Roxane Gay Stands Her Ground Discussing Gun Culture

Writer and professor Roxane Gay has spent over a decade exploring and espousing feminist ideals. So it may be surprising to learn that Gay is a gun owner and her latest work, Stand Your Ground, explores her — and America’s — relationship with guns, particularly the thorny issue of stand-your-ground laws that more than half of U.S. states have implemented.

“Ten years ago, I wrote a little book called Bad Feminist. I’m still a bad feminist who believes that we have to recognize our differences in order to celebrate what we have in common. And is gun ownership a part of that? I’m sure, in part, yes, because there are a great many feminists, many of whom I admire, who are absolutely against gun ownership.”

“And I respect that, and I actually understand their point of view, because women, all too often, face the wrong end of a gun, and oftentimes in their own homes. So how can we advocate for gun ownership when we know how those weapons are used against us? It’s a very fraught thing, but I do know that when we get to be the ones holding the weapon, that kind of changes things,” Gay says in a new YouTube video about why she decided to own a gun.

Hear more about Gay’s thoughtful, pointed insights on gun ownership and gun culture in Everand’s latest Welcome Home YouTube video. Follow it up with her latest book, Stand Your Ground, which is part of Everand Originals’ Roxane Gay & series of essays.

Watch Gay take aim at gun culture in the video on YouTube

Welcome Home is a video series that visits authors, artists, and creators where they most feel at home and creatively empowered. It explores how places, people, community, and emotion affect the creative process — giving insight into the story behind the author, the human behind the name, and the passion that drives them to create. Find all the Welcome Home videos here.

Roxane Gay is the author of several bestselling books, including Hunger, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the novel An Untamed State, the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti, and the graphic novel The Sacrifice of Darkness. She is also the author of World of Wakanda, for Marvel, and the editor of Not That Bad and The Selected Works of Audre Lorde. She is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and has launched the Audacious Book Club and a newsletter, The Audacity.

Her most recent work, Stand Your Ground, is the final part of Everand’s Roxane Gay & series, in which Gay herself curated essays on various topics from writers she admires.

Find out more about the works released in the Roxane Gay & series below.

Stand Your Ground by Roxane Gay

Gay, the author of Bad Feminist, explores America’s ongoing obsession with guns and what compelled her to become a gun owner herself — despite her staunch feminism and the deadly shooting statistics — in this fifth and final installment of Everand’s Roxane Gay & essay series.

In her pointed, clarifying style, Gay weaves together America’s long history with guns and her personal experience deciding to buy a gun as a Black feminist writer who’s been the target of harassment.

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Built for This by Julia Turshen

Let cookbook author Turshen lift you up with her memoir about embracing her inner and outer strength. Turshen shares how she learned to appreciate her appetite for food, started powerlifting to marvel at all the things her body could do, and now knows the meat on her bones is “made of the things [she’s] capable of.”

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You Are a Teen Mom: Instructions by Randa Jarrar

Memoirist, essayist, and novelist Jarrar offers an honest and wholly original user’s manual on how to raise a happy and well-adjusted child with little help and even fewer resources, but a fierce willingness to live out loud.

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My Year of Psychedelics by Gabrielle Bellot

In this fascinating and literally trippy memoir, acclaimed essayist and columnist Bellot shares the story of how magic mushrooms, ayahuasca, and other psychedelics transformed her life for the better.

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Good Girl by Elaine Castillo

Award-winning novelist and essayist Castillo details her life spent rescuing and training dogs, a story that reveals just as much about modern society and culture as it does our relationship with humankind’s first domesticated animal.

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Ready to dive into the Everand exclusive Roxane Gay & series? Sign up for a free 30 day trial to Everand, a digital subscription that gives you instant access to millions of bestselling ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more. Start reading on the web, iOS, Android, and even offline.

About the Author: Ashley McDonnell

Ashley is an Everand editor who loves Ernest Hemingway, “The Hunger Games,” and EDM. When she’s not reading, she’s making nerdy podcasts about anime and manga and learning to DJ.

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