Andrea Long Chu’s 2019 book, Females, is not an easy read. One’s reading pleasure is not helped by the fact that Chu is a walking and talking provocation. Her book, a short essay of barely 100 pages, is a paean to Valerie Solanas, a bizarre figure of the 1960s. In 1965, Solanas began writing the SCUM Manifesto, a pamphlet whose argument was that nearly every form of social wretchedness, from war, poverty and work, is directly related to men’s drive to hide their social and biological mediocrity. The SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men) was published in 1967 as a polemical essay written in the form of an extreme, satirical call for the overthrow of male-dominated society. It mixes bitter personal denunciation, provocation and anarchic rhetoric.
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.
[1] The ABC of Materialist Dialectics (December 1939) http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/12/abc.htm
[2] Dialectic and Logic-www.marxists.org/archive/plekhanov/xx/dialectic.htm
A Trumpet of Sedition 