Females by Andrea Long Chu
An exploration of gender and desire from our most exciting new public intellectual
"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.
"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."
--Maggie Lang, Vice"Among our most original thinkers on gender."
--The Week"A highly provocative, turbulent read."
--Dazed