A groundbreaking exploration of gender and desire from the Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic
With a New Afterword by the Author
“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—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. In a new afterword, Chu reflects on the book’s reception, the growing anti-trans movement in America, and the continuing need for a radical theory of desire.
ABA IndieBound Bestseller
What People Are Saying
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, Transgender Nonfiction
“A lucid meditation on desire as the force shaping our identities, the paradoxes of liberation politics, and her own gender transition.” Johanna Fateman, Bookforum
“[A] brief and blazing treatise.” Thora Siemsen, The Nation
“Reading Andrea Long Chu feels a bit like being on the fault line of an earthquake—the ground is undeniably shifting.” Callie Hitchcock, The New Republic
“Beneath the veneer of Females’ provocation, those indefensible ideas, it is a surprisingly tender book that aims to tend to a universal ache: the frayed knot of selfhood, desire and power through which, Chu argues, we might try to see ourselves and each other more clearly.” Marissa Lorusso, NPR
“Gleefully contrarian.” The Believer
“One of the most exciting critics working today.” Lila Shapiro, New York Magazine
“[A] sweeping provocation, what fascinates is where it leads … the flash of insight produced by a well-thrown-knife.” Julian Lucas, Harper’s
“Andrea Long Chu is one of the disrupters.” Stephanie Burt, Atlantic Monthly
About the Author
Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic at New York magazine. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2023, and Females was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. She is the author of Authority: Essays.
