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Jen Bohle's Reviews > Bad Feminist
Bad Feminist
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Jen Bohle's review
bookshelves: cultural-critique, feminism, gender-studies, lit-crit, memoir-esque
Sep 18, 2014
bookshelves: cultural-critique, feminism, gender-studies, lit-crit, memoir-esque
An inconsistent collection of ultimately shallow essays. Gay is funny, personable, thoughtful, and obviously intellectual but her essays don't delve deep enough into her subjects. Furthermore, I realize that essays can explore topics without coming to any definitive answers or conclusions, but I want more than an introduction to a problem. I want long and winding explorations with a surfeit of allusions, copious amounts of pattern-hunting from history, deeper thoughts on why something is the way Gay says it is. A 3 or 4 page essay on the "women's fiction" debacle? Impossible! Irresponsible! Gay's "Scrabble" essay seemed to pay homage to David Foster Wallace with the use of footnotes, but was without Wallace's raucous humor or almost archaeological excavation of a topic. The author explores contradictions within herself, feminism, and society without even *trying* to satisfactorily explain or unravel them. I hold James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf, DFW, and Susan Sontag up as the ultimate essayists, so perhaps the problem is one of expectation? Gay basically just shines a flashlight at an issue and says "see that?" as opposed to dissecting things under the steady light of an operating room.
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Reading Progress
September 18, 2014
–
Started Reading
September 18, 2014
– Shelved
October 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
cultural-critique
October 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
feminism
October 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
gender-studies
October 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
lit-crit
October 14, 2014
– Shelved as:
memoir-esque
October 14, 2014
–
Finished Reading
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by
Beata
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rated it 1 star
Feb 13, 2015 11:33AM
This is- precisely- how I felt about this book. You have eloquently put into words what I was unable to express.
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I thought of David Foster Wallace too with the Scrabble essay. It was like "Baby's First DFW".
I agree completely. At one point, she even admits to not knowing the history of feminism. Yet there was awkward hand-waving at white "feminist foremothers," which created so many missed opportunities to celebrate black women and explore deeper complexities of race. In fact, gender and race were never explored side by side in depth. It's truly a salute to intersectional feminism without ever grappling with it in the context of the essays.
I love "Gay basically just shines a flashlight at an issue and says "see that?". I found that as well! As soon as she introduced something important/interesting, she seemed to move to a new topic.
