Andrea Long Chu

An exploration of gender and desire from our most exciting new public intellectual "Everyone is female, and everyone hates it." So begins Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas--the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol--Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn, and even feminists like herself. Each step of the way she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race--men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she's just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the "second wave" of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring herself with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

A Concern

Females

I forgot to mark it as finished when it was. I forgot to have fun. I simply need to read it again and let myself laugh out loud for once.

Dora Tominic

Dislaimer: this is not a review.

I forgot to mark it as finished when it was. I forgot to have fun. I simply need to read it again and let myself laugh out loud for once.

actually manages to break new ground in the nebulous and fraught school gender theory in a tender, funny way. almost definitive of autotheory.

pranya

still thinking about sissy porn making the author realize she is trans . that sure is an interesting perspective to have 

luna luna

A play with thoughts. And an invitation to reflect on ones identity in being „female“ and what it (could) entail. 

antonia maria wagner she/they

eris

Ryan Nylander

The terfs on Goodreads (it brings me no joy to report that yes, there are terfs on Goodreads) are pissed at this one, so you know it has to be doing something right.

There is an intellectual bent to Females, which is to be expected with any Verso publication, but much to its credit it is also uncharacteristically fun to read, and the approximate length of a pamphlet, so you can digest it in one sitting. Best of all, it is blissfully liberated from any obligation to make sense, or be internally-consistent. Gender is nonsense; once we can admit this to ourselves, how can we still talk meaningfully about our experience of it?

Andrea Long Chu begins with an intentionally ludicrous premise -- that "everyone is female" -- and uses this as the jumping-off point for both a loose memoir and a loosely feminist discussion of various art-world and pop-cultural figures. She helpfully instructs us early-on to think of her premise as an inversion of the Freudian idea of "penis envy," which is an equally ludicrous idea despite being a very successful one, and proceeds to make Gender Trouble with a series of absurd and entertaining observations about anti-porn activists, incels, The Matrix, transitioning, and any hapless group unfortunate or self-important enough to draw her ire.

She's trolling, of course, when she claims that all incels, mens' rights activists, cuckold fetishists, and alt-right types form their hateful ideas as a reaction to their latent desire to be female, to their intrinsic femininity. It's immensely funny and satisfying to envision the aforementioned people reading Females and frothing at the mouth in anger. But just because it's all a bit of sorts, or a provocation, doesn't necessarily mean she isn't on to something.

Because all of this is so much fun, I'll forgive the self-indulgent memoir material here, in which she describes her favorite past art projects to us, along with a sizeable helping of self-loathing, which doesn't do much to temper what I will gently describe as a degree of self-absorption.

I will also forgive her hard-on for Valerie Solanas, the author of the SCUM Manifesto and would-be-murderer of Andy Warhol, for two reasons: one, in Females, she makes a pretty good case for Solanas as a genuinely fascinating and admirable figure; and two, because she failed to kill him, I can say somewhat irresponsibly that shooting Andy Warhol was an extremely raw and cool thing for her to do.

Females A Concern

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