Gender is the Expression of Someone Else’s Sexuality

Trans women have claimed The Matrix as an allegory for gender transition since at least 2012, when Lana Wachowski publicly came out as a trans woman while doing press for the film Cloud Atlas. (Her sister Lilly followed suit in 2016.) The symbolism is easy to find: Thomas Anderson’s double life (he’s a hacker by night), his chosen name (Neo), his vague but maddening sense that something is off about the world — “a splinter in your mind,” Morpheus calls it. Neo has dysphoria. The Matrix is the gender binary. The agents are transphobia. You get it.

And then there’s the red pill itself, less a metaphor for hormone therapy than a literal hormone. Many have pointed out online that, back in the ’90s, prescription estrogen was, in fact, red: The 0.625-mg. Premarin tablet, derived in Matrix-like fashion from the urine of pregnant mares, came in smooth, chocolaty maroon. Twitter users now gleefully brandish this fact as a “well, actually”–style rejoinder to the alt-right’s recent co-optation of the red-pill scene as a parable for “awakening” from feminist brainwashing.

There’s something to this kind of reclamation. Taken seriously, it suggests that the red-piller’s resentment of immigrants, black people, and queers is — and this is no metaphor — a sadistic expression of his own gender dysphoria. He is, after all, an abortive man, a beta trapped in an alpha’s body. Those around him assume he is a leader, a provider, a president, but his greatest fear is that they are mistaken. He radicalizes — shoots up a school, builds a wall — in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them.

But let’s face it: Allegorically is the least interesting way to read anything. Nothing ruins a question like an answer; the world is weirder than that. Consider, for instance, that the most common form of orally administered prescription estrogen today is probably the beveled, flat-faced 2 mg estradiol pill supplied by the Israeli pharmaceutical company Teva. It is, as it happens, blue.

Technically, it’s aquamarine — a tiny, coarse lozenge that turns to powder on my tongue. I take the blue pill twice a day, once in the morning and again before bed, sending myself back into the dream. In this version of the story, the hidden trans woman is not Neo but Cypher, the Nebuchadnezzar’s own Judas, who agrees to hand Morpheus over to the machines in exchange for being reinserted into the Matrix. “Ignorance is bliss,” he tells Agent Smith, mouth full of juicy, nonexistent steak. “I don’t wanna remember nothing. Nothing. You understand?”

For to exit the Matrix is not to know the truth but to discover the poverty of knowledge. “Welcome to the desert of the real,” Morpheus intones after Neo takes the red pill. There’s a reason the real is a desert. What good is the truth if nothing grows there? The notion that gender was socially constructed, instead of biological fact, was intended to free people like me from our assigned sexes. It did this, perhaps, but only at the cost of the very categories into which we sought entry. As a good feminist, I know there’s no such thing as a woman. As a woman, I resent this.

I’m saying I don’t wanna remember nothing, either. That’s a better definition of reality than most: the things we get to forget.

Adapted from Andrea Long Chu’s Females: A Concern, coming out in October 2019, from Verso Books.

What We Can Learn About Gender From The Matrix.  By Andrea Long Chu. Vulture ,  February 7 2019.

Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of an earthquake—the ground is undeniably shifting. Her essay “On Liking Women” last year in n+1 kicked off what some have called the second wave of trans studies, challenging the born-this-way ethos of traditional trans identity narratives. Chu offers a daring alternative: What if gender is not a matter of “who one is, but of what one wants?” She suggests that “transition expresses not the truth of an identity but the force of a desire.”

She has since made a name for herself skewering books by Transparent’s Jill Soloway (“self-importance alone could never guarantee writing this atrocious”) and Bret Easton Ellis (a “deeply needless book”), but the mysterious demands of desire remain her most resonant and provocative theme. As she wrote in an op-ed in The New York Times about her desire for a vaginoplasty: “This is what I want, but there is no guarantee it will make me happier. In fact, I don’t expect it to. That shouldn’t disqualify me from getting it.”

I recently met with her in Washington Square Park to chat about her first book Females, which springs from an unsurprisingly audacious conceit: “Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition.” For Chu, “femaleness” is the urge to be a vessel for another’s desire. Gender in this conception is defined not only by the self, but also by the other—it is the expression of what someone else wants.

CH : I first came to you, like probably most people, through your n+1 essay. What do you think about that essay now and how has your life changed after publishing it?

ALC : I think it’s too long; it clocks in at like 6,300 words. It’s a slightly unweeded garden. But I do still think it’s good. It really changed my entire life. Honestly it changed my life as much as transition did probably. I had been on Twitter doing just some jokes basically for like 100 people, very, very small. And then in the course of a day there was suddenly all of this attention. Then within weeks of that, I was getting messages from agents and editors at major presses. I had not written it intending to break into the business or anything. I was a grad student. I thought the piece was maybe a little too niche and theoretical, but there was this enormous response.

CH : The previous born-this-way discourse was starting to show its age, but at the time it still didn’t seem like there was room to actually offer an alternative.

ALC : The personal essay is itself sort of a problem when it comes to transition narratives. The genre conventions of that form forced you as a trans person to be writing a certain kind of coming-out narrative. But my transition didn’t feel like coming out. It felt like just choosing to do something else. It’s not like coming out of the closet. It was just like walking from one room in your house to a different one, or maybe like moving into a new apartment. I hadn’t seen this narrative and it felt like it was a conversation that needed to be had. Now I get emails from people saying that they transitioned because of the essay.

CH : How do you feel this book fits into your evolution of thinking about the subject of desire?

ALC : In Females, the metaphor for desire shifts to self-abnegation or submission. My desire originates outside of me. It is external and I am the recipient. But I then take it up as my own, so it doesn’t remain purely external. Insofar as it remains purely external, it’s just coercion, right? It’s just, someone else wants me to do something or society wants me to do something.

It’s not just: “Oh my boyfriend wants me to wear this dress.” It’s: “I want to wear this dress because I want to perform my boyfriend’s desire for me to wear this dress.” So it’s more subtle. I think that distinction is important because it’s not just about external pressure or total alienation from yourself. It’s alienation and coming home at the same time. It was outside, but it is now inside and that’s meaningful beyond a frame of infiltration. It’s that, I assume it as my own.

CH : So there is an external template invited into the inner world.

ALC : Right, which I do on behalf of the world or on behalf of another. I constantly find myself in this situation, like when I’m doing a photoshoot for author photos. I show them to my girlfriend or show them to my editor and I’m like, I want to know which one you like. And it’s not actually that I want them to use one that they like, but I don’t like. I want you to pick the one that you like, and then I want for me to like it. I want to know this is what you want, so that I can do what you want. Which is different than just coercion. It is genuine.

Think about these Christian mommy bloggers who talk about genuinely serving their husbands. The whole point is that, when it actually happens, it will not be your husband making you do something, it will be you doing it because it’s already internalized what that is supposed to be. You become a vessel for your husband’s desires.

CH :

Another important leg of the theory from your book is that we are all universally female, but that women are the chosen delegates for traits we have decided are “just for women.” Judith Butler has a quote, “The male projects that disavowed and disparaged embodiment onto the feminine sphere, effectively renaming the body as female.” I’m wondering how we decided that passivity was just for women? Or rather, why is passivity so taboo or undesirable that we want to project it away from us?

ALC :

I think because it’s destructive. You will die. If you were to experience your own femaleness in its pure unmediated state, then you would just be completely flattened out and overwhelmed by the force of experience. It wouldn’t be possible to persist in the face of that.

CH : In the book you write about Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece”performance, where she sits on a stage and people can do whatever they want with a pair of scissors.

Yes, so it would be that with no end to it. It would be annihilating. If you really want to get into it, the existential condition is the condition of being the subject. I am the thing that the world happens to phenomenologically. On the one hand, experience is all mine. I am lord and master of the world in that one particular sense, which is that everything happens to me. This is true of everyone who has ever lived. And at the same time, that is the lowest position possible in the ontological hierarchy—to be that, on which, in front of which, in the context of which, the world is happening. Always a bridesmaid, never the bride.

CH : What would being the bride be?

ALC : There is no being the bride. It’s a shadow cast from being an “I” in the world. There is this straw man of agency.

CH : So, ideally, how would you want people to use this book or this theory?

ALC : I think that there really is a different model of gender here than the prevailing one in gender theory. For example, the claim in the book that gender is the expression of someone else’s sexuality, is to actually say what gender is, in a substantial way, as opposed to talking about gender variation. You have a whole bunch of scholarship that’s interested in how gender can change and how it is constructed. But those theories do not account for what makes gender gender, as opposed to something else.

CH : I feel like your book is trying to answer the question of why we even have gender at all.

ALC :

Right, what actually is it? People will tell us that sexuality is socially constructed, race is socially constructed, beauty. Most things are probably socially constructed. Even if that’s true, what is it? It belongs to a category of things called socially constructed things. That means the thing that makes it gender can’t be the fact that it’s socially constructed. There has to be something that differentiates it.

Gender performativity has been mainstreamed and made more or less interchangeable with social construction. It emphasizes gender’s habits and behaviors, so it does shed a little more light. But it still doesn’t really explain why gender is gender as opposed to something else.

I am asking for a different paradigm for gender studies generally and I think this new theory would have downstream benefits if taken as a new paradigm.

CH : So what is gender to you now after all of this?

ALC : Gender is the expression of someone else’s sexuality.

CH : Gender is a mechanism for getting the right people to desire you.

ALC : Exactly. And without that component, I don’t think you can make it make sense.

We Are All Female Now. By Callie Hitchcock. The New Republic , November 7 , 2019.

Short, sharp shock, like three bullets from Valerie Solanas’s gun, is the resounding effect of what the critic Andrea Long Chu writes. That’s how her high school English teacher phrased it—“after a lyric from a Pink Floyd song,” says Chu with a laugh, “which at the time I took great pleasure in knowing was itself after the lyric from Gilbert and Sullivan’sThe Mikado”—and, like most high school English teachers, she was right. Luckily, most readers are happy to be shocked if it’s for a good cause. Chu’s cause? Females, by which she means everyone. In the brief and blazing treatise that is her debut non-fiction book, Females, the 26-year-old polemicist considers the work of Solanas, Gigi Gorgeous, the Wachowskis, anti-pornography feminists, and more in service of her notion that “femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels.”

