Roxane Gay Research Articles

Silenced, Scarred & Shattered: Unmasking the Wounds of Child Sexual Abuse in Select American Memoirs

The research brings to light the marginalized voices of three American women who have written about their sexual abuse in their respective memoirs Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of my Body (2017), Nikki Dubose, Washed Away: From Darkness to Light (2016) and Neesha Arter Controlled: The worst Night of my Life and its Aftermath (2015). Using these memoirs as primary data and using thematic analysis the study identified three themes which were further classified into different subthemes. Firstly, the research discovered the challenges faced by the survivors in expressing and communicating about sexual abuse due to fear and shame, the survivors do not come forward because of threats, because of rape stereotypes that permeate the society and the fear of what parents and others might think. Secondly, the research explores the various impact of trauma that is caused by sexual abuse which include shame, guilt and self blame, unworthy self, uncontrollable rage, disruption of safety and trust, isolating themselves from everyone, hostility towards body, destructive behaviours which include eating disorder from Anorexia Nervosa to Binge eating disorder, it also includes self harm and substance abuse. Thirdly, the research focuses on the recovery aspect on how the survivors learn to live with the wounds caused by sexual abuse. It focuses on how the survivors came in terms with the abuse, the conflicting feelings of forgiveness and revenge and how they sought redemption through writing their journey.

‘Never enough, never enough’: Institutional autobiography and gendered labour in contemporary North American women’s writing1

This article examines the gendered experience of labour in the North American university to theorize its implications for the production of autobiographical writing. Drawing on the work of Dodie Bellamy, Roxane Gay and Heidi Julavits, I make a specifically feminist argument about time, precarity and value in academia, arguing that the job of writing creatively in the academy is complicated by the invisibilization of education and administration as well as the preponderance of women and minorities in non-permanent and therefore precarious academic roles. The authors discussed in this article all play with supposedly marginal literary forms like the diary, personal essay or blog to trouble the institutional overvaluing of canonical work and destabilize what Sarah Sharma calls a ‘patriarchal temporality’ that designates their work and lives as marginal. With a particular focus on Bellamy, who documents her repeated denial of tenure in personal and often sexually explicit writing, I want to interrogate the peculiar circularity of narrating experiences of overwork, insecurity and discrimination in the body of a text that might be read by current or future employers, as women translate their personal and leisure time into new forms of workplace productivity and commit further areas of their life to the university without the promise of liberation from or reform of its oppressive structures.

EXPLORATION OF OVERWHELMING CRISIS OF PTSD THROUGH TRAUMA NARRATIVE OF ROXANE GAY'S AN UNTAMED STATE

The 21st century is a tech world undergoing surplus uctuations, familiarizing the new era, literature reects real life changes, challenges, problems and chaos. Though complications like famine, pandemic, accidents, failures, physical abuses, wars etc., physically gets alright, mind and the repressed memory nds a way out and the individual faces the psychological tremor, recollecting and re-living the traumatic moment that causes anxiety and waves of panic. The main objective of this paper is to explore the overwhelming emotional crisis of an individual affected from PTSD and the ruptured life after the traumatic incident through the interesting narrative of Roxane Gay's An Untamed State. The plot revolves around the character Mireille, a lawyer abducted for a huge ransom undergoes severe physical and psychological torture. The real horror of her life and unspeakable trauma explodes when she was released after 13 days. Her devastating bitter experience starts to shake her life stripping her identity and affecting her remarkable life altogether. The novel and the psychological study credibly portray and put forth the intricacies of rape trauma syndrome stricken life and surviving its erce pangs

Announcements

Announcements

Haiti’s “Painful Truths”: A Postcolonialised Reading of Trauma in Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State

Drawing on a postcolonialised approach to the traditional trauma paradigm, this paper analyses Roxane Gay’s novel An Untamed State as a trauma narrative which does not solely revolve around the Haitian American protagonist’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ensuing her abduction and violation in Port-au-Prince, as suggested by previous critical work. Particularly, it aims to demonstrate that Gay’s heroine is a resilient survivor of both a rape-related trauma and the traumatic blow to her partly Haitian identity caused by her direct contact with Haiti’s social and gender issues. Lastly, the essay examines how the novel delves into the unresolved cultural traumas derived from the effects of (post)colonialism in Haiti, which push the protagonist’s victimisers to commit such terrible acts.

