Towards a New “Bad” Feminist Canon: Why Feminism Remains Essential

More than a decade ago, I wrote an essay called “Bad Feminist,” where I grappled with my relationship to feminism through cultural criticism. The title was a bit tongue-in-cheek—catchy and provocative. I believed in feminism then as I do now, understood its importance, but I also worried that I fell woefully short of what a “good” or ideal feminist should be. I worried because I am human and, at times, inconsistent despite my best intentions.

How, for example, could I believe in and fight for women’s liberation while enjoying deeply misogynistic hip-hop lyrics? Calling myself a bad feminist and using that phrase as the essay’s title felt like the best way to encapsulate my relationship to feminism.

In that essay, I did not arrive at definitive conclusions, but I allowed myself space to think through how I define feminism, how I do or don’t live up to my feminist ideals, and how my feminism influences my opinions, the culture I consume, my relationships with friends, family, and partners, and my work. I was also thinking about being a bad feminist as a repudiation of any feminism that overlooks the intersections of identities we inhabit.

As a Black queer woman, I understood that I could not separate my race and ethnicity from my gender or my sexuality or any other aspect of who I am. If good feminism dictates we are women first to the detriment of acknowledging the other parts of our lived experiences, I was and am unequivocally a bad feminist.

It has been interesting to see how people have engaged with the essay and ensuing essay collection Bad Feminist for going on a decade now. Many people enjoyed the provocation of the title and, when they read them, the essays in the book. The idea that we could be both imperfect and feminists with good intentions resonated with a lot of people. The book, I think, created space for people to engage with feminism on pragmatic terms. But then, there were people who decided that if they called themselves bad feminists, they were also granted carte blanche to make decidedly anti-feminist choices and claim feminism, nonetheless. This was a convenient fiction to justify bad decisions, but once you put ideas into the world, you cannot control what people do with them.

Over the past decade, I have often been asked what I would change about my thinking in Bad Feminist. The truth is that I wouldn’t change anything, not because I got everything right but because the book is a reflection of who I was in the years I wrote those essays. Fortunately, my thinking is not static and my relationship to feminism continues to evolve. I would like to believe I am a better feminist today and am still evolving, even if I am not and, frankly, never hope to be the kind of good feminist that flattens women’s experiences into something more easily digested.

As I consider what I would write about feminism if I were to write “Bad Feminist” today, I would focus more on holding ourselves accountable for our choices more than the choices themselves. Nothing we do happens in a vacuum. I still believe, for example, that we can make flawed choices, but I understand, with far more moral clarity, that our choices have consequences. The better our choices, the more our choices arc toward the greater good, the better the outcomes. At least, that’s the hope. What I do know is that if we keep accepting and sometimes celebrating an unacceptable status quo where women are demeaned, dismissed, or diminished, the status quo will never change. Sometimes, we have to recognize and call out certain choices as anti-feminist and actively detrimental to the feminist project.

And so here we are, in 2025. Feminism has made a great deal of progress, but we have also lost critical ground. Many people remain reluctant to identify as feminists. They treat the label as a slur. They worry how they will be perceived for daring to believe in ideals as simple as gender equity and liberation for all of us. Many people are still asking for elementary definitions of feminism, though rarely are they doing so in good faith, because they already know the answers to the questions they’re asking. We’re seeing strange cultural regressions like the tradwife movement and bimbo feminism even as trends like #GirlBoss flame out because they lack substance. Most of us will tell ourselves anything to justify our choices. That’s human. But as “good” feminists, we’re supposed to embrace women’s choices no matter what those choices are. That feels nearly impossible when certain choices are detrimental to us all and when the women making those choices refuse to recognize that it is, in fact, feminism that allows them to make regressive choices.

Then, of course, there is the political ground we have lost. In June 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, upending fifty years of legal precedent. Reproductive freedom activists warned us that this day would come, and we fought hard to prevent it, but it happened nonetheless. In the immediate aftermath, millions of women across the United States lost access to abortion care.

At least twenty-four states have enacted Draconian legislation either banning abortion outright or implementing six- or twelve-week bans, which may as well be total bans. Some of these states have moved to restrict women’s ability to travel across state lines, threatening the prosecution of women who seek abortion care in other states as well as anyone who provides assistance in doing so. Next on the extremist conservative agenda is no-fault divorce, a practice that has allowed countless women to leave bad marriages without protracted legal proceedings. It is all quite dystopic. These setbacks are a stark reminder that women’s bodies, movements, and choices are contingent on the whims of men in power. We have made progress but we are not yet free.

We are not yet free and we do not all envision freedom in the same ways. All too often, we frame feminist progress as finally being able to enjoy the privileges that have long benefitted men. This is flawed thinking. If more women were CEOs, we would not magically address all the woes of late-stage capitalism. If a woman were to become president of the United States, that would not guarantee a more perfect union. The desire to make up for lost time, to have a taste of all we have been denied, is understandable. Power is seductive. Moving through the world freely, taking up space without apology, speaking and being heard without condition, wielding authority, commanding respect, these are privileges everyone should have. But we should not strive to emulate the worst of men by hoarding power, taking up so much space that we leave little for everyone else. That is neither good nor bad feminism; that is unacceptable feminism.

