Recommendations
Books Like Bad Feminist
Best books to read after Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Bad Feminist holds contradictions without resolving them — feminist principles and guilty pleasures, serious cultural criticism and confessional humor. These 8 books share its range, its accessibility, and its insistence on taking popular culture seriously while applying rigorous thinking to its implications.
- 1Buy
The Empathy Exams
by Leslie Jamison
Jamison's 2014 essay collection is Bad Feminist's closest companion in the contemporary feminist essay tradition — both move between personal confession and cultural criticism without signaling a change of register, both take seriously the difficulty of thinking clearly about pain and politics, and both appeared in the same year to define the possibilities of the personal essay.
- 2Buy
Sister Outsider
by Audre Lorde
Lorde's 1984 collection of essays and speeches provides the political framework that runs beneath Bad Feminist — particularly her argument about working across difference and her insistence on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality as inseparable from each other — and reading Lorde alongside Gay shows how contemporary feminist essay writing is in ongoing dialogue with its foundational texts.
- 3Buy
Hunger
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2017 memoir — about how childhood sexual violence shaped her relationship to her body and to food — is the most personal and direct of her books, and the natural next Gay to read after Bad Feminist; where the essays observe the world from a slight distance, the memoir is as close as she can get to her own experience.
- 4Buy
Men Explain Things to Me
by Rebecca Solnit
Solnit's 2014 essay collection — which gave the internet the word 'mansplaining' — is among the most influential feminist essay writing of the decade and shares Bad Feminist's range across personal anecdote and political argument, its humor, and its accessibility to readers who don't come to the essays through academic feminism.
- 5Buy
We Should All Be Feminists
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2014 extended essay — adapted from a TEDx Talk and famously sampled by Beyoncé — is the most globally read feminist essay of the decade and shares Bad Feminist's argument that feminism is not a fixed and pure ideology but a commitment that accommodates contradiction and that is available to everyone.
- 6Buy
The Argonauts
by Maggie Nelson
Nelson's 2015 autotheory memoir is the most formally ambitious and theoretically rigorous essay work of the decade, and reading it alongside Bad Feminist shows the range of contemporary feminist nonfiction from Gay's accessible cultural criticism to Nelson's philosophical hybrid form — both are essential, and they address different readers.
- 7Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his son about the Black body in America is the companion document to Bad Feminist for understanding American race and gender in the 2010s — where Gay is concerned with popular culture's treatment of women, Coates is concerned with American history's treatment of Black bodies, and together they map the political terrain of the decade.
- 8Buy
Know My Name
by Chanel Miller
Miller's 2019 memoir about the aftermath of being sexually assaulted by Brock Turner — and about reclaiming her identity from the reductive legal narrative that reduced her to 'Emily Doe' — is the most powerful complement to Bad Feminist's discussion of rape culture, giving that cultural criticism a specific, personal face.
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