602 Quotes by Roxane Gay

On my more difficult days, I'm not sure what's more of a pain in my ass -- being black or being a woman. I'm happy to be both of these things, but the world keeps intervening.

Whenever governments wanted to achieve some end, often involving population growth, they restricted access to birth control and/or criminalized birth control unless, of course, the population growth concerned the poor, in which case, contraception was enthusiastically promoted. Historically, society has only wanted the "right kind of people" to have a right to life. We shouldn't forget that fact.

In my teens and early twenties, I often went clothes shopping with my mother and I could always see her dismay at where I am forced to shop. I could see that she wished her daughter had a different body. I could see her humiliation and frustration. ... I harbored no small amount of frustration, or anger, for her words, for her disappointment in me, for my inability to be a good daughter, for one more thing I couldn't have – the simple pleasure of having fun while shopping with my mother.

The problem with movements is that, all too often, they are associated only with the most visible figures, the people with the biggest platforms and the loudest, most provocative voices.

I get angry when women disavow feminism and shun the feminist label but say they support all the advances born of feminism because I see a disconnect that does not need to be there.

Feminists are 'just women who don’t want to be treated like shit'.

Maybe I'm a bad feminist, but I am committed to the issues important to the feminist movement.

Bad feminism seems the only way I can both embrace myself as a feminist and be myself, so I write.

I resisted feminism in my late teens and my twenties because i worried that feminism wouldn't allow me to be the mess of a woman i knew myself to be. But then i began to learn more about feminism. i learnt to separate feminism from Feminism or Feminists or the idea of an Essential Feminism - one true feminism to dominate all of womankind.