Prospera’s Whip and Other Props of Bardolatry: Toward an Intersectionalist Re-telling of The Tempest

This essay engages in a cross-analysis of four woman-authored “island stories” from both black and white perspectives, employing disparate vocabularies of skin color, and covering a spectrum of attitudes toward Shakespeare’s The Tempest, from the thinly veiled bardolatry of Julie Taymor’s The Tempest screenplay (2010), to a stance I may go so far as to call “bard-blind.” The bulk of the discussion pits Gloria Naylor’s womanist fable, Mama Day (1988), against Caryl Cude Mullin’s young adult novel Rough Magic (2009), two texts which seem to offer a feminist critique of The Tempest by foregrounding the story of Sycorax, but which radically contrast in their attitudes toward Shakespeare, in their ideological underpinnings, and—ultimately—in their degree of artistic coherence. More specifically, I will argue that Naylor’s deconstruction of racial binaries and critique of phallogocentrism stand as the counter example to Mullin’s misguided pseudofeminism and muddled racial politics—both effects of her uncritical approach to Shakespeare’s masculinist-colonialist message. I conclude with a surprising intertext, Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014), whose accidental titular allusion ironically underscores its critical (shall we say) “innocence.” For Gay’s novel, though a rape-narrative set on an island, owes nothing to Shakespeare's dramatization of misogynist violence in The Taming of the Shrew and owes nothing to his colonialist parable, The Tempest. Indeed, the book contrasts point for point with the preceding Tempest retellings not only by virtue of its realism but also by virtue of its unswervingly progressive gender and racial politics.

Sexual Violence and Psychotrauma in Roxane Gay's An Untamed State and Nabard Fouad's Parrot: A Psychoanalytic Study

The History of humanity has widely witnessed violation of human rights during the wars and in the political, ethnic and religious disputes. Heartbreakingly, most of the victims are women and children. Females in general and underage girls are vulnerable to rape and sexual violence either to satisfy the lustful captors or to be used as ransom. Most awfully, in many cases, the fighting groups, terrorists and thugs target females as effective weapons against each other since in several societies women are regarded as the honor of the families, such as what happened to the Yazidi Kurds in Shangal, North of Iraq when ISIS terrorists attacked their city. The detainers think only of achieving their aims and never care about what will happen to the prey. This paper shows how the male captors rape and sexually abuse the female captives during their confinement, and more significantly to unveil how the trauma affects the victims after they get their freedom. What happens to a woman when she is taken by a group of ruthless lustful men is expectable, but how she continues is incomprehensible. The study selects two novels An Untamed State by Roxane Gay (2014) and Parrot (Tutti) by Nabard Fouad (2015) which narrate the story of women abducted and raped by their abductors. The psychological battle the women suffer from does not end in the prison rooms, but it will continue and actually it will never end since the victims develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and can never live a normal life thereafter. The sufferers are not criminals; they are mere victims of political and religious rage.

Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment

Beyond Cages: Animal Law and Criminal Punishment

Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State: A Caribbean Rhizomatic Novel Reflecting the New Transmodern Paradigm

This article explores Haitian American writer Roxane Gay’s An Untamed State (2014) as a novel that represents our intricate and rhizomatic transmodern era. In order to prove this contention, it focuses on the novel’s amalgamation of different literary genres and modes from previous cultural paradigms—namely, the postmodern fairy-tale retelling and the social realist novel—with Euro-American as well as Haitian/Caribbean literary and sociocultural elements. The result of this mélange is a complex narrative of multiple interconnections that offers a nuanced portrait of new millennium Haitian diasporas and locals, and that most especially, recuperates subaltern Haitian voices so as to denounce the “untamed state” of the country. The article concludes by arguing that Gay’s hybrid and relational text effaces an either/or episteme which, although considerably used in Western and postcolonial theories for a while, has now become obsolete and inoperative in such a globalised and entangled world.

