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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
Santilla Chingaipe is a journalist and filmmaker whose work explores migration, cultural identities and politics. She is a regular contributor to the Saturday Paper, and serves as a member of the Federal Government’s Advisory Group on Australia-Africa Relations (AGAAR).
Chingaipe wrote and directed the documentary series Third Culture Kids for the ABC. Other credits include the short documentary Black As Me.
Her first book of non-fiction detailing the stories of convicts of African descent transported to the Australian penal colonies, is forthcoming with Picador in 2021.
The recipient of several awards, Chingaipe was recognised at the United Nations as one of the most influential people of African descent in the world in 2019.
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