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Roxane Gay
Photo: Jon Tjhia
Roxane GayI have personally grown weary of this genre of critiquing feminism as sport. I’m more interested in: let’s do some of the work of feminism.
Roxane Gay’s latest book, a collection of short fiction called Difficult Women. The pages of the book are populated with resilient, perverse, bold, provocative, hilarious and heroic female characters.
It’s some of these very same qualities that have propelled Gay herself to feminist stardom. As a writer, and as a distinctly 21st-century voice in American feminism, Gay embraces complexity and contradiction and packs a powerful rhetorical punch whether she’s writing for Twitter, Tumblr, the New York Times, novels or comic books.
The academic, essayist and novelist rose to prominence in 2015 with the book Bad Feminist – part manifesto, part memoir, part cultural critique – and today has more than 190,000 Twitter followers, tuning in to her thoughts on everything from The Bachelor to American higher education policy. Most recently, she’s been working on an upcoming memoir, Hunger, and co-authoring a Marvel comic, Black Panther: World of Wakanda, with Yona Harvey and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
At Northcote Town Hall, the singular Roxane Gay talks politics, pop culture and Beyoncé with Santilla Chingaipe.
Who?
Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State, Bad Feminist: Essays and the story collection Ayiti. Her work has also appeared in Glamour, Best American Short Stories, and the New York Times Book Review. She is the co-editor of PANK.
Santilla Chingaipe
‘Celebrities and corporations spew forth “smash the patriarchy” and benefit financially from that. You want to talk about boards? I want to talk about how some women can’t get a job.’
Santilla Chingaipe is an award-winning journalist and filmmaker. Chingaipe created and hosted the Africa Talks series in partnership with the Wheeler Centre, which explored perceptions about African-Australian identity, representation and politics. She also curated Australia’s first all-day, anti-racism festival, Not Racist, But.... Her work explores contemporary migration, cultural identities and politics. She reports regularly for the Saturday Paper and is a member of the federal government’s advisory group on Australia-Africa relations.
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