Roxane Gay

Roxane Gay (born 1974) is an American writer, professor, editor, blogger, and commentator. She is a professor of English at Purdue University, contributing op-ed writer at The New York Times, founder of Tiny Hardcore Press, contributing editor for Bluestem Magazine, essays editor for The Rumpus, and co-editor of PANK, a nonprofit literary arts collective.

Career

She is the author of the short story collection Ayiti (2011), the novel An Untamed State (2014), the essay collection Bad Feminist (2014), and Hunger (forthcoming 2016). She also edited the book Girl Crush: Women's Erotic Fantasies. In addition to her regular contributions to Salon and the now defunct HTMLGiant, her writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and The New York Times Book Review.

Gay

Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term was originally used to refer to feelings of being "carefree", "happy", or "bright and showy".

The term's use as a reference to homosexuality may date as early as the late 19th century, but its use gradually increased in the 20th century. In modern English, gay has come to be used as an adjective, and as a noun, referring to the people, especially to gay males, and the practices and cultures associated with homosexuality. By the end of the 20th century, the word gay was recommended by major LGBT groups and style guides to describe people attracted to members of the same sex.

At about the same time, a new, pejorative use became prevalent in some parts of the world. In the Anglosphere, this connotation, among younger speakers, has a meaning ranging from derision (e.g., equivalent to rubbish or stupid) to a light-hearted mockery or ridicule (e.g., equivalent to weak, unmanly, or lame). In this use, the word rarely means "homosexual", as it is often used, for example, to refer to an inanimate object or abstract concept of which one disapproves. The extent to which these usages still retain connotations of homosexuality has been debated and harshly criticized.

Difficult Women

Difficult Women is a literary-folk music cabaret created in 1992, in Melbourne, Australia, by Lin Van Hek and Joe Dolce and has been performing internationally for 15 years.

During the witch-hunts in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, the term 'difficult women' was used to identify women targeted to be burned at the stake and for confiscation of their property by the church. Van Hek and Dolce's group has reclaimed this term and through a combination of theatrical vignettes, original music, songs, harmony singing and oration, brings to life women who were labeled 'difficult' for their willingness to defy what was expected of women in their time.

The show contains over four hours of material on visionary women such as Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Frida Kahlo, Memphis Minnie, Sonya Tolstoi, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Camille Claudel, Katherine Mansfield and Louisa Lawson.

External links

Bad Feminist

Bad Feminist: Essays is a 2014 collection of essays by cultural critic, novelist and professor Roxane Gay. Bad Feminist explores being a feminist while loving things that could seem to go against feminist ideology through essays that explore pop culture and Gay's personal experiences, covering topics as vast as the Sweet Valley High series, Django Unchained, and Gay's own upbringing as a Haitian-American.

It was one of two books published by Gay in 2014, the other being her novel An Untamed State.

Table of contents

[Introduction]

[Me]

[Gender & Sexuality]

An Untamed State

An Untamed State is the debut novel of writer Roxane Gay, first published in 2014 by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Plot

While vacationing with her husband and child in Haiti, Mireille Jameson is kidnapped. When her father refuses to pay her ransom she is gang-raped and tortured by her captors and kept imprisoned for 13 days before finally being released.

Reception

An Untamed State received positive reviews upon publication. Nolan Feeney writing for Time (magazine) called it a "riveting debut" that " captivates from its opening sentence and doesn’t let go." The A.V. Club awarded it an A letter grade and praised it as "a gripping psychological portrait of how trauma remakes the body to respond only to itself."

References