In anticipation of the book’s release, we convene in the backyard of Brooklyn’s Cafe Erzulie, where we met for the first time a few winters ago following the publication of her essay “On Liking Women” in the Winter 2018 issue of n+1. The essay was the first introduction for many to Chu as a writer as well as the beginning of her public engagement with the work of Solanas, whose unfrequented 1965 play Up Your Ass she organizes her debut book around.“I try to give as much of a live experience of language as I can,” Chu tells me of the theatrical zingers in her own writing, with a hint of restlessness that suggests her view of her own latitude. “I do remain a performer in my heart.”

Thora Siemsen: Are you nervous about having written polemics before publishing your first book?

Andrea Long Chu: As someone known a bit for writing scathing negative reviews of things, I think I would be impressed if someone did that to me. I don’t think I would be angry. I would be angry at limp dismissal. To be taken down, I’m sure, would be an honor. If it were a different kind of book I might be more worried about that, but I think this is kind of a weird book to review. The book contradicts itself a lot. It will be interesting to see how resistant it turns out to be.

I’m certainly nervous about being reviewed. I think that’s probably just normal. But it’ll be exciting. It’ll also be an occasion for people to respond to other things I’ve written. But a truly scathing takedown? I’m sure it could hurt, but that’s not the worst that could happen.

TS: What do you see as the worst?

ALC: The worst would be the feeling of just being misread or misunderstood. I suppose I could feel that way with a takedown piece, but even with a positive review one runs that risk. I despise the idea of being humored. I can handle someone telling me my ideas are wrong, because then I’ve still set the terms of the conversation. I do sort of dread a bad-faith reading that expects the book to be speaking for all trans people. I think I set myself up for misreading, so to some extent I should own that, but it will be interesting to see what happens.

TS: How often are you consciously courting disagreement in your writing?

ALC: I like to joke that, as someone who is always right, the last thing I want is to be agreed with. [Laughs] I think the true narcissist probably wants to be hated in order to know that she’s superior. I absolutely do court disagreement in that sense. But what I like even better are arguments that bring about a shift in terms along an axis that wasn’t previously evident. So it’s not just that other people are wrong; it’s that their wrongness exists within a system of evaluation which itself is irrelevant. Telling other people their views are irrelevant is far more satisfying than telling them that their views are wrong. In order to tell someone that they’re wrong, you implicitly agree with them about the terms on which you think they’re wrong.

That was the gamble of my op-ed about access to surgery in The New York Times. What if, instead of insisting that trans medicine is universally life-saving and enriching, we just grant that negative outcomes are possible, but we stop assuming that that’s relevant in determining who deserves access to care in the first place? That’s a high-risk, high-reward approach, I suppose.

TS: Lines from Valerie Solanas’s play Up Your Ass open each chapter of Females. How did this choice help determine the book’s structure?

ALC: Verso had initially approached me about doing an introduction to Up Your Ass, which they were thinking about publishing. Eventually that idea morphed, and we decided I would just write a short book—but I still wanted Up Your Ass to be essential to it. I also wanted the book to be more experimental in form. I was thinking brief, numbered axioms, like Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. That [idea] was a disaster. While it was freeing to be able to jump around from idea to idea, it was also painful and exhausting. I ended up with all these fragments and no coherent book, and I still hadn’t worked Up Your Ass into it. So I turned in the draft, came back to revise it after my surgery, and realized that the play could serve as the spine of the book. I more or less follow the whole play from start to finish. That transformed the book from this bad archipelago of thoughts into a single whole. The play was the answer.

TS: Do you see theater and theory as tangled up in you?

ALC: Yeah, absolutely. I got into theory because I was upset with theater. I was studying theater, doing acting. I was exposed very early in college to Augusto Boal, the Theater of the Oppressed, these explicitly political forms of theater, and as a result I became more and more frustrated with traditional models—even Brecht. In epic theatre, you’re supposed to use all these dialectical techniques to constantly remind the audience that what they’re seeing is a play, the fatal flaw being that audiences never actually forget that they’re seeing plays. So I just kept pushing further and further into avant-garde stuff, most of it completely unwatchable. I was reading Jerzy Grotowski and Richard Foreman, the Ontological-Hysteric Theater… I really believed in my heart that art could actually do something.

Then that belief broke. I was doing all this reading about art, and I suddenly realized I preferred doing the reading to doing the art. Then that became reading philosophy and theory. Over the course of the next several years, I came to the same conclusion about theory, which was that it had the same sort of structural impotence. The thing about theater is that when you keep pushing it further and further, eventually what you get is everyday life. At the most extreme edges of performance art, you’re just going through your life, and that is the art. Theory, I think, ends up at the same place. The point at which theory becomes capable of accomplishing something is the point at which it has abolished itself.

Now, I’m actually quite interested in impotence and the performance of impotence. I am on Team Castration—literally. So I’ve come to expect that from a text, from my writing, from theory. It makes it a lot easier to enjoy things. It makes it a lot easier to enjoy the theater, to which I’ve been able to return, my expectations are so lowered.

TS: How do you feel when you write?

ALC: When I’m actually writing, it is an experience second only to live performance. It tends to be very fast. Everything I have written for n+1 I wrote in a week. That can come at the expense of other things. To an extent, my writing process is dependent on my ability to convert depression into anxiety and then channel the anxiety productively. That means I will often not eat when I should be eating. I’ll get obsessed; I’ll go to sleep super amped up; it’s all I can think about. It’s very absorbing.

I say “second to performance” because I’m a very shy person, very socially stunted. I don’t know how to make conversation with people. I don’t know how to be in public spaces. I’m extremely underdeveloped. But onstage I can do anything and not feel guilt about it, not feel anxiety about it. It’s the only time I’m not self-conscious. I think I get a version of that in writing too. It becomes possible to really say anything and do anything.

I listen to the same music over and over and over again—lots of show tunes. These are things that I have listened to enough that they have worn smooth, like pebbles at the bottom of a river, so they don’t distract me. I can literally be singing along under my breath to something and typing words at the same time. The meaning of the songs has totally worn off over time, and there’s just pure, empty narrative momentum. It’s just a feeling of going somewhere and that’s all. I kind of get encapsulated in these empty narrative bursts and feel carried along. I can write and write and write.

TS: Can you write music?

ALC: I can, though I haven’t lately. I wrote music in high school and in college. I’m a pianist. I’ve written a couple of short musicals, which are pretty derivative and not very good. But I mess around on the piano now. I taught myself jazz improvisation in college. Every so often I get the urge to actually write something, but I don’t have an occasion. It’s something I would love to do. I would love to write a musical. I would have to have a really good idea, but I’m certainly confident that I could.

TS: What about fiction?

ALC: It would be such a relief to do fiction. Maybe that’s the naïveté of a nonfiction writer. Perhaps not at the level of the sentence, but it feels like so much less to be responsible for. You don’t have to get your ideas nitpicked; you can just write beautiful sentences. How long have I been in the writing game at this point? Not even two years. And I’m already like, “I just want to pivot to aesthetic pleasure. [Laughs] Can I just write something that is fun to read?” I have absolute faith in my ability as a stylist. Why am I fucking around with things people are going to get mad at on Twitter? Why don’t I just blow glass with words? It’s a consummation devoutly to be wished—to just be focused on pleasure. I hope that’s not insulting to fiction writers. It would be a very much sought-after form of self-abolition.

TS: Which characteristics are integral to you sounding like yourself as a writer?

ALC: I do a lot of cleft sentences. I tend to lean a lot on subordination. Starting a sentence with a noun clause which can sound very fusty—oh, I love that. Bipartite metaphors, where two parts of one thing are being compared to two parts of another thing: I like that form where the first half of the metaphor sets you up and satisfies by the end. I like to do something that I call a “new chestnut,” where you take an existing idiom and rephrase it in such a way that the latent metaphor of the idiom becomes revived. You take a fossilized metaphor, the old chestnut, and move the pieces around and change parts of speech and play it again. Suddenly the original metaphor comes back to life: “The devil had enough advocates to hang a shingle.”

TS: Which aspects of femaleness are you optimistic about?

ALC: Optimistic? [Laughs] I’m not optimistic. Maybe that’s a lie that I tell myself to cope with my optimism. I love Lauren Berlant’s work, and I will be pretty doctrinaire about the point that it is impossible not to be optimistic, that optimism is just the name of the relation to the world. That being said, certainly on a personal level my optimism has gone down since I began transition.

But even pessimism is just optimism in reverse. Pessimism is optimism in the writer’s capacity to think. The more pessimistic you are, the more you can congratulate yourself about how good you are at describing the world. I would like to think—and I suppose that “like” expresses an optimism, too—that I’m a weak pessimist. I’m pessimistic about pessimism. The glass is half-empty, but I’m here to get drunk.

TS: Would you say your work is interested in troubling the social contracts between trans and cis people?

ALC: Absolutely! Do you want to tell me more of what you mean? [Laughs]

TS: What do you hope to accomplish by agreeing with TERFs [trans-exclusionary radical feminists] to a certain degree? Also, can you say more about what you’ve called the “respectability that undergirds a lot of trans discourses”?

ALC: I’m reminded of this recent drama where Natalie Wynn just left Twitter. She’s this popular trans YouTuber who makes philosophy videos under the name ContraPoints, and she tweeted something about feeling uncomfortable when she was asked her pronouns in spaces where asking people’s pronouns is part of a conscious effort to be hospitable to trans people. There ensued a lot of brouhaha about whether or not she was “erasing” non-binary people, whether she was complaining from a position of privilege. Of course, I know what she’s talking about. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not pleasant to be asked my pronouns when I’m over here taking deliberate steps to obviate the need for asking.

But the thing that really interests me is the assumption that there is a correct answer to questions like this. Natalie’s critics seemed to read her as saying, “I’m uncomfortable with this, and therefore we shouldn’t do it.” They assumed she was asserting a moral principle because they had their own moral principle they wanted to defend: “Well, we should always ask what pronouns people prefer.” As if there could be a single moral principle that would actually work in all cases. But there isn’t.

The fact is that gender is inherently risky. If it weren’t risky, it wouldn’t be gender. Making a rule out of asking people their pronouns is about minimizing the risks that can be minimized as opposed to taking responsibility for the risks that can’t be. Above all, you minimize the risks to yourself, so that you never have to run the risk of being the asshole who misgendered someone. There’s your social contract: “How can we cis and trans people deal with each other in as painless a way as possible?” Which is a terrible goal. Where’s the joy, or interest, or pleasure? Being tolerated is not a big win for anybody. There’s a real impoverishment of the relation.

I think my work is interested in how people can learn to hold each other’s pain. We assume that to be ethical toward someone, to care for someone, means to prevent them from feeling pain. Whereas I think if you care for someone, that means you have to care for their pain. There’s a responsibility to harbor each other’s pains. To look after them, as you would someone’s house plant. To do that for each other as trans people.

