Reading for Pleasure - November 2015 "Bad Feminist" by Roxanne Gay

In these articles the novelist and academic Roxanne Gay discusses a world of fractious contradictions in a style which is both effervescent and subtly persuasive. A number of the articles discuss the disadvantages she has experienced as an American black woman, but she is also quick to point out the advantages and privileges she has benefited from, such as a stable middle-class upbringing, and varied educational opportunities. 

Her writing allows her to balance uncertainties with strongly held values about race and gender. For example she willingly ponders whether her feminism is compatible with her liking for rap music, at the same time as discussing and dissecting the destructive consequences of violence and discrimination. These contradictions may possibly make her a 'bad feminist' in some ways but they also make her a good writer. She has the ability to use writing to examine different identities in an illuminating and thought provoking way and to create her own identity as she writes.

Black History Month 2015: Yearning

Yearning: race, gender and cultural politics bell hooks; 25 September 1952

Real name Gloria Jean Watkins, the pen name bell hooks derived from her maternal grandmother. The de-capitalisation of her pen name is duel-functioning as it distinguishes her from her grandmother, and it proposes the writing is more important than her name.
bell is an American feminist, social activist, author and was a Professor at Yale University. In her writings she confronts the binary definitions of what is it to be a black woman and the issues surrounding social class. In her writings she proposes arguments, debates and solutions and by large this acts as a way to liberate individuals from these definitions. She is a prolific writer who draws influences from Toni Morrison, American absolutionist Sojourner Truth, American playwright Lorraine Hansberry and American Civil Rights radical Malcolm X and American Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. During her childhood in Kentucky, hooks experienced racial segregation and sexism which are explored throughout her earlier writings. As she has grown older hooks has embraced Buddhism which now influences her writings and methodologies