Females

Paperback, 128 pages

English language

Published 2025 by Verso.

ISBN:
978-1-80429-821-3
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(6 reviews)

“Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.”

So begins 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—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, and even feminists like herself. Each step of the way she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race—men, women, and everyone else. In a new afterword, Chu reflects on the book’s reception, the growing anti-trans movement in America, and the continuing need for a radical theory of desire.

4 editions

reviewed Females by Andrea Long Chu (Verso Pamphlets)

Well Ok Then!

No rating

A fun read but maybe less immediately shocking than it was when it came out; I’m getting the sense that broader trans discourse digests this kind of theory really quickly and starts taking it as read (no pun intended) which reduces its shelf life considerably. One day we’ll stop talking about sissy hypno.

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Subjects

  • Sociology