Andrea Long Chu Is Ready for Criticism. By Thora Siemsen.  The Nation, November  4, 2019.

If you’re familiar with Andrea Long Chu, it might be for her marvelous takedown of Bret Easton Ellis (“an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book”); or the equally-deserved drubbing she gave Jill Soloway’s She Wants It (“As a book about desire, power, or toppling the patriarchy, it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless.”). Or, you might have read her deeply ambivalent reflections on gender transition and vaginoplasty in The New York Times and n+1. Or, you may be one of her tens of thousands of followers on Twitter—where she writes under the handle @theorygurl—reading along for her snappy musings on the mundane and the momentous. Chu is a deft critic, adept at sliding across broad swaths of history and material, at conjuring the pithy poke or relatable read.

But the thing that keeps me returning to her work is its commitment to expressing the truth of her own experience in a way that makes the reader productively uncomfortable rather than settling for choir-preaching salability. Chu forthrightly addresses her misgivings (about culture and herself), the madness of desires that reorient our lives but not in ways that necessarily make things better or happier. She invites us into pleasure and pain, looking at both without blinking and compelling us to sit with what is there.

This critical disposition has, of course, earned her a fair share of critics from the right and the left. The recent publication of her first book, Females: A Concern (Verso), will do little to alter this perception for those who read her tendentiously rather than closely, opening as it does with the argument that we (you, me, everyone we know) all are female and that we all hate it. It’s a provocative claim, to be sure, but one grounded in the radical and, from a certain perspective, convincing, ideas about gender, sexuality and desire that Valerie Solanas’s put forth in the iconic S.C.U.M. Manifesto (1967). The reward of Females is a nuanced and sticky understanding of how and what we desire, of how a desire never really our own shapes us into the conflicted subjects we are.

In the interview below, I speak with Chu about the central argument of Females, about how her bottom surgery in 2018 shaped the book, about how Chu came to consciousness about her gender while watching sissy porn—a widely variable genre that involves male-to-female forced feminization fantasy and role play—and how the ubiquity of online porn may be helping many to find and understand identities that would have otherwise remained vague and unknown to them.

We also talk about Solanas’s influence on Chu as a writer and thinker, about how she resists the “It Gets Better” narrative and her complicated feelings about the trans readers who discover themselves in her writing but whom she knows all too well are themselves on the brink of a painful, difficult journey. And at the end, if you can stand it, there is love.

Eric Newman: The main claim of Females: a Concern is that everyone is female and everyone hates it. Can you explain what you mean by “female” and what the stakes of that association are?

Andrea Long Chu: Initially, I was just going to say everyone was a woman. I felt I could defend that claim in certain ways, but it presented obvious problems. There was an existing distinction between sex and gender, but there was a term—“female”—available for a sort of gendered yet pre-gender category.

By “female,” I mean the condition of having someone else do your desiring for you. This is an ontological claim about the subject, about what it means to be a subject: your desire comes from outside of you as opposed to originating inside of you.

The reason I’d call that condition being “female” is that it is traditionally what patriarchal culture ascribes to that sex and gender: everything from models of maternal care to the passive function in “traditional sexual intercourse” to styles of emotional relation in which women are supposed to be better at receiving the other, at taking into account other people’s feelings, etc..

There’s a long feminist practice of saying that these things being described as “feminine” or “female” aren’t really that, but I’ve always found that critical move ends up reproducing the female—as abject, as disempowered—somewhere else in order to get out of being saddled with those traits. So, instead of trying to deflate the claim of the female, I wanted to pump it with as much energy as I could and see what would happen.

EN: Valerie Solanas looms large in this book and, as you’ve written elsewhere, has been a central figure in your intellectual development. Can you talk about how she has influenced your critical approach and aesthetic?

ALC: Valerie was a panhandler and sex worker and playwright and failed artist who is famous for writing the S.C.U.M. Manifesto in the late 1960s, which she sold and distributed herself in Washington Square Park, and for shooting Andy Warhol at the Factory on Union Square a year later. She was extremely talented at performing her own impotence and something came out of that. I don’t know if something of any historical force came out of it, but I think what it did produce was a very specific aesthetic that, as a I writer, I am very interested in.

One of the things that draws me to Valerie is that she isn’t really a feminist. She never liked that term. There were feminists who sometimes associated with her and there were feminists who would have nothing to do with her. When we talk about feminism in the late 1960s, we are also talking about an uptown/downtown divide in women’s lib. Opposed to the uptown, Betty Friedan feminism focused on bourgeois values and empowerment, there’s Valerie’s downtown feminist energy that’s closer to a kind of terrorism, a guerrilla or a sort of agent-of-chaos kind of thing. There’s an authoritarian, if not fascist, streak in Valerie, too.

Her writing is interesting to me because it’s a very stark instance in which a political frame is superseded by the desires that motivate it. It’s a politics, but not for a good reason. I mean, [male] genocide probably isn’t the answer. Her demands are being described in the language of political complaint but the logic is so unforgiving, and I find that appealing on the level of logic, but it also has no chance of being realized without an enormous amount of investment. That is a tension that runs through lots of political projects, not just Valerie’s, though it becomes particularly inflamed in her case.

EN: Do you find that part of it appealing, that it’s a politics impossible to realize?

ALC: Writing about politics that won’t actually accomplish anything is about as useful as writing about politics that will, allegedly, accomplish something, right? I have long been preoccupied with the impotence of academic practice, not that I presume to have left that behind. Scholars who tell you that politically-engaged academic work has the power to change the world are like parents who tell you that their children are the best thing that ever happened to them. Even if what they say is true, it’s not why they believe it. They believe it because if they didn’t, their way of life would be thrown into a crisis of validity. How could you go on being a parent if you admit that your kids weren’t the best things that ever happened to you?

EN: You say in the book that sissy porn was formative of your coming to consciousness as a trans woman. If you hadn’t found sissy porn, do you think it’s possible that you might have just continued to suffer in the not-knowing?

ALC: That’s a really good question. It’s plausible to me that I never would have figured it out, that it would have taken longer.

EN: How does that make you feel? Is that idea scary?

 ALC: It isn’t really. Maybe it should be a little bit more, but it isn’t really. One of the things about desire is that you can not want something for the first 30 years of your life and wake up one day and suddenly want it—want it as if you might as well have always wanted it. That’s the tricky thing about how desire works. When you want something, there’s a way in which you engage in a kind of revisionism, the inability to believe that you could have ever wanted anything else.

EN: People often talk about the ubiquity of online porn as a bad thing—I’ve heard from lots of girlfriends that men getting educated about sex by watching porn leads to bad sex—but there seems to me a way in which this ubiquity is helping people to understand themselves, their sexuality and their gender identity.

ALC: While I don’t have the research to back this up, I would certainly anecdotally say that sissy porn has done something in terms of modern trans identity, culture, and awareness. Of course, it’s in the long line of sexual practices like crossdressing in which cross-gender identification becomes a key factor. It’s not that all of the sudden, in 2013, there was this thing and now there are trans people. However, it is undoubted that the Internet has done something in terms of either the sudden existence of more trans people or the sudden revelation that there are more trans people than anyone knew there were. Whether it’s creation or revelation, I think everyone would agree that the internet has had an enormous impact there.

One of the things I find so fascinating about sissy porn is that it’s not just that I can hear about these trans people who live 20 states away from me and that their experiences sound like mine. There is a component of it that’s just sheer mass communication and its transformative effect, but another part of it is that the internet itself can exert a feminizing force. That is the implicit claim of sissy porn, the idea that sissy porn made me trans is also the idea that Tumblr made me trans. So, the question there is whether or not the erotic experience that became possible with the Internet actually could exert an historically unique feminizing force. I like, at least as a speculative claim, to think about how the Internet itself is feminizing.

EN: You had a full draft of the book completed just before you underwent bottom surgery and then went through the revisions afterwards. I’m wondering how that experience impacted the work that you did in the book and your relationship to it?

ALC: I was revising Females just two months after the surgery. The draft and the final product were very different things. It got a lot better, of course [laughter]. I was in a lot of physical pain after the surgery and really hadn’t processed it for the most part. Of course, I still haven’t processed it and I’m still in some pain.

The experience of recovery really got infused into the book. The first couple of months after surgery were extremely dark for me and it was very hard to see an endpoint. There was anger and resentment. To some extent I offloaded that affect into the book. The writing and revision was partly a way of getting a little better. Which means that I have a pretty ambivalent relationship to the book itself.  I told a friend recently that I kind of wrote a book about hating myself and now I’m in the position of hating the book. I say that half-jokingly, but I think it might not be that I hate the book less than I used to, but that I’ve made some peace with what it represents: shrapnel from this very particular moment in my life.

Also, with respect to transition generally, the book and my writing is really just telling everyone else that they are like me and preparing myself to deal with that rhetorical risk.

EN: Is that what you want readers to take from Females? Is it an invitation to, if not community, some other form of collective experience or sodality?

ALC: I do often get emails from people about how reading my stuff has made them transition or has made them consider it. I don’t know that it’s happening on some kind of epidemic scale, as much as I might like it to, but it’s incredibly moving when I hear from people that it’s carving out a non-celebratory space—one that’s not pride-based—for trans women or non-binary folks to be able to say “Yes” to themselves. I say in the book that being a man was my punishment for being a man; that I didn’t deserve to be a woman. In some sense, I still don’t and I’m writing towards creating a space where transition doesn’t mean you have to resolve anything about yourself or not necessarily feel better about yourself. All of this is to say that I’ve been told my self-loathing has been helpful to other people, and that’s really a wonderful thing to hear.

EN: One of the things I love so much about your writing is its refusal of the sad-to-happy teleology. The problem with the “It Gets Better” narrative, for queer people and others more generally, is that it doesn’t always work out that way, and even if it does, the process is always painful. Loving yourself or loving another person means that you have to become another person and that means cleaving and self-amputation and loss and abjection. Even if you’re happy now—and that’s never a permanent state—the change that love requires is painful.

So, when you get that feedback from readers who you’ve helped to transition, is there a part of you that’s ambivalent about it, both happy that you were able to help someone get to a more honest place with themselves but also thinking: “Girl, I really hurt for you because this is going to be painful and you might not come out the other side happy”?

