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Nor does disagreement mean we are blind to the ways in which progress has been made. Conceding the idea that anger is an inappropriate reaction to the injustice women face backs women into an unfair position. Pointing out the many ways in which misogyny persists and harms women is not anger. In a review of Hanna Rosin’s The End of Men, a 2012 book celebrating the new world of matriarchal triumph that seems hopelessly quaint in 2017, Gay again approaches a feminist debate with the dexterity of common sense:ĭisagreement, however, is not anger. I don’t believe it is at all possible to anticipate the histories of others. I don’t believe people can be protected from their histories.
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There are things that rip my skin open and reveal what lies beneath, but I don’t believe in trigger warnings. The illusion of safety is as frustrating as it is powerful. Few are willing to consider the possibility that trigger warnings might be ineffective, impractical, and necessary for creating safe spaces all at once. There is too much history lurking beneath the skin of too many people.
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She dissects the question of trigger warnings, for example, with real sympathy, then questions how meaningful they are in relation to her own experience as well as her understanding of the larger reality: The same year her novel appeared, Gay’s collection of essays, Bad Feminist, burst onto best-seller lists, and the lyricist of cruelty and violence showed herself to be, in addition, a funny and intellectually refreshing cultural critic of the everyday pasting women are subjected to. The world is a dangerous place, safety is precious and rare, but even the damaged, and even those who cause damage, can love. Gay’s fiction is blunt, painful, and raw at the same time, it is almost delicate with finely drawn emotional distinctions. Based on one of the stories in Ayiti, the novel is beautiful and brutal, an account of a young Haitian-American woman kidnapped and raped for thirteen days, torn not just from her family but from her identity, much as Haiti has been. An Untamed State, a novel about the almost unimaginable suffering of Haiti and its people, appeared in 2014. Her first book, Ayiti, a swift collection of stories about Haiti, came out in 2011.
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Hunger is Gay’s exploration, both personal and theoretical, of the connection between these two kinds of bodily shame. Gay was gang-raped when she was twelve years old. at a technical university in the snowy wilds of Michigan’s upper peninsula. A detective hired by her parents found her, she came home, and she eventually got a Ph.D. She ran away from Yale in her junior year and disappeared into a seedy life she does not say too much about. The daughter of prosperous Haitian immigrants, she had an upbringing that was midwestern, though her boarding school and college were East Coast preppy. The book revisits some of the details of Gay’s life that she has written about elsewhere and fills in others. For men who read the book, it will be more of a travelogue. And I suspect that every woman who reads Hunger will recognize herself in it. Her new memoir, Hunger, is the story of being a physical woman in a physical world that has been shaped for so long by men. Her fiction and essays elicit as much shared understanding as they give. Roxane Gay is a writer of extreme empathy. Roxane Gay, Charleston, Illinois, July 2014