ANDREA LONG CHU'S "FEMALES"

We will read passages out-loud together from the second half of the book, where Chu riffs on topics such as The Matrix as gender binary, red pill men of reddit, and sissy porn. Surrounding her darkly thrilling suggestion: what if female-ness was seen as an existential condition?

Chu admits a preference for indefensible claims, and an attraction to the polarizing figure of Valerie Solanas for her brazen indefensibility, while offering kernels of something that feels like truth. In Females, Chu proposes that the way being female and the feminine has been coded is always something to “get away” from, even in various feminist causes. If the female is marked by giving up one’s desire for the sake of another, and the fear of losing agency and control, it is inside everyone, after all—“everyone is female and everyone hates it.”

By linking Solanas’s writing from the 1960s to her experiences of trans femininity in the 21st century, Chu puts queer feminist anger from the past in dialogue with the transformative work being done by trans women to refigure how we understand an embodied feminist politics.