 ALC: Absolutely, because it isn’t about things getting better. That’s the terror and also the holiness of a desire: It doesn’t actually have to do with the good. It has no necessary relation to that which is good or beneficial or healthy or advantageous or in one’s interest or any of that. It is independent of the object, even as it is structured by dependence on the object. Coming to terms with that, with knowing that this is what I want in a way that’s purely open is an incredible thing. It is agonizing and I live in the agony of that. Lots of other people do, too. 

 Can I say something about love, though, hearing you talk about it?

EN: Sure, go ahead.

 ALC: Years ago, I had a conversation about structural love, not in the sense of content but in the sense of a container or an envelope. It’s not that I like you or enjoy talking to you or that you bring me pleasure or that I bring you pleasure. It’s not any of the substantive content of the relationship, but rather this empty space in which the relationship happens.

I’m thinking, because I’m a good Christian girl, of the theological concept of God’s love: that you don’t deserve it and yet there’s nothing you can do to get out of being loved. For many this is a comfort, the idea that God will love you no matter what. But what it really means is that the statements “God loves me” and “I exist” are equivalent. God’s love is nothing, the pure nothing, the facticity of existence. You are there and, because you are there, God loves you. It doesn’t mean anything, it’s just the space in which your life unfolds: in God’s love, a pure predicateless position. I cut my teeth philosophically on theology and I’m still very attracted to concepts like that. The thing about God’s love is not that it is stronger than anything, but that it is weaker than anything. That idea is beautiful to me, the idea that love is so weak that nothing can defeat it.

EN: That’s beautiful. In some ways that brings us back to what we’ve been talking about here: the idea that vulnerability is a source of strength. Maybe, in addition to being female, we’re all in love and we all hate it.

 ALC: Yes, absolutely.

Andrea Long Chu on Desire, Weak Love, and Modern Trans Identity. By Eric Newman . LitHub , October  29, 2019.

“I loved your essay on sissy porn,” begins my email to Andrea Long Chu, aka @theorygurl, and I suspect it is how many emails she has received over the last few months begin.

Chu is a writer, critic, and doctoral candidate in comparative literature at NYU who is maybe best known for her viral essay On Liking Women. Though she is currently hard at work on her book Females: A Concern (not to mention raising funds for a new body), I reached out hoping she might have time to talk briefly about desire: if it’s queer, when it’s queer, what it means, and the way it relates to identity and our sexual selves. —Sean Santiago

SEAN SANTIAGO:

I was recently speaking with a woman who strongly identified as lesbian and hated the word “queer.” She basically called “bullshit” when I said that I considered my queerness to reflect on my gender as much as my sexuality. She then asked if I slept with just men, I guess implying that having technically heterosexual sex as a queer man would make my gender queer-er? So, I guess my question is, how does who we fuck relate to who we are and are those things wholly separate?

ANDREA LONG CHU:

Gosh, ok. So, one place to start is, like, it’s impossible—empirically—to be straight. I say this as someone who used to be straight and was intensely aware of how impossible it was to actually be heterosexual. Like, it’s a thing which one can be oriented by...

SS:  Like a north star?

ALC:  Right. But no one actually manages to be the ideal. It’s an ideal. So what that means is that straight people aren’t straight.

SS:  Everybody’s queer?

ALC:  It doesn’t mean that everyone’s queer, that’s the important thing—it doesn’t mean that everyone is queer. It means there are, broadly speaking, two groups of people who have a relationship of ambivalence with the category of heterosexuality. So what that means is that straight people are not straight in a different way than queer people are not straight. But you can’t actually distinguish between them by who manages to be heterosexual.

SS:  Manages to be heterosexual?

ALC:  Because no one manages to be heterosexual. There are straight men who fuck men, straight women who fuck women, queer men and women who basically just date people of the other gender. And I’m not gainsaying those identities, but at that point what’s being referred to is no longer the sheer fact of who’s fucking who, or even the sheer fact of a kind of habit of desire; what’s being referred to is a kind of aesthetic. A social aesthetic. A certain genre of behavior that’s loosely recognizable in the way that genres are loosely recognizable and that tend to produce certain…

SS:  Outcomes?

ALC:  Certain outcomes, certain… feelings. And so I think the best way to distinguish straight and queer people would be, like, through stylistic analysis. And not just aesthetic as in, straight people dress this way and queer people dress this way—aesthetic with a broad sense of having to do with patterning and form and tone and mood and all of those things.

SS:  Interesting. I guess my concern, or the concern being raised in this context, is that when it comes to quote-unquote queer sex my desires are so simple. So simple that they could almost, it seems, be interpreted as straight? Like, the things that are just kind of baseline erotic are so uncomplicated that I don’t really think about them at all. And you can’t beat yourself up over desire, but at the same time I think a lot of people build identities out of these patterns of wanting without really interrogating that desire first, and where it stems from.

ALC:  There’s a difference between having a political analysis of desire and having a political program about shaping desire, first of all. So I think it’s very possible to interrogate on the analytic level. I don’t think it’s reliably possible for that interrogation to become the means by which one changes the desire. In some cases that does happen—you do, like, learn. But for the most part, your desires are incorrigible. So I don’t know what to do about that. Analysis about other people’s desires as politically bad is always inevitably going to include you in the analysis. Like, yours is also bad. And you shouldn’t have to change that either. So, it’s thorny.

SS:  Because I think we define attraction and desire in very simplistic terms, right? So it’s this idea of fucking or getting fucked. Like, is that all you desire? Is that really the whole of it?

ALC:  I think the content of desire can be extremely specific. And in fact it tends to be specific. Because one is often dissatisfied in proportion to the specificity of your desire. Right? Like, if you get what you want, what you realize is it’s not exactly what you wanted; you wanted something else. There is a kind of murderous exactitude, on the one hand. But, because you have read the sissy porn paper you know that I do think on a certain level that everyone is just a bottom, ontologically speaking. Because even if everyone doesn’t necessarily want to get fucked, everyone wants to get fucked by their desire. And the classic problem of the bottom is that, ideally, you should never have to consent to anything. Ideally, it just happens to you the way you want it. You shouldn’t have to ask for it. You don’t have a safeword. You don’t clarify beforehand. You don’t actually want any of that. All of those are safeguards and half-measures. But ideally it would just happen to you. And that is the thing that I think is universal. That I think everyone just wants their desire to just happen to them.

SS:          In a perfect world.

ALC:  Right. In a perfect world. And then of course it doesn’t. But that has to do with… That’s not about the content of the desire. That’s sort of the basic structure of desire, I think. That has to do with the form of it, irrespective of content. Sex is very rarely about sex. To return to our lesbian friend: the lesbian instead of queer thing is partly about believing that the relevant social fact is not “Is your sexuality normative or not?” or “Is your gender normative or not?” The relevant political fact is “Do you associate with men?”—in the seventies they would say “giving your energy to a man.” It’s essentially a separatist impulse. What’s interesting about that is there’s, like, a logic behind it, which is if you’re still having sex with men and still associating with men, then what’s the point? What’s the point of being a feminist if you’re spending time with men? Which is the problem that feminism never solved. Feminism never solved the problem of heterosexuality. It’s the greatest stain on the feminist escutcheon. We never fixed it. Like, most women stayed with their husbands or boyfriends, kept associating with men, kept having bad sex. Feminism didn’t help.

SS:  But I mean, isn’t that a desire? And if desire is incorrigible, you want the bad sex with the man rather than no sex at all.

ALC:  It is. It absolutely is. That’s why feminism is impossible. [Laughs]

SS:  [Laughs] So the problem then is you can’t literally get rid of men. And you can’t undo the way that people relate to men and the way that men exist.

ALC:  Right. And the problem was not just that men would continue to exist, but that maleness would continue to exist—and what was then called male-identification. So the problem that separatists come up on in the seventies is that when you get a bunch of dykes on a campus or in a forest somewhere and there really are no men… The problem is that you could keep men out—like, empirically men—but you couldn’t actually keep male-identification out. If you go and look at the Lesbian Times there’s all this concern about what is called the bar butch. There’s all this concern about these women who are, like, imitating men and wanna fuck women and are like macho chauvinist types being in the space. And so the problem is that when you get just a bunch of lesbians together, somehow men are still there even if they’re not there. And they’re still there because people wanted that. Because the bar butches wanted to be butches and the femmes wanted to find a butch to fuck them. It wasn’t a thing that was going to get eradicated through consciousness-raising. So yeah, the separatists’ thing is infeasible not just because you can’t, like, genocide a whole bunch of people, but because the aesthetic or the style or the way of being of the to-be-genocided will remain afterward.

SS:  The idea of erasing or eradicating the thing—I feel like that’s bad because the thing always just crops back up. But I guess it’s still stronger for feminism with men on your side? [Laughs]

ALC:  [Laughs]

SS:  You need allies!

ALC:  I have men in my life who I like, I think? But, I don’t know, my baseline is just, like, you have to acknowledge the soundness of the argument that you’re trash and you shouldn’t exist. Like, if you’re a man, you should know that you’re a disease and that you really ought to transition and it’s okay if you don’t but, um, you’re a net loss for the human race.

SS:  [Laughs]

ALC:  So I think if there’s a conclusion to be drawn in response to your initial question, your opening statement, is that… maybe with respect to the lesbian, she’s saying, “I’m a lesbian because I fuck women or because I just date women.” But the wanting to differentiate herself from queer has to do with feeling like she belongs to a different social genre than queer. Like, feeling like the aesthetic doesn’t suit her. And by aesthetic I don’t mean that in a superficial sense. But, like, it doesn’t describe the patterns of desire and attachment and relationality that she either moves in or wants to move in. And that’s totally fair to me.

SS:          So can your sexual habits invalidate your claims to your gender identity? I guess we come up on this full-circle moment of like, if I sleep with women, am I straight? Or more to the point, am I straight and a man?

ALC:  Again, I think one takeaway is that queer and straight are—whatever they are—non-exclusive terms. There are straight queer people. That doesn’t mean they’re not queer people. But it also doesn’t mean they’re not straight people. Like, the terms are not actually in perfect opposition to each other.

SS:  Are you thinking of them in terms of who you sleep with, or no? Is this like a way of relating to another body or a way of identifying yourself? Like, how much does the way you think of yourself really matter if you’re effectively straight because of who you sleep with? Or you’re effectively gay because of who you sleep with? Is that sexual essentialism?

