Bad Feminist

Content Warning: This section references sexual violence, domestic violence, racial violence, and domestic terrorism.

The overarching theme of Bad Feminist is the fullness and complexity of humanity, which Gay primarily emphasizes in two ways: by presenting her own humanness through acknowledgement of her emotions, contradictions, and biases; and by linking the notion of justice to the consideration of marginalized people’s humanity.

Gay exhibits consistent honesty about what could be considered human flaws, like difficult emotions and personal biases/investments. She makes these evident in Part 1, where she grounds readers in the sense of who she is and the perspective she brings to the text—particularly her loneliness and desire for community, which feature in Essays 1, 3, and 4. Gay also acknowledges her nervousness and lack of confidence as a new teacher, as well as her “dangerous level of confidence to balance [her] generally low self-esteem” during her first Scrabble competition (34).

By providing examples of her emotional reactions to everyday life, Gay situates her personal investments and biases regarding pop culture artifacts within the complex matrix of human characteristics. In her discussion of Girls, she notes that she is not Dunham’s target audience and that she was not enthralled by the first two seasons because “Girls reminds me of how terrible my twenties were—being lost and awkward, having terrible sex with terrible people, being perpetually broke, eating ramen” (55).