Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes From a Trap Feminist, Sesali Bowen

Description

Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist
by Sesali Bowen
Hardcover | October 5, 2021

Bad Fat Black Girl is a fearless, genre-defying debut that fuses personal memoir, sharp cultural criticism, and rule-breaking feminist theory into a powerful manifesto for liberation. Writing with wit, swagger, and radical honesty, Sesali Bowen introduces Trap Feminism, a framework rooted in Black feminist tradition and informed by hip-hop culture, survival, pleasure, and refusal.

Raised on the South Side of Chicago, Bowen learned early how to hustle, protect her joy, and show up for other Black women and femmes while navigating queerness, fatness, poverty, sex work, friendship, and self-love. Her passion for trap music propelled her into the upper ranks of hip-hop journalism, where she profiled artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Janelle Monáe. Yet despite the richness and complexity she encountered in that world, Bowen found mainstream feminism lacking, constrained by respectability politics and narrow definitions of empowerment.

Through a mix of incisive essays and deeply personal storytelling, Bowen interrogates sexism, fatphobia, capitalism, and misogynoir, always centering the lived realities of Black women who have been excluded from dominant feminist narratives. Her writing is unapologetic, affirming, and deeply political, insisting that pleasure, survival, and self-definition are not distractions from liberation but central to it.

Bold, validating, and electric, Bad Fat Black Girl continues a long Black feminist legacy while carving out new space for voices that refuse to be sanitized. This is feminism that tells the truth, celebrates the real, and makes room for joy, rage, softness, and shine.

This title is a remainder, offered at half the original cover price. Remainder copies are new and unread, but may show minor shelf wear.