ALC:  I mean, your identification is one point of inflection, but it’s not the whole story. And it probably is, like, mostly not the story. It exerts some pressure on the shape of the person that you are, but it isn’t actually the shape. It isn’t actually who you are in terms of, like, an embodied subject living in the world with other people. If we’re talking about gender, I can say for instance that you transition because identification is insufficient. You transition because if I... You know, years ago I’m standing in my apartment in, like, jeans and a button-down with facial hair and an Adam’s apple, and I just think to myself, “I am a woman,” which is a thing that happens and that has happened to every trans woman at some point. That by itself is not sufficient. That by itself is not going to generally change the gender other people give you. And the gender other people give you is real. It’s not like you’re right and they’re not. They’re also right. Which is scary, right? It means it’s possible to be identified as a woman and socially still be a man. And not just socially in terms of, like, your affect is masculine or something. But socially in terms of the way that you’re received in a community, in a shared world. And so you transition because you want that part to change. You transition precisely because there is more to gender than how you identify. Otherwise no one would transition. It wouldn’t happen.

SS:  I do think there’s also a lot of rhetoric now that doesn’t grapple with that social element, with existing with other people in the world. If everything were perfect you would not have to do this. But it sets up this false expectation that it’s other people’s problem; that your truth exists in spite of other people when in reality, that’s kind of all there is.

ALC:  I mean, you transition because when faced with the choice of changing the world or changing yourself, you choose to change yourself. Right? Even if you could identify as something and then everyone could just acknowledge it immediately and everything was beautiful like that; even under that model, the fact that you would want that means that there is way more to your gender than how you identify. It means that, for the most part, your gender exists in the hands of other people, which is terrifying. I mean, as with most things, you mostly don’t have control over it and it’s just going to happen to you.

SS:  And not in the way that you want it.

ALC:  And probably not in the way that you want it.—

Andrea Long Chu on Literally Everything, Part One. By Sean Santiago.  Cakeboy Magazine , October 22, 2019.

In an early fall afternoon at a dry-pot restaurant in the East Village, the critic Andrea Long Chu is talking about herself, which is, by her account, one of her favorite things to do. So is numbing her notoriously sharp tongue with Sichuan peppercorns, and, as she raises a quail egg to her lips, it seems she may even be feeling something akin to happiness — not a sensation she experiences very often, as her following on Twitter is well aware. Her feed is a font of grotesque self-loathing. She writes about her suicidal tendencies and her desperation to be hot in the same irreverent style she used to ridicule Jill Soloway (“a rich Los Angeles creative type with a child’s knack for exploiting the sympathies of others”) and Bret Easton Ellis (“an angry, uninteresting man who has just written a very needy book”) in a recent pair of devastating book reviews. “I cannot stress to you how humiliating it is to be literally incapable of keeping my pants up bc my belly is too fat and my ass is too flat,” she tweeted recently. “It’s like getting misgendered every second of the day.”

But her sadness isn’t just a bit. A little less than a year ago, in a New York Times op-ed about her plans to undergo surgery to “get a vagina,” Chu made a provocative claim that angered some trans advocates: She did not expect the painful, expensive procedure to make her happy. Still, Chu insisted, she had the right to get it whether it cured her dysphoria or not. Nearly a year after the surgery, she says she’s feeling more miserable than she’d expected. “It’s perversely vindicating,” she adds with a wry smile. Dressed in a jumpsuit patterned with blue-and-white flowers, she brushes a curtain of curls away from her face with a flip of her wrist, revealing a tattoo of a geometric vulva on the underside of her forearm. “It’s very dangerous to get what you want.”

This is the sort of statement — darkly funny, intensely personal, daringly poised between profundity and trolling — that has made Chu one of the most exciting critics working today. A 26-year-old Ph.D. student in the comp-lit department at NYU, she entered the mainstream in the fall of 2017 with an essay for n+1, “On Liking Women,” in which she challenged the central tenet of trans discourse on the left. “I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period.” The piece had its critics, but many hailed it as a revelation. Sandy Stone, the artist and academic credited with establishing the field of trans studies, praised Chu for launching the discipline’s more forthright second wave, a breakthrough she never dreamed she’d live to see. “Maybe I’ve died and gone to trans heaven,” she wrote on Facebook. As Chu sees it, the first wave of trans studies was largely a defense against those who claimed real women are those born with a vagina. “My work begins with a frustration about how that defensiveness has calcified into a trope,” she explains.

In her first book, Females, out later this month, she posits a new theory about gender and sexuality, starting with the contention that “everyone is female.” (“I get criticized for projecting a lot,” she says dryly.) In Chu’s usage, female is a “universal existential condition,” defined by submitting to someone else’s desires. For example, even if you conceive of yourself as an alpha male who likes to top in bed, the desire to dominate is ultimately its own form of submission. “A top,” says Chu, “is just a bottom folded into another shape.” So why does she insist on calling a universal condition “female”? “Because everyone already does,” she writes. Women are the “select delegates” of this state of being.

Growing up in Asheville, North Carolina, Chu was “well trained in repression.” Her parents were conservative Presbyterians. “Lots of praying in public,” she recalls. Her father, a doctor, is half-Chinese, but his ethnic identity, as Chu sees it, was repressed as well. “I don’t think he would even refer to himself as a person of color,” she says. One of the few places she felt free was onstage. She played villains and fools in high-school musicals (“Never the romantic lead”) and studied theater and theory at Duke; she decided to apply to grad school when a professor in a cultural-studies class told her to. (She still loves performing: Once, while giving a talk, she put a remote-controlled vibrator in her pants and asked one of the audience members to press the button as many times as the person liked.)

Chu was 23, a couple of years into her Ph.D. studies and in the midst of a breakup with a girlfriend, when she felt compelled to transition. Within a week, she’d bought her first bra. She wasn’t “coming out of the closet” after years of consciously (or unconsciously) hiding; the desire to be a woman descended upon her suddenly, like “a tongue of fire or an infection,” as she writes in Females, and she acted on it with uncharacteristic speed. It was “easily the most impulsive thing I’ve ever done,” she says.

For Chu, the East Village is saturated with warm memories of that time, the kind you get when you fall in love. She takes me by the Buffalo Exchange where she sold off her men’s clothes. We linger in front of her old apartment where she first emerged into the world dressed in women’s clothing. She was headed to dinner with a friend that night, wearing a red mesh skirt and sleeveless cream turtleneck with vertical stripes. A group of people was sitting on the steps, and she braced herself for a reaction, but everyone just shifted slightly to let her pass. “It was the happiest I’ve ever been,” she says of the weeks after she transitioned. “It was like having a crush on myself.”

Snapping out of her reverie, she sighs and adds, “Now I’m just in a sexless marriage with myself.” As she describes it, the root of all her unhappiness — the reason she believes there’s no “cure” for gender ­dysphoria — is that she will never be able to fulfill her deepest desire, which is not just to be a woman but to have always been one. “If I were to unleash the full force of dysphoria onto a conversation partner, it would be Lovecraftian in the scale of horror,” she explains. “It would be like an indescribable, tentacular nightmare.” And yet she’s almost amused by the tragedy of it. After all, our endless striving in the face of certain failure is an essential part of what it means not to be trans but to be human. “We tell ourselves the object compels us. This person will give me what I wanted, this job, this belief, this breakup,” she says. “But it’s desire itself that compels us. It is by nature gratuitous and without purpose. The infinite desire to desire.”

Andrea Long Chu Wants More The 26-year-old critic argues for a new understanding of gender and desire in her debut book, Females. By  Lila Shapiro. Vulture, October 16, 2019. 

Andrea Long Chu hovers on the edge of jumping the shark; she does this knowingly, I think, conspiratorially, gleefully, toying with her more than 24,000 Twitter followers on a daily basis. Friends of mine in the left-wing, academic(ish), theory-curious elite – who have followed her monumental rise as an essayist and critic from the beginning – are torn. WhatsApp group members remain divided, huffing with frustration into their phones as they argue the merit of her thinking, typing furious rebuttals from beneath their desks. Chu, though, performs jumping the shark as critique, as tonal affect in all her tweets and, most importantly, in her writing. Following the release of her first book, Females (2019) – in which she takes radical feminist author, and the woman who famously shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas as her guiding force – the liberal queer/gender theory intelligentsia might just cancel her. But, let’s be honest, if Solanas were still alive and had a Twitter account, she would probably already have been cancelled.

Females is Chu’s much-anticipated debut: it is a work of memoir (sort of), a provocation, gender theory(ish), film and art criticism all rolled into one. It is a peculiar book: one that I – and, I think, numerous others – wanted to do a lot of things. In many ways, it is astonishing: a crucial theory looking to sexuality to formulate questions around gender. Yet, a lot of people I know have found Females confusing, a difficult read, an exercise in logic, not what they were expecting, controversial, offensive – especially those who know their theory.

The mantra of the book – ‘everyone is female and everyone hates it’ – is already buzzing around spheres of the internet as a whispered aphorism. It looms on the blurb of the book itself. The affective hatred that Chu establishes in this sentence is crucial. In order to hate, we need to feel an emotional aversion to an object; if femaleness is this object, then we all despise it, according to Chu. However, to be able to hate something indicates an ego developed enough to find object constancy, and finding this object constancy in femaleness has the potential to produce feelings other than happiness, such as disappointment. We think our desires can be satisfied by achieving this object but that is a fantasy; in fact, Chu proposes, to be female is to have our desire projected upon us instead.

In defence of Chu, it is important to understand that, when she is talking about femaleness, she is not talking about gender so much as she is talking about desire, or gender, as an erotic, sexual project. She writes: ‘The thesis of this little book is that femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation.’ She is clear, though: ‘I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.’ In this sense, Chu is not discussing ‘biological sex’, though she is not ‘referring to gender, either’. She is, instead, referring to femaleness not as an ‘anatomical or genetic characteristic, but rather a universal existential condition’. This is Chu’s provocation, her premise, her ‘commitment to a bit’, her concept – or, in the spirit of Solanas, writing that is ‘impossibly serious’ and ‘seriously impossible’. This is why understanding the tonal field of ambivalence of Chu’s writing can provide a helpful framework. It is, perhaps, what she admires in Solanas, who had a ‘fierce commitment to her own ambivalence’. In many ways, as Chu herself suggests, this book is about what it means to stand by those ambivalences, to back them.

When I was reading Females, I couldn’t help but return to the gender studies class I teach undergraduate students and to how, when we study Judith Butler for the first time, I emphasize that what she is actually saying is that, as a public action and performative act, gender is not a radical choice or project which reflects a wholly individual decision, nor is it solely imposed or inscribed upon the individual, as some post-structuralist displacements of the subject would contend. I wondered how I might teach Chu’s writing alongside this, how she seems to be asking similar questions about structures of desire and the affects that are produced in the messy contradictions between desire and discomfort, as well as the affective cloud that emerges when our desires don’t necessarily align with how we want them to, or if we put sexuality first.

