An exploration of gender and desire from our most exciting new
public intellectual
“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—the woman 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. Or maybe she’s just projecting.
A thrilling new
voice who has been credited with launching the “second wave” of
trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring
herself with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.