Poet Kay Gabriel Reviews Andrea Long Chu's Females

Poet and essayist Kay Gabriel takes on Andrea Long Chu's new book, Females (Verso, 2019), at Los Angeles Review of Books. "Her bit ... is contained in two theses," writes Gabriel, "that 'everyone is female' — not in the everyday sense of that word — and that 'everyone hates it.'" More:

...Chu’s two theses don’t concern biological sex at all, she says. She means “female” in an idiosyncratic — as she says, ontological — sense. Being female means “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. […] To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.” Chu is not the first person to describe this experience. In fact, she taps into a well-mined philosophical vein. In the Kantian tradition, Chu just describes heteronomy, the experience of being subject to another’s will. In the language of psychoanalysis — significantly closer to Chu’s own territory, given her lexicon of desire — she describes castration.

Jacques Lacan’s formulation that “desire is always the desire of/for the Other [le désir de l’Autre]” presents a version of the same thesis: to be a desiring subject means to be confronted with a social world that you inherit, and that shapes, constrains, and continually exceeds the desire you have toward it. In that regard, the six or so chapters at the center of Chu’s book on incels, sex, and pornography addiction are straightforwardly a series of footnotes to a Lacanian theory of castration: tops turn into bottoms, powerful men are always begging for sex, anyone who claims command of the phallus actually wants to get fucked, et cetera. From whichever perspective, becoming a subject means pursuing limited means of agency in the midst of vast external determination.

Chu isn’t the first to understand this relationship between self and other as somehow violent, either. Following a certain materialist tradition — from Du Bois, Fanon, Silvia Federici, or David Harvey — you could just as easily describe the experience of “[letting] someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense” as a dispossession...

Read on at LARB.