Mobilizing the Sense of \u201cFat\u201d: A Phenomenological Materialist Approach

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.

The New Edith Wharton Studies

The New Edith Wharton Studies

Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body: A Fat Studies Approach

There is much scholarly research about the impact of popular culture messages regarding fatness on people, but there is limited study on people’s attitudes to those fat-shaming messages. Roxane Gay’s Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body is a memoir of her own body, traumatic journey, and fatness. This article looks through this memoir to find out Roxane Gay’s attitude towards these messages in showing how people accept, react, and subvert these messages. This study will present this memoir as a manifestation of the prevailing negative representations of fat people in popular culture and how Gay, before and after being fat, responds to those fat-shaming messages produced by popular culture. This article, under the umbrella of Fat Studies, will discuss how Gay, because of her fatness, has been treated as other and marginalized in popular culture and how she presents herself as a proponent of Fat Studies. This research, discussing Gay's attitude to popular culture messages regarding fatness, willshow how Gay, through this memoir, protests against fat-shaming messages and how she becomes the voice of every fat person.

Feminist Futures of American Studies

This article reflects on the long-term and recent developments in the interdisciplinary field of American studies and its imbrications with its cultural and political contexts. Pushing back against premature assertions of feminism's obsolescence, I argue that scholars and teachers of American studies and media studies must take the popular seriously―popular film and television as well as popular political movements. Given the growing demand from students for a deeper and more sustained engagement with intersectional feminism, the article works through some short case studies to urge even the confirmed feminists to rethink and refresh their approaches to teaching and performing scholarship to best provide students with the theoretical tools to strengthen and define their feminism as a discipline as well as an attitude. Inspired by the popular 2014 movement, "The Year of Reading Women," the #metoo and #timesup phenomena, and the popularity of and backlash against celebrity feminism of Beyoncé and others, this article weaves together academic and pop-cultural sources such as Sara Ahmed and Roxane Gay to underscore our responsibility to maintain, nurture, and contribute to the progress made by previous generations of feminists.

Glimpsing Shadows: Affective Witnessing in Noctambules and “Of Ghosts and Shadows”

‘I am watching my lover’, begins Roxane Gay’s short story ‘Of Ghosts and Shadows’.1 In the opening scene, Marie, and her lover Amelie idly browse through a marketplace in Haiti. Since the two of th...

School PE and ‘fat’ kids: maintaining the rage and keeping a sense of perspective

ABSTRACT This paper is about ‘fat’ kids in HPE classes. The motivation for this paper comes as a personal response to my reading of Roxane Gay’s book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body. Hunger is thoughtful, passionate, articulate, sad and overall troubling. It also raised questions for me about whether health and physical education (HPE) is a safe space for fat young people and whether or not there is any possibility that HPE might be a transformative space that some scholars suggest. It raises issues regarding curriculum choice and pedagogy, but also about dispositional change such that all HPE teachers become more sensitive to the needs, feelings and capacities of young fat kids.

Awesome women and bad feminists: the role of online social networks and peer support for feminist practice in academia

In her book, ‘Bad Feminist’, Roxane Gay claims this label shamelessly, embracing the contradictory aspects of enacting feminist practice while fundamentally being ‘flawed human[s]’. This article tells a story inspired by and enacting Roxane Gay’s approach in academia, written by five cis-gendered women geographers. It is the story of a proactive, everyday feminist initiative to survive as women in an academic precariat fuelled by globalised, neoliberalised higher education. We reflect on what it means to be (bad) feminists in that context, and how we respond as academics. We share experiences of an online space used to support one another through post-doctoral life, a simple message thread, which has established an important role in our development as academics and feminists. This article, written through online collaboration, mirrors and enacts processes fundamental to our online network, demonstrating the significance and potential of safe digital spaces for peer support. Excerpts from the chat reflect critically on struggles and solutions we have co-developed. Through this, we celebrate and validate a strategy we know that we and others like us find invaluable for our wellbeing and survival. Finally, we reflect on the inherent limitations of exclusive online networks as tools for feminist resistance.

