In Bad Feminist, Roxanne Gay uses quotations to express her inner thoughts in a very direct way, as well as show others views on feminism. For instance, during a heated argument with her boyfriend, he asked her if she was a feminist, and she admitted that she thought “Isn’t it obvious I [Gay] am a feminist, albeit not a very good one?” (Gay). She integrates this quote by using a very blunt and simple statement “I thought” in order to convey exactly that – her immediate thought in the moment. Another instance of Roxanne Gay weaving quotes into her writing is when she is adding information from an interview with Melissa Leo. Here, she uses a very similar method as before. She introduces the new subject, adds a simple filler of “said” and then jumps right into the quote, stating that leo said “well, I don’t think of myself as a feminist at all. As soon as we start labeling and categorizing ourselves and others, That’s going to shut down the world. I would never say that. Like, I just did that episode with Louis C.K.” (Gay). The final interesting way that Gay uses quotations is when she quotes writer Robert Hughes as he not only writes about Louise Bourgeois, but quotes her. She uses a quote within a quote to explain both Bourgeois’s original opinions on the subject as well as Hughes response to these opinions.
Roxanne Gay uses this most recent quote to disagree with Abramović when he states that an artist seemingly has no gender. Bringing Louise Bourgeois into the conversation completely juxtaposes this idea as her work completely surrounds the topic of women and, more specifically, motherhood. The quote that she had given in the interview that Robert Hughes includes in his writing specifically references one of her pieces in the Museum of Modern Art which exhibits both the urge to be frightening and the feeling of being frightened that the mother in the piece experiences as she anticipates a breach in her privacy due to the baby. It can be saidthat Gay agrees with the way that Bourgeois approaches her art thus making it easy to infer that she disagrees with Abramović that artists, and thus art, should remove all gender from their work.
