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Females
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Paperback (2019)
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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.
Reviews
Desire deserves a description. So does the gender self-loathing of the “female” who is, it turns out, “all of us.” With these theses, Andrea Long Chu inspires thrilled and dark passions because she has them and because she believes in smart and smarting arguments for them. The sentences are alive and veer toward surprise but also toward a tender wish for an easier conventional life for gender.
A thrilling provocation, a funny and surprisingly tender memoir, a bold move, a dare. She’s our most reliable trickster, and this is the book everyone will be talking about.
Females marks nothing short of a historic cataclysm in public discourse about gender and sexuality. In the grand tradition of the philosophes, Females is crucial not only because of what it is, but for the world of conversations it makes possible. When we talk about transness, when we talk about feminism, when we talk about experimental memoir and the thrilling, unexpected rebirth of the Künstlerroman, there will be a before and after Females.
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One of the most exciting critics working today
, New York Magazine -
[A] sweeping provocation, what fascinates is where it leads... the flash of insight produced by a well-thrown-knife
, Harpers -
Andrea Long Chu is one of the disrupters
, The Atlantic Monthly -
Featured in The New York Times
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Chu is a deft critic, adept at sliding across broad swaths of history and material, at conjuring the pithy poke or relatable read
, Lit Hub -
A lucid meditation on desire as the force shaping our identities, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition.
, Bookforum -
[A] brief and blazing treatise.
, The Nation -
Beneath the veneer of Females' provocation, those indefensible ideas, it is a surprisingly tender book that aims to tend to a universal ache: the frayed knot of selfhood, desire and power through which, Chu argues, we might try to see ourselves and each other more clearly.
, NPR -
Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of an earthquake—the ground is undeniably shifting.
, The New Republic -
Astonishing.
, Frieze -
One of Chu's most ambitious and significant pursuits to date...It’s always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.
, Vice -
Among our most original thinkers on gender.
The Week -
A highly provocative, turbulent read.
Dazed -
Reliably eloquent and provocative.
, The A.V. Club -
Juicily transgressive.
, VOGUE -
Chu’s intellectual rigor is matched by her honesty. It is at once profoundly disconcerting and deeply persuasive.
, Women’s Review of Books -
Thought-provoking and controversial reading from one of our most astute contemporary minds.
Hunger -
Performatively edgy, frequently hilarious
, Commonweal Magazine -
Females is a pithy takedown of every orthodoxy around gender you can name. It’s also very very funny.
, Tribune -
There is a satisfying, funhouse-mirror effect to taking logic to its breaking point.
, The Point -
Gleefully contrarian
The Believer -
Chu built up an internet following with frank essays about trans identity, and she brings the same hybrid of cultural criticism and personal experience to Females. ... In just ninety-four short pages, Chu manages to show off her quick wit and deep knowledge of everything from pop culture to social history to queer theory.
, The Rumpus -
Every aspect of the volume breaks with scholarly tradition: the book is unconventionally small in size (18 cm); the language is irreverent; the style is a mix of novel, autobiography, and theoretical treatise; and Chu includes personal reflections and confessions alongside popular culture criticism and history. Rather than a cohesive treatment of a singular topic, the book is a collection of related but autonomous confessions that have the power to alter how gender is conceived or, at the very least, and generate conversations that transgress the status quo of gender.
, CHOICE -
Though 'Everyone is female. And everyone hates it' sounds assertive, definite, even simple, it is
the opposite. Why use ‘female’? It is a word so loaded, so specific to a cultural meaning of sex and/or gender, and yet that stability is rendered inert by the inclusion of 'everyone' into its category. And why do we ‘all’ hate it? And what is the ‘it’ of being ‘female’ that we ‘hate’? Answering any of these questions is a delightful impossibility, and to treat Females as a project of clear theoretical argument would be to have misread the text. Like desire’s negative structuring, the pleasure of Females is located in its very impossibility, its elusive slip., AC Review of Books -
I'm certain that Andrea Long Chu’s 112-page engagement with Valerie Solanas in Females (Verso, 2019) has more to say about the way we live today than the doorstop biography of Andy Warhol published this year by HarperCollins.
, The Quietus -
I was out of breath after finishing this book ... Drawing from Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, Chu revisits Solanas’ claim that men are women and women are men in order to critique the sexual landscape today. From performance art to incels and porn, Chu cuts through them with fire and wisdom.
, Elephant (Standout Artists of 2020)