To be female, Chu argues, is to make room for the desires of someone else, to have those projected onto you. I can get on board with this as a concept, but it is also where I think many feminists are going to take issue, since Chu assigns femaleness as vulnerability, weakness, submission. Judging by the blog posts I briefly scrolled through on Reddit and Medium, many have already expressed their dissent.

Speaking the other day to a friend who could not get quite get on board with Females, I argued that what I think Chu is employing is femaleness as tone, as genre: gender is simply how we choose to deal with the affects that reside in the aesthetic genres and tonal dimensions of femaleness. However, in the vein of Solanas’s 1965 play Up Your Ass – about a lesbian sex worker who commits murder – it is also important to not take Females too seriously. I like to think of Chu laughing to herself as academics feud over this 100-page book. Chu starts with Solanas and works with her throughout, using her as mouthpiece. The book, as a performance, is satire.

This book fits within Chu's wider project on ‘bad politics’ and I anticipate that her PhD will address much of the theoretical thinking that was left cowering between the lines of Females. Yet, Females also gets at the heart of the desire so many of us in academia cling to: the desire for critique to be a political act. We want to believe that what we are doing matters. This is not to say that I don’t think Chu’s interventions are crucial, rather that what her work seems to reveal is how many of us project a fantasy onto her about the potential of political critique. And Chu, sometimes – often, in fact – refuses to play ball. Females will be discussed in every university gender theory seminar and on all corners of the internet, as people from every constituency of the feminist community look to it as an object in which they want to see themselves reflected, that they will drive to do their political work for them. In one review I read of Females, the writer systematically calls out particular sentences, wading through the book paragraph by paragraph to expose why and how Chu’s work is an assault to feminism. This, I think, will prove to be a popular and easy response: to read Females as an exercise in, and revelation of, Chu’s internalized misogyny. Some people will want to see themselves in Females, but Chu’s writing constantly reminds us that they might be left disappointed. When criticism or particular modes of epistemic thinking fail us, we feel deflated and let down. Of course, this is so often precisely how desire works, too.

‘Everyone is Female and Everyone Hates It’: Andrea Long Chu’s Theory of Desire. By Bryony White. Frieze ,  November 7, 2019.

Chu declares ethics to be “a commitment to a bit,” which tells you everything you need to know about her vision of feminism in this book. There is no real ethical seriousness. No fundamental ameliorative vision. It’s just misery through and through, with no political will.

Andrea Long Chu’s book starts off with a surprising claim: “Everyone is female,” followed immediately by another howler: “The worst books are all by females.”

She then follows this absurdity with a long list of everything that is “female,” including many obvious non-females, indicating that her statement is not to be taken at face value. She basically says every single person or thing is female. But if everything is female, how can that be a meaningful statement? It’s like saying, “Everything is tall.”

So what’s going on here?

First of all, Chu admits, that she’s “not sure” if she wants this book to be a feminist text. That might tell you something. But what’s really going on is that Chu offers a simple thesis about what it means to be female:

“Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”

She clarifies this by saying “female” is “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”

This definition should give us pause. On a shallow reading, it stinks of misogyny. Why should that be the definition of a word linked to womanhood? It might be a historically significant descriptive definition but it’s definitely not a normative statement and definitely not one we should be making when doing modern feminist theory. On a deeper reading, it is a psychoanalytic attempt to make heady the idea that everyone is just as miserable existing as she is.

Chu says that when this psychic operation happens the “self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force.”

Is that it? That “females” are hollowed-out incubators? It doesn’t get her out of the accusation of misogyny to simply say “everyone” is hollowed out because she’s still making the fundamental association between this state-of-being-an-incubator with being female, a condition typically associated with womanhood. Making misogynistic claims about both men and women doesn’t negate their essential misogyny.

Chu says “femaleness…is always bad for you.” I don’t know about that. I would wager many females would disagree with that statement! And while yes, theorists are allowed to stipulate definitions of their terms, redefining them in new ways, it is impossible to take a term as widely known as “female” and simply redefine it according to misogynist stereotypes and apply it to everyone without dragging women into the mud. If we are doing normative theory, not historical analysis, then shouldn’t we be making more positive connotations for the word “female”? Perhaps she thinks that is too pedestrian.

She back-steps a little saying this isn’t about biological sex or even gender but rather a “universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.”

Is she really saying that all of human consciousness is a miserable suffer-fest of sacrificing yourself to other people’s desires? That sounds a bit like projection to me. Surely there is more to the varied and expansive human consciousness than that! Furthermore, if all existence is sacrificing to others, surely there are other people receiving these sacrifices and being made better? Unless she wants to claim it’s turtles all the way down, which is untenable.

Recognizing the absurdity of her central thesis, she asks: why refer to this existential condition as “female”? Her answer: “Because everyone already does.”

Um….speak for yourself?

However, it’s amazing how much self-awareness Chu has when she writes:

“Feminism opposes misogyny precisely inasmuch as it also expresses it. Or maybe I’m just projecting.(emphasis mine)”

You’d think someone arguing for an absurd thesis for a book and then basically acknowledging it stems of one’s own psychological insecurities would, perhaps, come up with another thesis for a book. But no, Chu presses forward in full self-awareness of how her central thesis stems from internalized misogyny.

However, for Chu, her statement that everyone is female is “psychoanalytically uncontroversial.” Because yeah, if Freud said it, it must be uncontroversial, right? I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t take Freud seriously when talking unironically about castration complexes.

Another howler from Chu when talking about Freud is her statement that “pussy envy” is a universal desire, which seems to be an instance of her forgetting that trans men exist. And when she says, “everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all,” I take this to be another instance of obvious projection.

And speaking of projection, another howler:

“Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for.”

When Chu admitted she wasn’t writing a feminist text, I guess she was right, because what kind of nonsense is this? Most trans people will tell you they did not transition for someone else, but rather, for themselves. Either to avoid suicide and depression or to jump forward into gender euphoria. But always for ourselves. To think otherwise is to buy into the seriously harmful narrative that trans people’s desires emanate from anywhere else than our own authenticity. But again, that’s probably too pedestrian for Chu, who prefers to live in a world of controversial hot takes that deviate from mainstream tropes like “trans people transition to be happy.” This, after all, someone who stated in the New York Times “There are no good transition outcomes.”

Chu’s preferred form of doing gender theory is to make outrageous generalizations that are paradoxical. For example, here she is with another hot take: “All gender is internalized misogyny.”

I don’t even know what to say about that except that it speaks volumes about her own relationship to gender.

Another: “From the perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.”

Man, I hate to say it, but it really doesn’t seem like Chu has the highest respect for women.

Another weird take on gender transition:

“If there is any lesson of gender transition — from the simplest request regarding pronouns to the most invasive surgeries — it’s that gender is something other people have to give you.”

I…just don’t know. The book is just an endless stream of statements like this e.g. attempts to subvert standard trans tropes about gender being internal. She even says how you identify subjectively is “on its own basically worthless” (albeit “precious and important”). I feel like most trans people are gonna give that a big “no.” Gender identity is not worthless just because external validation exists. She downplays the importance of identity to gender by saying “if identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it.” But this statement is confusing the crucial importance of identity to gender with the ways we may or may not use transition to express our gender. But that doesn’t mean identity is “worthless” without transition. That’s just insulting to the many people who don’t transition.

Going back to the definition of “female,” to her credit, Chu does make a nice point about the biological category of “female” being constructed as distinct from gender in order for 19th-century gynecologists to perform unethical research experiments on black women in the antebellum South. She says, “In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.”

But it is precisely because of that history we are not served by reproducing it by continuing to normatively define “female” as those subservient to the desires of others.

Continuing in her taste for bizarre generalizations about gender she writes, “Isn’t that the whole point of gender — letting someone else do your living for you?” To which I reply: in what world? Where is she getting these ideas? I keep coming back to her admission that all this is projection. But I keep waiting for her to reconcile that admission with all these outrageous statements about gender.

And then, a little more than half-way through the book, I run into the most outrageous howler yet. Discussing her own pre-transition fascination with sissy porn and the pseudoscience of autogynephelia which casts trans women as perverts, Chu writes:

“Autogynephilia describes not an obscure paraphilic affliction but rather the basic structure of all human sexuality. This is not just because everyone has an erotic image of themselves as female — they do — but the assimilation of any erotic image is, by nature, female. To be female is, in every case, to become what someone else wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.”

It’s almost as if Chu, when writing this book, thought to herself: what is the most absurd thing I could say about gender? And then wrote it down and tried to defend it. Not only is this statement giving credence to the harmful pseudoscience of autogynephilia, it’s wilfully creating an association between trans women and sissies in order to defend an abstract claim in gender theory that “everyone is female.”

I would be remiss to point out that much of the book centers around an analysis of Valerie Solanas, the author of the SCUM Manifesto and the play Up Your Ass. The book also has some nice (and often hilarious) analysis of The Matrix, Pickup artists, pornography, and the manosphere.

Chu is at her best when she’s discussing obscure feminist history and cultural commentary. She’s at her worst when she’s making proclamations about trans people, gender, and feminist theory. Which is a shame because I find her to be such a brilliant writer. If only she had stuck to an analysis of Valeria Solanas and cultural commentary, the book could have been great. But I have to dock so many points for the absurd gender takes that the book becomes almost a parody of feminist theory.

However, I imagine there will be many self-proclaimed important literary people who will take this book up and declare it to be an important manifesto on trans feminist theory. Which kinda bums me out. Chu is a good writer, no doubt, but trans feminism this book is not.

Females, by Andrea Long Chu: A Review. By Rachel Anne Williams. Medium  , October 29, 2019. 

Simone de Beauvoir famously wrote that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman," a claim I could imagine making writer and critic Andrea Long Chu roll her eyes.

At the very least, Chu has an update: "Everyone is female," she writes in the appropriately titled Females, her first book, "and everyone hates it."

Chu has earned a reputation over the past few years as one of the sharpest new thinkers on gender and sexuality with her essays on, among other topics, transgender identity, feminism and television. (She has also picked up a rather loyal following on Twitter, where she treats her mental health, PhD candidature and pop-culture diet all with equal wit and consideration.) In Females — part memoir, part theoretical intervention — Chu explores and defends this claim about universal femaleness, perhaps as much to herself as to anyone else.

