One of today's most original thinkers on gender offers a provocative take on the current feminist movement, exploring "desire as the force shaping our identifies, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition" (Bookforum).

"[Females] is always smart, sometimes sincere, and unpredictable about when it will pinch your arm or clutch its nails around your heart." --Vice

Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.

Females is 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. She even has a few barbs reserved for feminists like herself. Each step of the way, she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state 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 her innermost self with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Verso
Published: 03/04/2025
ISBN: 9781804298213
Pages: 128
Weight: 0.81lbs