Andrea Long Chu: Females: A Concern
Verso, 2019
Based in New York City, Andrea Long Chu is an essayist and critic whose writings have been credited with launching a “second wave” in trans studies. Females: A Concern is her first book-length work, which provides readings of contemporary culture—both popular and niche—through female-ness. Only here, “female” refers to self-negation—a state “against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels.”
While Chu is the book’s author, she has effectively summoned the late Valerie Solanas as a guide. This small book began as an essay on Solanas’ (1965), an experimental play about a young misanthropic sex worker named Bongi Perez that would not be produced until 2000—well after Solanas’ impoverished death and her posthumous mythologization as radical, as violent. Chu wields the parodic play’s plot, characters and themes as an intertextual ally for may be fantastical, but the seriousness required to commit to it is always real” (my emphasis).