Of course, the "female" identity on which the book is based is admittedly less a biological condition than an existential one. Chu describes it as an experience "defined by self-negation" that includes "any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another." In other words, to be female — which, remember, we all are — is to not express your own desires, identity, personality but rather those of others, impressed upon you. And gender, it follows for Chu, is what people do to deal with the terrible fact of being female.

If that sounds dramatic or provocative, that's largely Chu's style. In 2018, she wrote a powerful essay in the magazine n+1 about transness and the history of feminist organizing that theorist Sandy Stone credited with launching a "second wave" of transgender studies; later that year, Chu wrote an opinion piece for The New York Times about transgender people's rights to medical care. In both cases — and in much of her writing — Chu meticulously frames the popular debate about transgender people, then positions her own point of view on another plane entirely. She's just as bored by those known colloquially as trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, who deny transgender people's identities outright as she is by the common refrain that transgender people are simply "born in the wrong body" (as when Caitlyn Jenner joked to Diane Sawyer that God gave her "the soul of a woman"). At a moment when society is largely starting to gain a vocabulary for talking, albeit in less-than-nuanced ways, about transgender civil rights, Chu's refusal to support any mainstream narratives have made her a somewhat controversial figure.

But she simply isn't interested in straightforward, respectable answers. What most of these narratives don't account for, she argues in Females, is desire, in all its messy, definitional power. Chu asks: Instead of something stable and inherent — known and knowable, and inescapable right down to our very souls — what if gender is an extension of who we want to be? What if this quality of wanting didn't separate transgender people from cisgender people, but were instead a universal condition of gender itself?

Chu writes ferociously and exactingly about the nature of desire: what it makes us do; who it makes us become; grounding these questions in the culture of everyday life. Desire is how Fight Club and The Matrix get twisted in the hands of the internet "manosphere" into models of male supremacy; it's what lies beneath feminist disagreements about pornography from the '90s and why they play out today both in the alt-right and in Hollywood movies; it's there in the scrupulous beauty routines of a famous trans YouTuber. "Most desire is nonconsensual," she admits in a chapter of Females about pornography, and all the ways we try to engage with it — hide from it, ignore it, indulge it — indelibly shape us. Desire, for Chu, is gender's centrifugal force; it's what makes us all so female to begin with.

Chu puts these cultural products in conversation with the work of revered theorists: Sigmund Freud; Catharine MacKinnon; Andrea Dworkin; and Shulamith Firestone. But no one is so close to Chu's heart in Females as Valerie Solanas, the author and artist famous for writing the SCUM Manifesto, a radical text bent on eliminating the male sex (and for shooting and nearly killing Andy Warhol in 1968). Females started as an essay about Solanas' play Up Your A-- — which Solanas hoped, desperately and unsuccessfully, that Warhol would produce — and lines from the play anchor each chapter. Solanas didn't just give Chu an entrypoint into her first book; it was after encountering Solanas' work, Chu writes, that she began to come to terms with being transgender. (At the end of one chapter, she reflects on being told about a pornographic video in which two characters are seduced by a professor who reads SCUM, "turning them into lesbians." Chu says the plotline "made instant, perfect sense. It's what Valerie did to me.")

Solanas is often written off as an extremist, or an unfortunate and problematic accident of the second wave — but it's heartening to watch Chu take her seriously, taking her to task while looking at her legacy with generosity and scrutiny. If Chu knows that Females' central organizing thesis is wildly untenable, it's in Solanas' spirit that she pursues it nonetheless. "Valerie would make statements not because they were accurate or true, but simply because she wanted to," Chu writes; later, "We share this, I think: a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end."

In the end, Females is not a polemic; it's not a guide to escaping the tyranny of our supposed powerlessness in the face of desire. Instead, it is one woman's attempt to make sense of a time when the possibilities for identity feel terrifying and punishingly limitless, wondering what it might look like to accept our inescapable femaleness — even if we don't always play by its rules, Chu argues, it might help to know how the points are scored. 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.

In 'Females,' The State Is Less A Biological Condition Than An Existential One. By Marissa Lorusso. NPR , October 30, 2019.

I can think of nothing less cool than giving Andrea Long Chu, queen of brutal one-liners, a sincere, glowing, snark-free review. Alas, she’s left me no choice.

Chu’s upcoming book, Females, begins with a reliably bold suggestion: Everyone is female. Through close examination of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto, Solanas’ play Up Your Ass, and a wide variety of other pop culture references, Chu explores the meaning of her assertion. She clarifies that everyone is not a woman; she instead uses female to mean “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.”

This redefinition alone may spur anger, but if you’re able to trust Chu’s voice, at least for the duration of these pages, the rewards will be great. More than gender, Chu is writing about desire. She might argue they’re the same thing, and she is convincing, but whether or not you agree with her, this exploration of desire is worth considering.

Chu uses a persona of provocateur as a mask for a deeper, more personal truth. It’s not that she isn’t suggesting things that are radical. It’s just that they’re not actually that controversial when you think about them.

For so many decades, cis people (doctors, journalists, artists) have shaped our narratives. A crude, simplified idea of transness pervaded society, even among trans people. It makes sense to counter that level of ingrained simplicity with an aggressive refusal to engage with respectability politics. Chu seems to take glee in shouting things other trans people cautiously whisper. This can cause backlash, like when some felt her New York Times op-ed about her gender confirmation surgery played into TERF talking points. But it can also be revolutionary, like when many of us felt our confused desires to be women and be with women finally represented in her essay, On Liking Women. (I, personally, found comfort in both pieces.) People will likely be split which category this book falls into.

During a section about Gigi Gorgeous, Chu explains that Gigi is a “TERF’s worst nightmare.” Her commitment to a high femme dumb blonde aesthetic embodies the transphobic claim that trans women uphold patriarchy. According to Chu that makes her a perfect representative for all transness. Chu writes, “Gender transition, no matter the direction is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for.” This quote might upset you if you’re attached to the idea of transness as the fulfillment of the self. You might imagine a cis person reading it and fear their possible conclusions. It may simply not align with your own feelings. But it isn’t necessary that you agree with Chu to appreciate her ideas. Because Chu isn’t just expressing opinions, she’s justifying them. Before you have a chance to protest she makes another point: “If identity were all there were to gender, transition would be as easy as thinking it.” By stating the simple truths of being trans, Chu highlights the complexity, opening up room for even her most contentious suggestions.

In a later section, she confronts the oft-discussed disconnect between Men’s Rights Activists’ metaphor of “the red pill” and its origins in The Matrix, a movie by two trans women. Ever the contrarian, Chu suggests this disconnect isn’t a disconnect at all. She frames these men as ladies who doth protest too much. “He radicalizes–shoots up a school, builds a wall–in order to avoid transitioning, the way some closeted trans women join the military in order to get the girl beaten out of them,” she writes, unsatisfied saying just one controversial thing in a single sentence. Then she makes an observation about The Matrix that caused me to audibly gasp, despite my belief that by 2019 we were out of new trans Matrix takes.

But her bent towards the controversial, her relentless sense of humor, and her singular intelligence are all in service of a constant searching. The fact is no one actually knows what gender is or what it means to be trans or cis. Most trans people, myself included, shrug these questions, instead focusing on our desires, our safety, and the desires and safety of our community. But I’m grateful that Chu refuses to accept that. I’m grateful that she’s tasked herself with these unanswerable questions, and within this searching she has found fascinating answers, if never the answer.

Not to dismiss the interesting gender theory found within this book, but, at its best, Females, is a memoir. It just so happens to be a memoir written by someone whose Twitter handle is “theorygurl.” We’re not simply experiencing Chu’s ideas, we’re experiencing her discovery of these ideas. Anecdotes about a pre-transition college art project, her preference for forced feminization porn, and, in the last chapter, a revealed connection to Solanas, provide a context for Chu’s point of view. The sections on Gigi Gorgeous, The Matrix, and forced fem porn may be the most fascinating, and the most entertaining, but Chu’s enthusiasm for Solanas is infectious. It’s always a pleasure when a writer is discussing a topic they care this much about. It’s like when you’re falling in love with someone and their passions start to become your passions. It’s less about the thing and more about how that thing relates to the person. We learn as much about Chu when she writes about Solanas as we do when she writes about her personal life. The whole book has this level of connection and her vulnerability resonates deeply.

I expected this text to be thought-provoking. I wasn’t prepared for its depth of emotion.

Andrea Long Chu’s “Females” Is More Than a Provocation. By Drew Gregory . Autostraddle ,  October 3, 2019.

In 1988, Valerie Solanas, the author of the 1967 female-supremacist pamphlet SCUM Manifesto, died from pneumonia at the age of fifty-two, in a single-occupancy hotel room in San Francisco. The decomposing body of the visionary writer, who famously set forth her plans “to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex,” was discovered kneeling, as though in prayer, slumped over the side of the bed. The image lends itself to hagiographic depictions of Solanas—as a fallen soldier, a suffering genius, a latter-day entrant into the modernist pantheon of great artists exiled by society. Or perhaps that’s just how she appears to me. I’d rather imagine her within a tragic male tradition than an abject female one—though you’ll soon see why I’ve begun to wonder if there’s any difference.

Consumed with loathing, finding only fleeting euphoric reprieve in her own ideas, Solanas is feminism’s Antonin Artaud. She’d spit at the comparison, of course. By her logic, all artists are female. “A ‘male artist’ is a contradiction in terms,” she states in SCUM, a slender polemic as remarkable for its withering nonchalance as its unabashed biological determinism. “Having nothing inside him he has nothing to say,” she puts it simply.

Andrea Long Chu, author of the SCUM-proportioned volume Females, agrees. All artists are female. Not because men have nothing to say (though she doesn’t deny it), but because everyone, without exception, is female. “I am female,” she writes, closing out her brief, bracing introduction. “And you, dear reader, you are female, even—especially—if you are not a woman. Welcome.” Lest you think this might be good news, she adds, “Sorry.”

Chu finds in Solanas precedent for a semi-comedic strategy of defamiliarization, and adopts her habit of risky reversals to shake new sense into the ubiquitous term female. In SCUM you see the outline of Chu’s future style: Men have, as Solanas writes, “done a brilliant job of convincing millions of women that men are women and women are men.” She sees human history as nothing but a long con in which men claim innately female traits (forcefulness, courage, integrity, objectivity, dynamism, emotional independence, and grooviness among them) as male, and model perverse, violent caricatures of female power to mask their supreme passivity. Chu has a different take: We’re all, as females, cultivating and customizing our passivity actively; or we are laboring, as accidental misogynists, to escape our femaleness through idealistic follies such as feminism. From the madness she wrests a lucid meditation on desire as the force shaping our identities, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition.

