“I am a bad feminist because I never want to be placed on a Feminist Pedestal. It’s the culture’s reductive, pejorative view of feminism, she argues, that suggests there is a good or “bad” way to inhabit an identity. This partially explains why she considers herself a “bad feminist” today. She writes of being “ashamed” of disavowing feminism, professing ignorance of its meaning and mission. Gay spent much of her young adulthood shying away from the feminist label because she-and those who assigned it to her-associated it with essentialism. Gay subscribes to the common feminist belief that the movement has long been stigmatized as one governed by “anger, humorlessness, militancy, unwavering principles, and a prescribed set of rules for how to be a proper feminist woman.”Įssential feminism, she writes, “suggests there are right and wrong ways to be a feminist” and doesn’t allow for “the complexities of human experience or individuality.”
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