Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
Published 2014 · 75,000 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Feminist Literature, Nonfiction
How hard is Bad Feminist to read?
Bad Feminist scores 31 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 22 out of 100
- Accessible, conversational vocabulary. No jargon.
- Sentence structure: 22 out of 100
- Clear, direct prose. Short, punchy essays.
- Abstraction: 22 out of 100
- Personal and cultural observation. Ideas emerge from experience.
- Information density: 35 out of 100
- Moderate. Engaging and readable. Personal essays rather than dense argument.
- Narrative indirection: 80 out of 100
- Direct, essay-by-essay structure. Each piece is self-contained.
- Symbolic density: 100 out of 100
- The 'bad feminist' label as organizing concept. Otherwise concrete.
- Ironic distance: 15 out of 100
- Self-deprecating humor. Gay laughs at her own contradictions.
- Resolution withholding: 80 out of 100
- Each essay reaches its own conclusion. The contradiction is the resolution.
- Structural complexity: 15 out of 100
- Standalone essays. Can be read in any order.
How Bad Feminist is regarded
Bad Feminist holds a literary regard score of 42 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.