Paperback, 128 pages
English language
Published 2025 by Verso.
“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.
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.
I started this book expecting a "serious" work of feminist theory. At some point I realized I had started on the wrong footing, so I reread it as a personal essay. That works way better. The book kiiinda presents itself as laying out a theory of gender (in short, the theory that everyone is female), but it doesn't really commit to that and the theory doesn't really work if you take it seriously - which I don't think the author wants us to. The book is actually an autobiographical reflection on the author's transition, told through her personal relation to Valerie Solanas' (tiny) body of work. I enjoyed it a lot!
