Staff Pick
Provocative and immensely engaging, Andrea Long Chu’s potent book will leave you questioning your relationship to gender, art, and hierarchies of all sorts. Recommended By Keith M., Powells.com
Perhaps most well known for her deliciously brutal take-downs of writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and Jill Soloway, Andrea Long Chu is a vicious intelligence that cannot be ignored. She's deeply controversial within trans circles because of her tendency to so fully illuminate her own self-loathing for cis audiences (see her unfortunately titled NYTimes article, "My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy"), many criticizing her for giving the bad faith arguments of our enemies more ammunition than they already have. Her new book Females will make no new converts in these respects, building itself on the bones of the late Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto and famous for, among other things, shooting Andy Warhol and calling for the genocide of all men. It is from within this bedrock of marginalization and rage that Long Chu constructs this little wonder, bouncing from the Red Pill/Blue Pill conundrum of The Matrix to trans Youtube star Gigi Gorgeous, provoking us with lines like "gender makes dumb blondes of us all." She has said in interviews that she prefers claims that exceed their reach, where the desire spills over the page, and the arguments in these book do just that. Even though I hesitate to recommend a book like this one to a general audience (just how many times while reading did the thought "you shouldn't say that!" pass my mind?), I saw myself in her pages in a way I rarely do. I have always preferred messiness over stale truism, and Females is nothing if not messy — a mean, poetic, hilarious, brilliant mess. Roll around in it and it might just change you. Recommended By Cosima C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
This provocative and searing take on the current feminist movement explores the intersections of gender and desire--from "one of the most exciting critics working today" (New York Magazine) Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
Females is 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. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state 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 her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.
Synopsis
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction This provocative and searing take on the current feminist movement explores the intersections of gender and desire--from "one of the most exciting critics working today" (New York Magazine)
Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
Females is 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. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state 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 her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.
Synopsis
One of today's most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring "desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition" (Bookforum). " Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart." --Vice Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
Females is 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. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state 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 her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.