On "Females"

On "Females"
Andrea Long Chu

Andrea Long Chu, Females (London: Verso Books, 2019)

“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”

Females is Andrea Long Chu’s genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire.

Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas—the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol—Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race— men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she’s just projecting.

A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

 

I read this book during the virus quarantine and think that it is absolutely a must-read. With clever irony and an anti-dogmatic approach to the question of genre, Andrea Long Chu makes theory in her own way; expressing her concerns through a series of jokesmore or less serious, more or less crediblebehind which, there is however always a very precise and stimulating theoretical concern.

I have asked Andrea, through these videos, to present her book to us herself.

Enjoy the viewing.”

Andrea Bellini