BRIEF--JUST UNDER one hundred 7" x 4.5" pages--but provocative, hard to put down and hard (I expect) to forget. Certainly capable of starting a discussion, or several.
"Everyone is female," states the first sentence. That is, any of us, whatever our other gendered circumstances, will at least sometimes be subject to a "psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another" (11). Accordingly, "Everyone is female, and everyone hates it" (11), "all women are. females, but not all females are women" (12), and "To be for women, imagined as full human beings, is always to be against females. In this sense, feminism opposes misogyny precisely as much as it always expresses it" (14).
Chu is just getting started. However, Females is by no means one of those manifestoes that piles one dry assertion atop another. Much of it turns on an analysis of Up Your Ass, a play by Valerie Solanas, she who shot Andy Warhol, and Chu's feminism is of the SCUM Manifesto variety--anarchic, ribald, outrageous, hilarious--rather than that of, say, Carol Gilligan.
(Judging from Chu's notes, the original manuscript of this play is held by the Andy Warhol Museum Archives in Pittsburgh. How did that happen?)
Chu is a trans woman; does that put her in a different relationship to the feminist tradition? I don't know. It may account. for why we seem to be both within and outside that tradition as we read Females. "Sissy porn did make me trans," Chu writes, and continues--
Wanting to be a woman was something that descended upon me, like a tongue of fire, or an infection--or a mental illness, if you believe the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, where gender dysphoria can be found sandwiched between frigidity and pyromania. The implication is obvious: No one in their right mind would want to be female.
Which, remember is all of us.
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