Incredibly, Roxane's family only found out about her traumatising experience decades later, when disclosures about what happened to her in the woods were published in her essay collection Bad Feminist. Or when she begged to take a year off before university because she was barely holding her life together.
Notably the play she wrote and produced about sexual violence while still at high school. Gay didn’t tell her parents what happened in that cabin in the woods when she stopped being a child. Don’t forget to talk about the unspeakable She means the other people on planes the restaurant designers whose spaces can’t accommodate her body the retailers who don’t sell clothes in her size those who erase her gender, calling her “Sir” because she does’t fit narrow ideas about femininity even the doctors who can’t see past her “morbid obesity” to diagnose a sore throat.Įveryone, in other words, who assumes she is ashamed of herself for being fat, “no matter how close to the truth that might be.” 4. This is important because she doesn’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened, or pretend she is on “some triumphant, uplifting journey”, or that everything is okay. “I don’t think there’s any shame in saying that when I was raped, I became a victim, and to this day, while I am also many other things, I am still a victim.” “I knew I wouldn’t be able to endure another such violation, and so I ate because I thought that if my body became repulsive, I could keep men away.”īeing raped wasn’t her fault, which is why she finds it helpful to think of herself as a “victim”, rather than a “survivor”, despite surviving what she went through.
#Hunger by roxane gay citation plus
She wound up as a “woman of size” because she “began eating to change her body” after a boy she loved, plus several of his friends, raped her in a cabin in the woods when she was just 12.īeing raped, she writes, prompted Gay to change her body because she wanted to create a barrier against the rest of the world. Sometimes it’s okay to acknowledge you are a victim
She is explicit about the emotional – and physical – pain of living in the world when you are “super morbidly obese”, according to your body mass index. She writes to share the story of her body – specifically, how her body changed from being that of an average 12-year-old girl to one that, at its heaviest, weighed 577 pounds.