishment abortions 6 0.53462 artifice actors rape fraught ends surrender insane 7 0.39241 fuck plot compassion transvaginal richard kill scrabble 8 0.26236 suddenly carson tribe triangle argonauts evolution friend's 9 1.07833 black women people white beauty woman social
[beta: 0.12872] <950> LL/token: -9.39549 [beta: 0.12902] <960> LL/token: -9.39985 [beta: 0.12812] <970> LL/token: -9.4023 [beta: 0.12769] <980> LL/token: -9.39727 [beta: 0.12804] <990> LL/token: -9.40611
00 0.10214 walk part southern tastes tiger fe me masculinity 11 0.16045 baby other harry iggy i've feel sedgwick 22 13.23607 capitalis time don's good life make people 33 0.15636 butch calling frai an belly photo sun sleeping 44 0.88724 wo en people black men rape movie woman 55 0.32735 urder health guidelines cooper totally talented edward 66 0.49284 equally consistently abortions articles fruit darkness e bodies 77 0.32306 guilty realize opinions le on brice triggers plastic 88 0.19343 turned traitor holes other's blood invited giving 99 1.1721 black wo en people white beauty woman social 331 APPENDIX B. SPREADSHEET SAMPLE
Purpose/Function Identifying personal limitations,g "I don't knowyg how to see beyond g this belief to truly p,get why trigger warnings are necessary." y gg 152 P6 feelings, considering both personal warnings aren't meant for those of us who don't believe in them, just like the Bible wasn't written for atheists. Trigger Bad Feminist reactions and the feelings of others (the all warnings are designed for th epeople who need and believe in that safety. Those of us who do not believe should have little Moment important "But." say in the matter. We can neither presume nor judge what others might feel the need to be protected from." 153 P2-3 "Mostly, this story shows us how broken men are everywhere--on rances in central Texas, in elite football programs, both on the field and on the sidelines. And alongside these broken men are the women who all too often become broken too. It's a Analysis categories The brokenness of y(gender from all sides spectacle in every way." 159 P1 sexuality, but what about other labels? like feminist? white feminist? black feminist? Regarding sexualit labels: "We act like placing these people in categories will have some impact on our lives, or that creating Cultural Moment queer feminist?) theseyy categories is our yp responsibility, when, most of the,ypy time, such taxonomy p won't change anythingg at all." py 161 P1,2,3 just one more benefit the privileged class enjoys and often takes for granted. Heterosexuals take the privacy of their sexuality for granted. They can date, marry, and love whome they choose without needing to disclose much of anything. If they do Analysis categories Bodies and gendered privacy choosegg to disclose, there are rarely yppnegative consequences." g gyg g g j g 163 P2-3 and small, an even if we can only fight the small ones, at least we are fighting."; "We expect role models to model the Feminist Work- Fighting Injustice not just behaviors we are perfectly capable of modeling ourselves...How helpless are we willing to be for the greater good? That Analysis categories for role models-pressure on role models question interests megg the most." y p ggy 169 P1 choreographed and tedious. A woman ares to acknowledge the gender problem. Some people say, "Yes, you're right," but do The tediousness of feminist work; inaction nothin to change the status quo. Some people say, "I'm not part of the problem," and offer up some tired example as to why Analysis categories when women speak out; Rinse. Repeat. this is all no big deal, why this is all beign blown out of proportion. Some people offer up submission queue ratios and other 171 P2 "Inappropriate humor is often the best kind. Everyone knows at least one joke she finds funny even though she shouldn't. I Bad Feminist am not alway sproud of the things that make me laugh, but I genuinely admire a comedian who can both make me laugh and Moment Enjoyment of inappropriate humor make me uncomfortable." 178 P2
Representations of/Stereotypes of "When women respond negatively to misogynistic or rape humor, they are 'sensitive' and branded as 'feminist,' a word that Analysis categories feminism has, as of late, become a catchall term for 'woman who does not tolerate bullshit.'" 180 P1
Feminist Work vs Ease- the ease of Analysis categories remaining silent 181 P2-3 Discussing Tosh.O challenge for men to touch women lightly on stomachs and record it: "If any number of young men were willing to film themselves touching women lightly on their stomachs, how many were encouraged to ignore a woman's no Purpose/Function The consequences of Complicity becuase Daniel Tosh finds rape amusing? What areyy the consequences if the answer is even one?"yjg182 P1 believe you're joking, because haha, a man putting his hands on you is so funny in the reality from where you are communicating. Clearly, we have different definitions of funny, but perhaps you truly do find it amusing to joke about Purpose/Function Questioning without judgment domestic violence.pp I am not here to judge you."py,ypy 183 P1 feminist I am when I consider someone like Richard Pryor. He was a comic genius. I am always floored by how he tackled the Bad Feminist Susceptibility to charisma of complexities of race with his humor. Pryor was also flagrantly abusive toward the women he loved. His brilliance cannot Moment problematic/hurtful/harmful people overlooked. That's what I tell myself, but then I imagine all the hurt he caused and how rarely that hurt is discussed. That 186 P3