An exploration of gender and desire from our most exciting new public intellectual
Andrea Long Chu is a writer, critic, and graphic designer. Her writing has appeared in n+1, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, differences, Women and Performance, TSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She writes a weekly newsletter of television criticism called Paper View. She sits on the editorial collective of Women and Performance.
Desire deserves a description. So does the gender self-loathing of
the "female" who is, it turns out, "all of us." With these theses,
Andrea Long Chu inspires thrilled and dark passions because she has
them and because she believes in smart and smarting arguments for
them. The sentences are alive and veer toward surprise but also
toward a tender wish for an easier conventional life for
gender.
*Lauren Berlant, author of The Female Complaint*
A thrilling provocation, a funny and surprisingly tender memoir, a
bold move, a dare. She's our most reliable trickster, and this is
the book everyone will be talking about.
*Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal
Girl*
Females marks nothing short of a historic cataclysm in public
discourse about gender and sexuality. In the grand tradition of the
philosophes, Females is crucial not only because of what it is, but
for the world of conversations it makes possible. When we talk
about transness, when we talk about feminism, when we talk about
experimental memoir and the thrilling, unexpected rebirth of the
Künstlerroman, there will be a before and after Females.
*Jordy Rosenberg, author of Confessions of the Fox*
One of the most exciting critics working today
*New York Magazine*
[A] sweeping provocation, what fascinates is where it leads... the
flash of insight produced by a well-thrown-knife
*Harpers*
Andrea Long Chu is one of the disrupters
*The Atlantic Monthly*
Featured in The New York Times
*Jessica Bennett*
Chu is a deft critic, adept at sliding across broad swaths of
history and material, at conjuring the pithy poke or relatable
read
*Lit Hub*
A lucid meditation on desire as the force shaping our identities,
the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender
transition.
*Bookforum*
[A] brief and blazing treatise.
*The Nation*
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.
*NPR*
Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of
an earthquake-the ground is undeniably shifting.
*The New Republic*
Astonishing.
*Frieze*
One of Chu's most ambitious and significant pursuits to date...It's
always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it
will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart.
*Vice*
Among our most original thinkers on gender.
*The Week*
A highly provocative, turbulent read.
*Dazed*
Reliably eloquent and provocative.
*The A.V. Club*
Juicily transgressive.
*VOGUE*
Chu's intellectual rigor is matched by her honesty. It is at once
profoundly disconcerting and deeply persuasive.
*Women’s Review of Books*
Thought-provoking and controversial reading from one of our most
astute contemporary minds.
*Hunger*
Performatively edgy, frequently hilarious
*Commonweal Magazine*
Females is a pithy takedown of every orthodoxy around gender you
can name. It's also very very funny.
*Tribune*
There is a satisfying, funhouse-mirror effect to taking logic to
its breaking point.
*The Point*
Gleefully contrarian
*The Believer*
Chu built up an internet following with frank essays about trans
identity, and she brings the same hybrid of cultural criticism and
personal experience to Females. ... In just ninety-four short
pages, Chu manages to show off her quick wit and deep knowledge of
everything from pop culture to social history to queer theory.
*The Rumpus*
Every aspect of the volume breaks with scholarly tradition: the
book is unconventionally small in size (18 cm); the language is
irreverent; the style is a mix of novel, autobiography, and
theoretical treatise; and Chu includes personal reflections and
confessions alongside popular culture criticism and history. Rather
than a cohesive treatment of a singular topic, the book is a
collection of related but autonomous confessions that have the
power to alter how gender is conceived or, at the very least, and
generate conversations that transgress the status quo of
gender.
*CHOICE*
Though 'Everyone is female. And everyone hates it' sounds
assertive, definite, even simple, it is
the opposite. Why use 'female'? It is a word so loaded, so specific
to a cultural meaning of sex and/or gender, and yet that stability
is rendered inert by the inclusion of 'everyone' into its category.
And why do we 'all' hate it? And what is the 'it' of being 'female'
that we 'hate'? Answering any of these questions is a delightful
impossibility, and to treat Females as a project of clear
theoretical argument would be to have misread the text. Like
desire's negative structuring, the pleasure of Females is located
in its very impossibility, its elusive slip.
*AC Review of Books*
I'm certain that Andrea Long Chu's 112-page engagement with Valerie
Solanas in Females (Verso, 2019) has more to say about the way we
live today than the doorstop biography of Andy Warhol published
this year by HarperCollins.
*The Quietus*
I was out of breath after finishing this book ... Drawing from
Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto, Chu revisits Solanas' claim that
men are women and women are men in order to critique the sexual
landscape today. From performance art to incels and porn, Chu cuts
through them with fire and wisdom.
*Elephant (Standout Artists of 2020)*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |