FEMALES - ANDREA LONG CHU

A trendy book. It took me a long time, like months and months, to get this one from the library. As you can imagine, trans issues are popular here in Seattle and Chu is certainly the biggest new name in this world (pop-theory). It’s easy to see why Chu got in this position. She’s smart as fuck and funny (I love the tweet: “hi i’d like to return this pikachu it’s detective”) but, most crucially, she writes in a very polemic, dramatic way. She cops to this in the book, a book that is largely a dissection and consideration of the various works of Valerie Solanas, who was nothing if not direct. Chu readily admits that her preferred genre is manifesto. This book doesn’t really fuck around. It states it’s thesis, “Everyone is female and everyone hates it.” early on and really pushes it to the limit, perhaps beyond. She’s got sort of a Fran Lebowtiz or Zizek energy where you want to hear their opinion on whatever because it’ll always be provocative and original. She’s got smart things to say about THE MATRIX  for instance. The book is really about desire; Chu theorizes females as, by definition, an object of desire, “To be female is, in every sense, to become what someone wants. At bottom, everyone is a sissy.” Even leaving behind the excellent pun, this exploration about desire and the messiness of our desires was the most interesting part to me. Chu correctly points out that most desires aren’t desired. Now this is really helpful in terms of thinking about transness and the relation between desire and gender and orientation, but even more interesting when we think about the way technology will intersect with desire in the future. Already we have the vast increase in the medical procedures available to trans folks. Outside of this book, Chu might be most famous for her “my new vagina won’t make me happy” essay. But the sex-robots are on the horizon and what that will do to our desires, especially our icky and unwanted desire, is going to be fascinating. Thinking about orientation and gender and sex makes much more sense from a prospective of “desires” where we all contain multitudes some of which might be contradictory, than from our current paradigm of “identity” where one is uncovering and broadcasting a “true” self that cannot be denied.  Chu is on the cutting edge of this thinking. I hope she ends up writing a dozen books or gets a TV show. As a final quick aside, it’s a weird quirk that Chu was born in Chapel Hill, grew up in Asheville then went to college at Duke. I wished she’d written more about North Carolina and how those locations in particular operate within NC and the South at large but it’s perhaps too niche a topic. 69 Manifestos