A Review of Females, by Andrea Long Chu (Verso, October 2019)
One of the few things I can say for certain about Andrea Long Chu’s Females is that its author really wanted to write a book. Much of the writing in this pamphlet is extremely impressive: sharp, terse, witty. At its best, it communicates a breathless enthusiasm for the act of writing, one which is too often lacking in nonfiction. But, if it is clear that Chu wanted to write a book, it isn’t so obvious that she knew quite what book to write, or what she was writing it for. Perhaps the most charitable reading one could offer of Females is that it’s an autobiography. But as a piece of life-writing, it is, at best, elliptical. It tells us that it began as an essay about Valerie Solanas’s play Up Your Ass, and it has some interesting things to say about Up Your Ass. In fact, the passages that discuss Solanas and her work are by far the most stimulating. But, as a work of literary criticism, its lack of focus prevents it from saying anything of substance about the material it discusses. The last option remaining, unfortunately, is to read Females as a work of “theory” — gender theory, or political theory, or philosophy — or, even worse yet, a manifesto. It has the misfortune of being structured like, and sometimes even sounding like, a text that makes claims about the nature of reality. It begins with its thesis statement, a statement which is repeated, defined, expanded, iterated upon. Sometimes, an attempt is even made to provide evidence for it. “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.” Before I discuss the precise nature of this claim and the evidence offered to support it, a few objections must be addressed. The book’s blurb describes it as “genre-defying”, and Chu occasionally refers to how “far-fetched” and “tendentious” her thesis is. Surely, the exploration of the idea, the literary exercise, the aesthetic experience, this is what matters, not the truthfulness of the argument. This, I would be inclined to agree with, if the author of Females did not specifically deny it. “Jokes are always serious”, writes Chu. Drawing a direct comparison between herself and Solanas, she asserts that they “share […] a preference for indefensible claims, for following our ambivalence to the end”. Solanas, infamously, revealed herself to be dead serious about what she wrote. It follows that Chu must be as well. And a claim such as “everyone is female, and everyone hates it” is one which is worth taking seriously. As I’ve mentioned, Chu is a good writer, and her argument is made strenuously and assertively enough that it has the potential to persuade. But persuade this reviewer, it did not. In a pivotal passage, Chu defines what she means by “female”.
“I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. […] To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. […] When I talk about females, I am not referring to biological sex, though I’m not referring to gender, either. I’m referring to something that might as well be sex, the way that reactionaries describe it (permanent, unchanging, etc.), but whose nature is ontological, not biological. Femaleness is not an anatomical or genetic characteristic of an organism, but rather a universal existential condition, the one and only structure of human consciousness. To be is to be female: the two are identical.”
As painful as it is for me to do, I quote this passage at length because it is the single most important (literally, the “defining”) moment of her argumentation. Some readers might find this definition fluid, perhaps even compelling. But, unfortunately for Chu, and perhaps for myself, I have received some amount of philosophical training. I know that “something whose nature is ontological” and “a universal existential condition” are not the same thing. In fact, I know that “universal” and “existential” do not really belong next to each other, especially not in a sentence like the one Chu wrote. I know that, if there is a “one and only structure of human consciousness”, it is neither “ontological” nor “universal existential”. These terms, as they appear in Females, are absolutely meaningless. They occur only as set dressing, their accumulation serving to give the appearance of philosophical substance. In addition, I know that the idea that we are irreversibly at the whim of the desires of another is not one that Chu came up with. It is clearly an iteration upon Levinas’s encounter with the Other, Sartre’s être-pour-autrui, Heidegger’s Mitsein, Hegel’s Anerkennung. While it is not my contention that Chu should have read all of these writers, I do think that it’s not unreasonable to suggest that before writing a book about this topic, she might have enquired whether other people have written about it before. In fact, I sincerely hope that she’s read Hegel; she wrote a whole article about him. Perhaps Chu is avoiding engaging with these male authors because they serve only to elide the gendered framing that she is advancing. And yet, their writings on this specific topic manage to be less misogynistic than Chu’s book, because they often resist the temptation to identify submission entirely with femaleness. They thus helpfully disprove Chu when she justifies her decision to “continue to refer to [this condition] with an obviously gendered term like females” by claiming that “everyone already does”. Not that said disproving was needed: it is plainly ridiculous to justify the perpetuation of bigotry with the fact that said bigotry already exists. Having thus shown any claim Females could make to being a philosophical text to be utterly groundless, we come to the nature of this pamphlet as a work of political theory, specifically gender theory. Here, things look even bleaker. Females’ use of its titular term is only the beginning of its many acts of political irresponsibility. Most defensible, perhaps, is Chu’s use of the terms “spade” and “sissy”, whose slur-adjacent nature she acknowledges in passing. Much more egregious is her use of Gigi Gorgeous’s deadname, and a passage in which she uses he/him pronouns to describe Gorgeous before her transition, with no apparent concern with whether Gorgeous would approve of being written about in such terms. Again, this passage could perhaps have passed as inoffensive if it did not occur in the shadow of Females’ greatest irresponsibility. If you were to read this pamphlet without paying too much attention, and thus missed its single mention of nonbinary people, you would be forgiven for thinking that Chu believes that the only types of people in existence are cis women, trans women, and cis men. Trans men are not mentioned in Females, not once. That a trans person would dare to write an entire pamphlet dedicated to claiming that “everyone is female”, and not for a second consider that there are many people to whom such an imposition of femaleness has caused immeasurable harm, is beyond comprehension. It is ethically abhorrent. What’s more, what little Females has to say about gender, apart from being stated in repulsive terms, is neither novel nor interesting. It appears that Chu’s target readership is young internet users, judging by the space she dedicates to discussing the insufficiency and hollowness of such statements as “your gender is valid” and “gender is socially constructed”. These are hardly the core tenets of gender theory; they make for very low-hanging fruits. The times where Chu comes closest to making an actual argument for her central claim are equally flat and unimpressive.
“gender is something other people have to give you. Gender exists, if it is to exist at all, only in the structural generosity of others. […] You do not get to consent to yourself, even if you might deserve the chance. You do not get to consent to yourself — a definition of femaleness.”
A passage such as this one might, again, impress someone who has never read or heard of gender theory up to this point. Unfortunately, this is little more than a concise summary of the introduction to Judith Butler’s Undoing Gender, with the notable difference that Butler manages to discuss the tensions at the heart of asking for one’s gender to be socially recognised without Chu’s irresponsible, tortuous, and unsound use of the term “femaleness”. And this is really the heart of the problem: Chu is really bad at writing about gender. Sheer incompetence is the only explanation for a text like this. One final example. In a passage about incels, Chu argues that their theory of the feminisation of the Western male is in fact an accidental revelation of their inherently “female”, desire-dependent nature. It should be plain to even an inexperienced reader that this is a dismal line of argument. Incels theorise that their true (male) nature has been masked by the feminisation process of a culture dominated by feminist interests. Chu argues instead that masculinity is a mask under which incels are attempting to hide their true (female) nature. Neither side offers any actual evidence for their claims about the true nature of the Western man, whether male or female. With such a standard of argument, when Chu begins a sentence with “if everyone is female — and I’m hoping you’re starting to believe that they are —” the bathos is so overwhelming as to become hilarious. Females is very enjoyable at times. Sometimes, it is even thought-provoking. But the thoughts it provokes only lead one to realise that this is a book that utterly fails to justify its own existence. In the end, it is a book that says very little, and what it does say is wrong, uninspiring, and harmful.