Queer African American Authors

"A provocative author, activist, and educator, Roxane Gay provides sharp commentary and interesting perspectives on such topics as feminism, sexuality, gender, race, body image, violence, rape culture, and how culture considers women. Known for having a clear writing style and distinctive voice, Gay has been a New York Times best-selling author. Though she has considered herself awkward, shy, and a loner, her revealing vulnerability in such books as 2014's Bad Feminist and 2017's Hunger were considered deeply moving to readers and critics alike. In 2020 Queerty recognized her as a writer who gives voice to diversity. Gay also announced that she had eloped in 2020."

"I am home in North Country.
I am home in the middle of a cornfield in the Central Plains.
He is home in the North Country. He is not home in the middle of a
cornfield in the Central Plains. He was a boyfriend and then he wasn’t.
We don’t have the necessary vocabulary to explain each other. The present tense doesn’t work, but neither does the past."

Gay discusses sexual assault, disordered eating, the Internet, and sexuality in an interview with NPR.

Roxane Gay, writer and associate professor of English at Purdue University, feels that Americans had gotten careless with language throughout the election. Gay believes language matters and sometimes the word diversity becomes an empty container for whatever people who want to fill it with.

When writer Roxane Gay dubbed herself a "bad feminist," she was making a joke, acknowledging that she couldn't possibly live up to the demands for perfection of the feminist movement. But she's realized that the joke rang hollow. In a thoughtful and provocative talk, she asks us to embrace all flavors of feminism -- and make the small choices that, en masse, might lead to actual change.

"My sister decided we had to go see her estranged husband in Reno. When she told me, I was in a mood. I said, 'What does that have to do with me?'"

The Roxane Gay Agenda is the *bad feminist* podcast of your dreams. It’s writer Roxane Gay in conversation with guests who have something necessary to say about the issues that matter most to her–and hopefully to you as well. On the Agenda: feminism, race, writing, art, pop culture, food, and, of course, politics. If you enjoy hearing from people–women, mostly; Black women, usually–who bring unique perspectives to a world in complete and utter chaos, put this show on your own agenda. (Apple Podcasts, viewed 29 November 2022)

"When I tear myself open I'm horrified by what's beneath my skin but when you think about it, everything about everyone is ugly and it is only a matter of how much ugly you can take. You and I are breakers of things. That's why we work. There is so much ugly we can both take."

"It is summer in a dead-end town. There's not much good to say about that. I have been spending a lot of time at the community center pool. The lifeguards at the pool are all ugly so it's kind of a waste of time. I always hope I'll see a cute boy there and I like how the hot pavement feels when I walk barefoot."

On a global level, warming temperatures in the Atlantic promise storms of increasing ferocity as the US backs out of the Paris climate agreement, suspends EPA regulations and wilderness protections, touts the benefits of bringing back coal, and fails in its recovery effort in Puerto Rico. Gay tells the story of rape and the fallout from it: she explores what it means to have an experience of violation without a language for it, what it means to have a self and a body that can be harmed in ways she could not fathom, and how the levels of learning about her own experience represent a life's work.

[...]of the audience she cultivated through her early digital presences and print publications, Gay constructed an image around herself; she had become for many a significant cultural figure. [...]mainstream recognition provided Gay with the broader platform necessary to perform her brand of authorship against the traditions of literary culture. According to Gay, "social media has upped the ante for stepping out of line and that frightens me because it seems like there's less room for error-und I think we have to have room for error. According to Gay, "Feminism is just a constant, it's just part of who I am, so I'm going to continue becoming a better feminist and a more intersectional feminist."

In Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, Roxane Gay takes readers on a journey of her body, describing her gang rape at twelve-years-old, the subsequent over-eating it caused, and her life as a victimized fat Black woman. The memoir ends with a declaration of freedom: "Here I am, finally freeing myself to be vulnerable and terribly human. Here I am, reveling in that freedom. Here" (304). Though the memoir ends with her declaration of freedom, Hunger emphasizes Gay's bondage by using variations of the term "freedom," "bondage," and "cage." There are, for example, seventy-eight references to freedom and bondage throughout the memoir: nine references to "cage" (17, 19, 187, 265); three references to "prison" (196); (2) three references to "trapped" (17, 22); twenty-five references to "free," "freedom," or "freed"; (3) and thirty eight references to "safe" or "safety." (4) At first glance, it might seem that Gay's thirty-eight references to safety are incongruous with freedom. However, in Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (2020), Jessica Marie Johnson comments that Black women across the Black Diaspora have long understood "freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their progeny," especially, Johnson notes, "safety from intimate violence" (3).

This paper aims to mobilize the way we think and write about fat bodies while drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy of the body. I introduce Nancy’s approach to the body as an addition to contemporary new materialism. His philosophy, so I argue, offers a form of materialism that allows for a phenomenological exploration of the body. As such, it can help us to understand the lived experiences of fat embodiment. Additionally, Nancy’s idea of the body in terms of a “corpus”—a collection of pieces without a unity—together with his idea of corpus-writing—fragmentary writing, without head and tail—can help us to mobilize fixed meanings of fat. To apply Nancy’s conceptual frame to a concrete manifestation of fat embodiment, I provide a reading of Roxane Gay’s memoir Hunger (2017). In my analysis, I identify how the materiality of fat engenders the meaning of embodiment, and how it shapes how a fat body can and cannot be a body. Moreover, I propose that Gay’s writing style—hesitating and circling – involves an example of corpus-writing. The corpus of corpulence that Gay has created gives voice to the precariousness of a fat body's materialization.