Intellectuals are often very attached to the idea of canon, the notion that there is a definitive set of works for any given field that is incontrovertibly exemplary and foundational. It’s comforting, I suppose, to believe we can identify a canon and trust that these works will stand the test of time, the test of change. Canon serves as a touchstone, as if we are saying the world is often unknowable, but we know these things to be true.

It is important, though, to resist or at the very least complicate our understanding of canon, not because we shouldn’t have foundational texts in a given field but because canon is, generally, static. The excellence of the texts elevated to canon is subjective and, in many instances, represents a narrow ideal curated by people who are, implicitly or explicitly, invested in upholding patriarchy and white supremacy. Literary critic Harold Bloom was an ardent supporter of canon, going so far as to compile a collection of what he deemed the canonical works of Western literature in the volume The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. He was particularly invested in prioritizing “aesthetic quality” and felt that attempts at diversifying the canon merely diluted it by including works that did not possess the necessary aesthetic merits. In his “Elegy for the Canon,” Bloom wrote, “We are destroying all intellectual and aesthetic standards in the humanities and social sciences, in the name of social justice.” This treatise was quite the provocation. It was biased at best, this valorization of flagrant exclusion. And it was a sad reminder that texts written by marginalized writers are assumed to be lesser, to not possess the aesthetic excellence of those written mostly by white men and a few white women.

For Bloom, the canon is not an ever-evolving body of work representing the best of literature. Instead, he understands canon as an impenetrable fortress protecting a singular set of works. There is only one way into the canon and no way out. “One breaks into the canon only by aesthetic strength,” he says without acknowledging that historically, only one group of people was allowed to define aesthetic strength and determine which writers possessed it. The written record of feminist ideas is centuries long. As we engage with feminist works across time, we examine the state of feminism, what feminism looks like in practice, and its successes and failures. And over the years, feminists have criticized the idea of the canon—they highlight the ways women have been excluded from canons, how men’s experiences are considered universal and objective while women’s experiences are considered niche and subjective.

American art historian Linda Nochlin offered one such intervention in her 1971 essay, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” She challenged feminists to question the ideological foundations of intellectual disciplines. Nochlin noted that “in the field of art history, the white Western male viewpoint, unconsciously accepted as the viewpoint of the art historian, may—and does—prove to be inadequate not merely on moral and ethical grounds, or because it is elitist, but on purely intellectual ones.” She questions the uncritical acceptance of “white male subjectivity” and suggests that feminists should not engage in canonical debates on those terms. For example, in art and in many other disciplines, people will ask where all the historical women greats are. And feminists often try to answer that question, explaining why that question is disingenuous, why women have been obscured from much of history, and so on.

Nochlin says we don’t need to answer that question because in doing so, we “tacitly reinforce its negative implications.” We allow the people who created the status quo to dictate the rules of engagement. Feminist scholar Dale Spender also interrogates canon in “Women and Literary History,” when she notes that in the eighteenth century, women were as prolific and successful as men if not more, and despite those contributions, they were elided from the contemporary canon. She discusses how male critics have overlooked women’s contributions and says, “Whether the men of letters have overlooked women’s writing, or whether they have exploited it, what can be stated unequivocally is that they have in effect suppressed the traditions of women’s writing.” Like many feminists challenging canon, Spender argues that any canon that ignores history and women’s contributions is illegitimate.

Feminist skepticism of canon is healthy, but I believe there is a feminist canon, one that is subjective and always evolving but also representative of a long, rich tradition of feminist scholarship. Dynamism was the guiding principle as I assembled The Portable Feminist Reader. I wanted to contribute to the feminist canon by choosing works that reflect compelling, fiercely intelligent, and diverse in every sense of the word, feminist thought.

To our detriment, we try to be definitive about what feminism is or isn’t, and how it should be represented. It serves us better to be more expansive. This anthology recognizes that no one collection could or should cover every aspect of a sociopolitical movement. I have included traditional scholarship alongside poetry and personal essays. There are ancient texts, pieces published within the past five years, and everything in between. I’ve included work from established feminists like bell hooks, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Hélène Cixous alongside more recent feminist thinkers like Jessica Valenti, Brittney Cooper, and Sara Ahmed.

More than anything, this feminist reader is not a fortress; it is not an end point. It is the beginning of what I hope will be a vibrant and vigorous conversation about historical and contemporary feminist thought. The Portable Feminist Reader is a text that embraces contradiction and complexity. You could, I suppose, think of this as a Bad Feminist Reader.

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From The Portable Feminist Reader, edited by Roxane Gay. Published by Penguin Classics, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Introduction copyright © 2025 by Roxane Gay.