Uma Dwivedi
Females, by Andrea Long Chu, Verso, 112 pp., $12.95
Andrea Long Chu is not one to take herself too seriously. Often, she seems determined to take herself less seriously than would a reader, wedded to the ironic distance required for provocation. She constructs arguments and then suggests she might just be projecting, admits early on that she doesn’t mean what she says. Even the book’s jacket claims that Females is indefensible. All this seems calculated to create a detached thought experiment, one that requires little emotional commitment on the part of the reader and perhaps even the author. If Females was a partygoer, she’d be dressed in Brooklyn Casual (think a perfect, enormous sweater tucked into meticulously frayed jeans), sipping a single vodka tonic all night, relentlessly sardonic but acting just drunk enough that no one could really get mad. She’s beautiful, sharp, magnetic, even brilliant, but it’s hard to engage with her enough to remember her through your headache in the morning.
Females begins with a provocative opening passage, a litany testifying to the universality of femaleness:
Everyone is female...there are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets… sex between females is no better or worse than any other kind of sex, because no other kind of sex is possible...the 1 percent is 100 percent female. The entire Supreme Court is female… all the dead are female. All the dying, too...I am female. And you, dear reader, you are female, even—especially—if you are not a woman. Welcome. Sorry.
If femaleness is neither womanhood nor biologically determined, then what is it? Chu goes on to explain, setting up the central framework of the book, that femaleness is a state of self-negation experienced by everyone, regardless of gender. She defines as female “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another.” It’s relatively easy to set this up as a universal condition, one we all experience and engage with repeatedly over the course of our lives, for everyone can, to some extent, relate to the experience of denying themselves to serve others. What’s less evident is why this should be referred to as “femaleness.” Chu’s answer to this is simple. “Why... an obviously gendered term like females? The answer is: because everyone already does. Women hate being female as much as anybody else; but unlike everybody else, we find ourselves its select delegates.” It’s a framework that makes sense in its movements. But what does it help us understand?
Andrea Long Chu correspondingly defines gender as “how one copes with being female.” She argues that we can see gender identities as the specific defense mechanisms that consciously or unconsciously develop as a reaction to one’s femaleness. This does allow for some new room in how we think about gender: if womanhood is not the same as femaleness, but a set of responses and defenses to femaleness, we can perhaps envision womanhood with more richness and complexity. The book prompts questions about how we can better think about gender beyond our tired, bioessentialist frameworks. When is femininity or womanhood an excision of the self? When are they something else? Similarly, we can think about masculinities, both cis and trans, in terms of how they interact with this idea of femaleness. When is masculinity a reactionary power grab in the face of the idea that really, we have no power, that we submit ourselves necessarily and perfectly to the wills of others? When can it be something else? Are trans people making genders out of dominance and submission? What would that even look like? These are compelling questions, to be sure, but they are not new. Interrogations of transmasculine dominance can be found in the work of academics like Henry Rubin and Jack Halberstam dating at least as far back as Halberstam’s 1988 work, Female Masculinities, and transfeminist writers like Susan Stryker and Kate Bornstein have been engaging with questions of femininity and power for decades. I don’t know that “femaleness” as defined by Chu adds something to conversations about gender, power, and repression that was not there before. And for all her efforts, attempting to redefine a word as loaded and ubiquitous as “female” may not be a particularly fruitful project. The specters of sex-based medical control, bioessentialist thought, and general misogyny haunt the word too forcefully to be successfully dismissed, and their rowdiness makes it difficult to use the redefinition as a meaningful tool of analysis.
