Paperback, 112 pages
en-Latn-US language
Published Oct. 29, 2019 by Verso.
Everyone is female "When I say that everyone is female, I mean very simply that everyone wants to be a woman. What one does with this desire is what we call gender." So begins Andrea Long Chu's investigation into gender and desire, females and bodies, radical dreams and philosophical pessimism, and feminism as a form of political suicide. Feminism, Chu argues, is an untenable claim, and "when you make an untenable claim, your desire is showing, like a shy tattoo peeking out from a sleeve." Written in a series of linked theses, this is a provocative and searching text from our most exciting new public intellectual, a self described "sad trans girl in Brooklyn." Chu wears her heart on her sleeve with wit, style, and a manic searching grace.
This book was absurd. Far more absurd than the blurb on the back led me to believe. I did not expect a book about Valerie Solanas when I picked it up. That was a surprise, and the good kind. I would recommend this book to anyone willing to talk seriously about absurd things and laugh at serious things. Someone for which gender is a mindfuck.
That was all I’d jotted down as a review of this, last year: “funny, vague, clever”.
Vague? I meant it, strangely, as a compliment. The declarations are bold. From the first page, Andrea Long Chu arrays her arguments on a sweeping, jokey surge: “Everyone is female […] There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets.”
For a short book, Females is dense with points. Much is blunted in the rush. Beats are firmly met (or, if hard to pinpoint, are kept to), yet transition is a constant; text supple within constraints, and still its reach broad or deep or precipitously high, in the manner of a (complex) wave. It can’t sustain itself at the extremes (and doesn’t try to, hovers without overstaying, inertia impelling), but supports itself up there, however insubstantially.
