Andrea Long Chu’s Females is a polemical intervention in
contemporary debates about sex, gender, and desire. It also advances
provocative claims about gender as desire, about the social meanings attached
to “female” and “male,” and about the politics of gender transition and
identification. Chu frames the book as a polemic. She believes that gender is,
first and foremost, a matter of desire. She challenges liberal and academic
categories (identity as a social role or cognitive self-definition) and treats
“females” as desired as such, or as desired by desiring to be such. The tone is
literary, aphoristic and intentionally provocative.
There is nothing wrong with the polemical form that can
clarify. But when it substitutes rhetorical flair for systematic analysis, it
risks leaving political questions unanswered: what class interests are served
by particular ideas? What organising program follows from a claim about desire?
Andrea Long Chu’s Females is a polemical intervention in
contemporary debates about sex, gender, and desire. It advances provocative
claims about gender as desire, about the social meanings attached to “female”
and “male,” and about the politics of gender transition and identification. The
book, at best, should be seen as opening up a conversation. Still, it should be
approached as a theoretical and literary provocation that intersects with
questions of identity, social reproduction and cultural authority.
Its tone is deliberately shocking; it advocates the
abolition of male authority and, in parts, violent and exclusionary measures
against men. Published in 2019, Historically, it has often been read as an
expression of radical, petty‑bourgeois feminism and cultural
nihilism rather than as a program for socialist transformation. It should be
noted that Solanes acted out the logic of her argument in 1968, when she shot artist
Andy Warhol. She pleaded guilty to attempted murder by reason of insanity and
was imprisoned in a psychiatric hospital for three years after a diagnosis of
paranoid schizophrenia. It is hoped that Chu does not follow in her idol's
footsteps.
Chu’s petty‑bourgeois subjectivity and
voluntarism echo the Scum Manifesto's individualism, moral denunciation, and
moralistic remedies. Chu’s thinking starts from the premise of subjective
privileging of desire over social reproduction. A Marxist method begins from
the primacy of social being: “it is not the consciousness of men that
determines their existence, but their social being that determines their
consciousness”. Sex and gender under
capitalism are rooted in relations of production, the division of labour, and
the social reproduction of labour power, and are not reducible to individual
desire.
Chu’s political thinking mirrors the tendencies that the
Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky identified and fought against in the late 1930s—eclecticism
and petty‑bourgeois opposition to capitalism that replaced
scientific analysis with moralising and substituted voluntarist acts for
organised class strategy.
Trotsky warned that rejection of dialectical materialism
leads to political confusion and opportunism, writing, “Vulgar thought operates
with such concepts as capitalism, morals, freedom, workers’ state, etc., as
fixed abstractions, presuming that capitalism is equal to capitalism, morals
are equal to morals, etc. Dialectical thinking analyses all things and
phenomena in their continuous change, while determining in the material
conditions of those changes that critical limit beyond which ‘A’ ceases to be
‘A’, a workers’ state ceases to be a workers’ state.
The fundamental flaw of vulgar thought lies in the fact that
it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of a reality which
consists of eternal motion. Dialectical thinking gives concepts, by means of
closer approximations, corrections, concretisations, a richness of content and
flexibility; I would say even a succulence which, to a certain extent, brings
them close to living phenomena. Not capitalism in general, but a given
capitalism at a given stage of development. Not a workers’ state in general,
but a given workers’ state in a backward country in an imperialist
encirclement, etc.”[1]
Chu treats desire and aesthetics as primary causal forces. She
wholeheartedly rejects the materialist analysis that situates erotic norms
within capitalist social relations. The founder of Russian Marxism, G.
Plekhanov’s dialectical critique of idealism warned against elevating inward
“notions” above concrete social relations, writing “The utopian socialists
regarded 'human nature' from an abstract point of view and appraised social
phenomena in accordance with the formula 'Yes is yes, and no is no.” Property
either was or was not conformable to human nature; the monogamic family was or
was not conformable to human nature; and so on. Regarding human nature as
unchangeable, utopian socialists were justified in hoping that, among all
possible systems of social organisation, there must be one which was more
conformable than any other to that nature. Hence their wish to discover this
best of all possible systems, the one most conformable to human nature.
Every founder of a school believed he had discovered it,
which is why he advocated adopting his particular utopia. Mars introduced the
dialectical method into socialism, thus making socialism a science and giving
the death blow to utopianism. Marx does not appeal to human nature; he does not
know of any social institutions that conform to it or do not. Already in his
Misère de la Philosophie, we find this significant and characteristic criticism
of Proudhon: “Monsieur Proudhon is unaware that history in its entirety is
nothing other than a continuous modification of human nature.” (Misère de la Philosophie,
Paris, 1896, p. 204).[2]
One of Chu’s more controversial claims is that trans
identity and transition are intelligible as responses to desire and to the
aesthetic, or, to put it another way, the calculation of gender. She treats the
surgical transition and identification as a trans as acts shaped by the logic
of wanting to be read or valued as a particular gender. Her reduction of transition
to an aesthetic desire risks erasing the material conditions that compel or
enable transitions—such as access to medical care, labour market pressures,
policing and workplace vulnerability.
To summarise, Chu’s work is culturally resonant because it
exposes real anger against patriarchy, but Chu is not a Marxist or even close
to one. Her books and essays, instead of challenging the capitalist system,
channel it in ways that can fragment working‑class solidarity. The contemporary
task is to understand gender oppression as bound up with capitalist property
relations and state power.
Chu often prefers paradox, aphorism and literary provocation
over systematic argument. She uses paradox to unsettle both mainstream feminism
and trans‑affirming orthodoxy. Her thrust, if you pardon the pun, is toward
rethinking gender as situated primarily in desire and aesthetic valuation,
leaving open complex ethical and political implications rather than prescribing
collective programs.