Females is a whirlwind examination of power, erotics, performance, and desire. Chu’s references span The Matrix, sissy porn, Gigi Gorgeous, Freud, Phillip Glass, and most substantially, Valerie Solanas, writer of both the SCUM Manifesto and the play Up Your Ass. In fact, the book began as an essay about Up Your Ass, which traces the encounters of a queer sex worker as she goes about her day, quotes from which are interspersed throughout the text, usually without much in the way of explanation as to their relevance. Solanas was a highly controversial figure of the 1960s, best known for shooting Andy Warhol in 1968. Her works are as biting, divisive, and extreme as one might expect from a woman once described as “[establishing] a point so she can stab something or someone with it” in a letter to her editor. Solanas's company wears down the edges of Chu's own arguments, making us more willing to accept it when she says things like “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.”
The kinds of analyses I find most interesting are those grounded in material reality, which, in Females, only really take place in moments of memoir and cultural criticism. Chu is at her strongest when she is concerned less with theory than with psychological investigation, the mess of human wants and impulses carefully traced to gender. A significant portion of the book delves into sissy porn, a genre of pornography in which the (presumed assigned male at birth) viewer is subjected to feminizing submission. It is a cultural phenomenon that Chu provocatively says “made her trans.” She expands on this by saying that sissy porn provided a space for her to relate to her own “femaleness” in ways different than those she permitted herself before transition, when she, by her own account, lived as a violent and angry boy desperate for some modicum of power. Sissy porn provided a space for her to inhabit submissiveness—that is, femaleness—which eventually allowed her access to womanhood. I’m more interested in thinking about how “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is” resonates on an individual level than as a universal claim. I don’t want to say that she should stick to individual experience rather than theory, as it carries the implication that women (especially trans women) don’t have the authority to speak about any experience broader than their own, but in Females, Chu makes arguments based on such enormous claims that anything not demanding acceptance—as personal experience does—doesn’t necessarily land. Her discussion of The Matrix manages to combine the acuity of her memoir-work with the book’s bold conceit. It posits that “femaleness” is a tool with which we can better understand incel “red-pillers” and the alt-right’s worship of hyper-masculine power as backlash against their own (female) desire to cede control. It’s trenchant and compelling analysis, building on much of the work done in the last few years about the alt-right’s particular brand of toxic masculinity. What it offers that hasn’t really been explored before, however, boils down to a kind of psychological “gotcha”: oh, you hate women? That’s just because you actually want to be a girl.
What Females seems to offer above and beyond all else is a kind of transgender Freudianism. Quoting Solanas, she says that everyone has “pussy envy” (even trans men? really?) because everyone wants to be female—which is to say, everyone deep down wants to cede control completely. LikeFreudianism itself, it is interesting to some degree, but how much can we really get out of it? How true is it to life? Freud posited that all “women” have penis-envy, so jealous of the power phallically symbolized that they either developed a “masculinity reaction formation” and became unladylike or embraced their own passive inferiority. Chu posits that all people are “female,” existing in a state that desires self-negation instinctively and either submits to that impulse or lashes out violently as a reaction. Can we really say that masculinity is an attempt to seize control as a reaction to symbolic castration? Can we really say that “all gender is internalized misogyny,” as Chu claims? While Freud is mentioned in Females, it is only to uncritically relate his theory of the castration fetish to sissy porn. It’s hard, then, not to compare Chu to Freud, especially since she does not critique his work in any way. Females is based on a series of unevidenced sweeping claims, and the application of these claims brings up interesting questions that we have, largely, already been wrestling with. We can define and redefine words until our keyboards bleed, come up with shocking theories and let them out to play. So what?
Females is not a book that provides readers with much more than an intellectual exercise. People will talk about Females; they will do so for a long time. Queer and trans and feminist scholars will delicately pull apart every theoretical thread Chu has woven together here, examine how they all fit together. But does it offer readers (particularly trans ones) new and substantial ways to make sense of gender? I don’t think so. Perhaps it’s unfair of me to want a public intellectual’s book about gender to offer general readers something to hold onto in their own lives. Nonetheless, it’s what I want. What is the point of theory divorced of material significance? So what? Females is interesting. I can’t say it will stick with me.
Uma Dwivedi is a writer and a Sociology major, but mostly, they’re thinking about cable-knit sweaters.