Soul Memories

Soul Memories Emilie M. Townes (bio) We thought we had left Philadelphia to arrive in Richmond in the late morning on July 28. Laurel and I had been talking and texting with Katie to make sure it would be okay to stop by to see her for a brief time on our way back to Nashville. She assured us that she was strong enough to see us no matter where she was—hospital or home. We did not know that the Philadelphia-Richmond corridor is more like a parking lot most of the time, and so we did not get to Richmond until late afternoon. I'd kept in touch with Kate to make sure that she knew we were on our way and still coming no matter what the hour. It was one of those precious visits that you know is special, even when you do not know why. Our brief visit turned into three hours as we caught Katie up on the latest news (sometimes called gossip), met her various caregivers, and learned more about what was happening and the treatment plan her chief oncologist had devised. "Who would have thought," said Katie, "that moving from acute to chronic would be a good thing?" As we drove on to our planned stopping place after our visit, we talked about the powerful visit filled with laughter and head-shakes and asking about what we were reading and books and articles we would recommend although Katie said that her brain often felt like mush. What struck me about that visit is that none of us asked "why?" None of us gave God a good piece of our mind. It never occurred to any of us to do so. We reveled in being together and sharing what friends do when dealt a difficult hand—you keep moving and surviving and finding ways to live with all the creativity and gumption you can muster. We texted a bit in those remaining days. The first was a book recommendation for the supplementary reading list for my fall semester class: Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture edited by Roxane Gay.1 Katie, ever the reader, [End Page 133] inquirer, teacher, and resource was staying on point and making sure that good books were read and taught. There are many things I miss about not being able to pick up the phone and talk or text Katie. Her humor, her insights, her wisdom, her analysis, her humanity. They are now becoming memories for me, as I replay our knowing each other since 1984—first, she called me out about being slow to get back to graduate school so that I could teach, then she became my mentor, colleague, and friend. What a journey it was to have someone like Katie to walk with on the rim bones of nothingness as we negotiate the academy. Her unwillingness to believe that this was the best we could do and be as people, teachers, ministers, and students was infectious. Her belief in the power of learning and what a privilege it is to teach for a living was a model of professionalism and joy—yes, joy. She was happiest when a student or a colleague "got it" whatever that "it" was—as it led them down the path of greater insights and perhaps opening up a space where the various "isms" we must confront would be eradicated for a bit as we then pick up our intellect and passion to engage the fray one more time. Katie was a one of a kind, but she left so many of us filled with not only memories of her but also the charge she gave each of us in various ways: do the work your soul must have. [End Page 134] Emilie M. Townes Emilie M. Townes is dean and E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of Womanist Ethics and Society of Vanderbilt Divinity School. Townes's teaching and research interests are analyzing the linkages among race, gender, class, and other forms of oppression. Among her many publications are Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (2006). She served as president of the American Academy of Religion...

