Roxane Gay's Analysis

Roxane Gay’s essays examine the systematic oppression of different social identities, with a focus on gender, race, and sexuality. She keeps intersectionality, or how these different social identities overlap and affect one another, at the forefront of her discussions. She regularly comments on popular culture, and discusses how mainstream media’s misrepresentation and exclusion of minorities contributes to the continuation of the systematic oppression of these groups. Gay rightly stresses the idea of intersectionality, as too often the mainstream culture separates different social inequalities, trying to solve them as isolated issues, when in fact, racism, sexism, and homophobia are all very much connected, complicating one another too greatly …show more content…
Since the first wave of feminism in America, during the late 1800s into the 1920s, the widely celebrated feminist icons Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton remained adamant about keeping black women out of the feminist movement. They felt they would be perceived as too radical if they included black women in their marches and protests, and get nothing accomplished, so they sacrificed the needs of less privileged women for their own (Boynton). The second wave of feminism, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1970s, did make some small improvements in regards to the racism of the movement. With the civil rights movement’s expansion in the 1960s, there was more of a crossover between race and gender equality than during the first wave of feminism, and multiple black feminists were widely recognized within the movement. Even with a slight improvement, however, mainstream feminism remained a movement aimed towards white, heterosexual, cisgender women. Audre Lorde, a prominent second-wave feminist, identified herself as a “black lesbian feminist socialist” (Lorde 114). She was largely concerned with similar themes as Gay, always including how her identities intersected, as she remained highly critical of the mainstream feminist movement for the way “white women focus upon their oppression as women and ignore differences of race, sexual preference, class, and age” (Lorde 116). Not only did the feminist movement in this time exclude women of color and queer women, but too often they contributed to their oppressions. Mainstream feminism was extremely homophobic throughout this period. Betty Freidan, author of The Feminine Mystique, was celebrated as a feminist icon. Her ideas, however, were damaging to the way the feminist movement treated queer women. She