Females may be only the second work in a constellation of twenty-first-century efforts to grapple with Solanas—as a consummate performer of female rage, a high-camp satirist, or an accidental Derridean—to take her seriously as a gender theorist. The first such work would be Chu’s earlier, jaw-dropping essay “On Liking Women,” published in 2018, in which she explores SCUM as a conceptual framework, or a rich reference point, for her coming out. Citing Solanas’s intoxicating, petty grounds for her genocidal agenda (i.e., that patriarchal debasement has rendered “life in this society . . . at best, an utter bore”), as well as the suggestion that men, if they wish to live, should seek to “be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women” via new technologies, Chu writes of an epiphany:

This was a vision of transsexuality as separatism, an image of how male-to-female gender transition might express not just disidentification with maleness but disaffiliation with men. Here, transition, like revolution, was recast in aesthetic terms, as if transsexual women decided to transition, not to “confirm” some kind of innate gender identity, but because being a man is stupid and boring.

It perhaps goes without saying that this vision flies in the face of the dominant understanding of transition as a fundamentally affirmative act, but Chu’s invocation of Solanas is provocative in this context also for SCUM’s not unearned reputation as anti-trans. It can be inferred that Solanas’s chromosomal standard for maleness, which she establishes right out of the gate in her manifesto, offers no exception for trans women, and that her contemptuous characterization of drag queens (“insecure about being sufficiently female, he conforms compulsively to the man-made stereotype, ending up as nothing but a bundle of stilted mannerisms”) prefigures the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) trolling point that trans people reinforce an oppressive gender binary.

Chu pushes back on the characterization of Solanas as a transphobe, particularly as one associated with second-wave radical-feminist thought (which she disdained). But whether Solanas was or wasn’t transphobic per se, she was a sex essentialist. This is SCUM’s underlying disqualifying flaw, whatever breathtaking observation or fascinating caveat one may find to pivot from in the text. Its considerable charms are not in dispute, but neither is the fact that it advocates holocaust—it explicitly invokes both gas chambers and “degenerate ‘art.’” Sure, Solanas was an ironist, but only sort of. She offered as proof of her seriousness at least one meaningful display of fascist intent—her 1968 attempt on the life of male artist Andy Warhol. Finding this living contradiction in terms on the phone at his studio, she fired five shots; one hit him, piercing both lungs and his spleen, stomach, liver, and esophagus. He nearly died.

But Chu doesn’t want Solanas for her politics. She’d be the first to say that unfortunately for females (which is to say all of us), that’s not the way wanting works. “Most desire is nonconsensual; most desires aren’t desired,” she writes in Females. Chu doesn’t fall in line with Solanas, but she keeps her close, catching sparks off her until the very last page.

Her book leverages the rhetorical triumphs of SCUM—its inflammatory absurdism, its aphoristic deadpan—and it makes related, similarly seductive, similarly doomed, sweeping claims. But here, the failure is staged. Chu’s aim isn’t to build an airtight case. She lets her argument’s smoldering structure flare and fade slowly in a series of profound personal reveals. First-person writing would have been anathema to Solanas’s imperious voice; Chu uses Solanasian bluster as something of a Trojan horse for memoir. But her outrageous central thesis—everyone is female, and everyone hates it—even if it’s not built to last, demands attention as more than a gambit.

Femaleness, as Chu defines it, is “ontological, not biological”; it’s “a universal sex defined by self-negation.” To be human is to be female, “an incubator for an alien force.” And that force is the desire of another, which we compulsively accommodate at terrible cost to ourselves. While this may appear at first to be a familiar, vintage feminist definition of femininity, the twist is that, as females, regardless of gender (more on that later), we’re all in the same boat.

Desire, in Chu’s formulation, is an existential constant. Though she emphasizes the female’s sacrifice in response to external desires, this raises the question: How exactly does this psychic economy of perpetual bottoming, with its surfeit of abdication, work? It must be our own desire, in collusion with cultural forces and interpersonal pressures (all by-products of the female condition), boomeranging back to deal us a punishing blow. Time after time, we objectify, warp, and empty ourselves, anticipating—often wrongly—what the object of our desire would want us to be, while that also-always-female object is likewise desperately projecting her desires and rehearsing a set of people-pleasing contortions. Life’s a hall of mirrors, as well as a bitch.

Yet, while we share a problem—our sex—we are not all the same. How we manage it constitutes the unique pathology of our identities. “Everyone is female,” Chu reiterates, “but how one copes with being female—the specific defense mechanisms that one consciously or unconsciously develops as a reaction formation against one’s femaleness, within the terms of what is historically and socioculturally available—this is what we ordinarily call gender.” To articulate the species-wide sameness of the predicament, Chu selects vivid examples as far-flung as YouTube star Gigi Gorgeous, a trans woman Chu describes as “Kardashian-adjacent,” who built a following with makeup tutorials before beginning to document her transition online; Mike Haines, the incel-adjacent author of the 2016 r/TheRedPill subreddit post “HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD: 37 Rules of Approaching Model-Tier Girls”; and Chu herself.

Her meditation on Gorgeous is colored by her compassion for and allegiance to the heavily contoured celebrity, as well as a touch of melancholic envy:

“”Gender transition, no matter the direction, is always a process of becoming a canvas for someone else’s fantasy. You cannot be gorgeous without someone to be gorgeous for. To achieve this, Gorgeous has sanded her personality down to the bare essentials. She laughs at what is funny, she cries at what is sad, and she is miraculously free of serious opinions. She has become, in the most technical sense of this phrase, a dumb blonde.””

Having nothing inside she has nothing to say, a TERF might say, echoing Solanas in a cruel rebuke of Gorgeous’s submission to stereotype. But Solanas was not referring to this kind of emptiness, a Herculean feat of technique, technology, and will; she might approve of the YouTuber. Chu’s real point, packaged in awe at Gorgeous’s accomplishment, is that we all, albeit to less spectacular effect, strive for such blank-canvas surrender. “If sexual orientation is basically the social expression of one’s own sexuality, then gender is basically a social expression of someone else’s sexuality,” she writes. “From the perspective of gender, then, we are all dumb blondes.”

Consider Haines’s dumb seduction advice in “WARLORD,” predicated on the manospheric truism that women want to be dominated (by men, of course) but that they have to, during courtship, determine if the guy has what it takes. “And so transpires an unexpected reversal of roles: in order for a woman to be sure a man’s worth submitting to, she must first dominate him,” Chu summarizes. “The biggest loser—the one most open to abuse, suffering, humiliation—thus turns out to be the biggest winner. Desperate to prove he isn’t a woman, he temporarily becomes one.” Minus the word temporarily, that last sentence, in both content and cadence, might be lifted from SCUM. And indeed Chu’s studied form, provocation layered upon provocation (here, the perilous equivalence of Gorgeous and a misogynist Red Piller arises as yet another antagonism), has even more in common with the confounding text than it seems at first.

If you haven’t already guessed, Chu’s object of desire, at least for the purposes of Females, is none other than Solanas herself. As a conceit it works beautifully—it’s a fascinating, if somewhat terrifying, experiment to imagine what Solanas would want, and it’s riveting to read about Chu trying to become whatever that might be. Her writing is, in its most insistent and unguarded moments, suffused with authentic unresolved longing. Her desire is not only a conceit.

This is most evident in the raw narrative of her life and transition, which she intercuts with passages about Solanas, pop culture, TERFs, and second-wave and antiporn feminists (Chu is refreshing for her daring appreciation of what movements and thinkers get right, just before they make their fateful wrong turn). She recounts her pre-coming-out unhappiness—her juvenile obsession with the New York School, her abuse of a found piano in the name of art, and the depths of her self-hatred. “I hated being a man,” she explains, “but I thought that was just how feminism felt. Being a man was my punishment for being a man.”

Her discussion of her obsession with sissy porn—a hypnotic genre that introduces watchers, in stark sexual terms, to their essential, empty, female nature—provides another occasion for iconoclastic baiting. Porn, we’re supposed to believe, doesn’t “make” anyone anything, but Chu insists that it can—and that there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. “Sissy porn did make me trans,” she declares, her radical candor deployed as a shield against third-wave blowback. And when she mentions learning, as she completed Females, about a pornographic video in which a woman teacher quotes from SCUM to lure two female students into lesbianism, she writes, “This made instant, perfect sense. It’s what Valerie did to me.”

As with many observations Chu offers, these contentious pronouncements are made half in jest. They’re not meant to be taken as truth. Instead, they’re allegorical, and just as importantly, they serve to disarm. Spoiler alert, in the closing shocker, which definitely doesn’t take the form of a joke, I was finally left properly aghast. Chu’s coup de grâce is her use of Solanas’s attack on Warhol as a metaphor for her own transition.

When I think of the shooting, I imagine not the day of it—the accounts of Solanas lingering strangely at the Factory, overdressed for the June heat, and wearing lipstick, which was unusual for her—but its aftermath. Alice Neel’s astonishing 1970 portrait of Warhol, which he sat for, shirtless, just two years later, is a haunting picture of the damage done—evidence of how ruthlessly the author made her mark on a chapter of American art history, in fear she’d never escape from the margin with her writing. The Pop artist is shown resting upright, eyes closed, his torso cut into puzzle pieces by the flabby triangles of his breasts and the deep surgical scars traversing his abdomen. He wears a corset, a requirement of his post-Solanas body for the rest of his life. His shadow against the wall is a patchy aura in baby blue, the couch he sits on is only an outline. The painting, purposefully left undone, stands as gentle parallel for a body subjected to violent undoing.

After a whole book written in various inspired states of Solanas impersonation, Chu performs one last reversal. She tells us her birth name was Andy, and writes, in her concluding fantasy: “Fifty years later, Valerie shot Andy again. This time, he did die, quickly and without hesitating.” Solanas, long after her own death, does destroy the male sex—in Chu.

It is a stunning image of transition as self-negation—tragic, abject, Herculean, female. It’s an act of becoming gorgeous for another, by the desire of another, at gunpoint. Females, in advancing a theory of gender that posits the force of intractable, confusing, undesired desire as its source, represents it as a painful, messy business. There is plenty here you won’t like, and a lot you won’t want. But that’s the point. Nobody wants to be female. Sorry.

Cutting Up. By Johanna Fateman. Bookforum ,  Sept/Oct/Nov 2019

Also of interest :

Wanting Bad Things :  Andrea Long Chu responds to Amia Srinivasan.  By Anastasia Berg.  The Point Mag, July 18 , 2018.