I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark

I'd Watch a Movie Written by Tiana Clark Jennifer Schomburg Kanke (bio) Clark, Tiana. I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. Blurbs on the backs of books can be misleading. Our expectations rise when we see that Kaveh Akbar, who has been awarded the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship and keeps our Twitter feeds gloriously overflowing with amazing poetry links, says the book is "one of the best first books of poetry" and NAACP Image Award nominee Allison Joseph calls on us to "Read it, and be changed and redeemed." Can a book possibly live up to all this praise? Yes, absolutely, yes. Tiana Clark's first full-length collection, the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize winning I Can't Talk About the Trees Without the Blood, presents readers with a commanding cinematic lyricism that envelopes them in the history of American race relations and the narrator's personal history. In the poem "800 Days: Libation," Tiana Clark says, "I don't want to watch another black man die/today or know the story of how," in explanation of why she doesn't want to watch Time: The Kalief Browder Story about a sixteen-year-old awaiting trial at Rikers Island who spent two years in solitary confinement. My reaction to the poem is similar to my reaction when viewing a silhouette by visual artist Kara Walker. The works are a mixture of beauty and horror, which is to say, truth. The poem is potently self-aware about how these intersections in art are sometimes problematic, yet often necessary. It covers some of the same ground as Roxane Gay's meditation on happy endings found in "The Smooth Surface of Idylls," but sets the ideas to music, lineates them with skill and precision. "800 Days: Libation" reminds us that there are things poetry can do that other formats can't. As Yeats has said, "we make out of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but out of the quarrels with ourselves, poetry." The collection invites us into Clark's inner journey with prosody, allusions, and images. On the journey, she often puts herself in conversation with African American women of the past. In the epistolary poem series "Conversations with Phillis Wheatley," she imagines responses to Wheat-ley, the first published African American woman poet, from her friend Obour Tanner, while also pulling in the overarching narrative of the collection. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," she uses the voice of the singer/songwriter/activist to interrogate herself about her relationship to her own art and the powers that be of the literary world. I wanted to play Bach and Beethoven for endless encores. But they wouldn't let me and they won't let you. Things have changed Miss Simone.I have a scholarship. They want me here. [End Page 186] They want my poems. They want— Do they want you, she says, sucking her ghost teeth, or your black pain? This excerpt is fairly representative of the collection. The personal is political and vice versa. Lyrical and disjointed, but not hard to follow if you pay attention. In "The Rime of Nina Simone," the voices weave back and forth between the primary narrator of the collection and Nina Simone. Nothing is labeled or in quotation marks. The "I" can be either Clark or Simone. But, at least to me, it's always clear who is speaking even without the overt markers we get from prose or more traditional narrative poems. "Self Portrait as Hannah Peace" weaves between lines from Toni Morrison's Sula and Clark's own description of her mother on the dance floor at a country bar called the Cotton Eyed Joe in Knoxville, Tennessee. But isn't it all Clark's description? Though Morrison wrote some of the lines, Clark selects them, adapts them, helps us see another layer to their power. All of the poems in the collection using this (or similar techniques) reify the slipperiness of authorship and palimpsestic nature of identity. Her explorations of her biracial heritage, in poems such as "Mixed Bitch" and "After Agon," also reinforce these notions. All the...

Rebooting Roseanne: Feminist Voice across Decades

Rebooting Roseanne: Feminist Voice across Decades

Triple Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American Culture

Abstract My article underscores the intermediate existence of black American women between race and gender by stressing the role white patriarchy and black hypermasculinity play in the marginalisation of black female voices and the prioritisation of white women’s interests within and beyond mainstream feminist spaces. In order to legitimise this intermediate existence of black women, my article develops the triple consciousness theory (TCT). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, TCT argues that black women view themselves through three lenses and not two: America, blackness and womanhood. Black feminists, TCT affirms, are able to reimagine misguided narratives of black womanhood in contemporary American culture by unpacking the complexity of this threefold consciousness. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay strives for the inclusion of pluralist voices in the mainstream feminist movement and in Lemonade, Beyonce uses Afrofuturist tropes, reappropriation and gothic imagery to exorcise the generational pain of betrayal by black men and white women. With Insecure, Issa Rae radicalises feminist theory by critiquing archetypes attached to black womanhood and in Marvel’s Black Panther, not only do black women possess the unprecedented agency to shape their own identities on their own terms, there is also an existential reconnection with their past.