Earlier this month, Dua Lipa sat down with one of the most prominent feminist voices of this generation, Roxane Gay, to discuss her widely celebrated collection of essays, Bad Feminist – Dua's Monthly Read for March for the Service95 Book Club.
In this exclusive video, Roxane reads one of the book’s most thoughtful essays, Peculiar Benefits. In it, she unpacks the complicated nature of privilege – exploring how it can exist alongside marginalisation and how acknowledging it often feels uncomfortable or contradictory. The essay examines the subtle advantages people may hold, even while navigating other forms of inequality, and challenges the instinct many of us have to minimise or deny those advantages altogether: “It’s an essay I wrote when I was trying to think through my relationship to privilege. And how at times people are often reluctant to claim privilege, because they are marginalised in other areas of their life,” says Roxane.
The essay begins with Roxane looking back at her childhood and the early experiences that shaped her understanding of inequality, including visits to Haiti with her parents. Seeing such extreme poverty, alongside her own relatively comfortable upbringing in the US, pushed her to confront the reality that privilege can exist even when someone also experiences discrimination.
Like with many of other essays in Bad Feminist, it is through deep personal reflection and her sharp cultural insight that Peculiar Benefits invites readers to sit with these tensions, asking us to think more honestly about power, fairness and the ways privilege quietly shapes our everyday lives...
Watch the video here or listen to the podcast here.
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