Females

Andrea Long Chu argues that femaleness is defined not by anatomy or gender identity, but by a psychic surrender to the desires of others. Drawing on Valerie Solanas’s Scum Manifesto and psychoanalytic theory, Chu posits that everyone is female because everyone sacrifices their own autonomy to satisfy someone else’s expectations. The text analyzes the 1960s underground art scene, the dynamics of transitioning, and the internal logic of the incel movement to illustrate this universal state of passivity and self-negation.

Readers interested in radical gender theory and contemporary cultural criticism will find this a provocative challenge to standard liberal definitions of identity. Those who feel dissatisfied with biological or social-constructionist views of womanhood read this to see a more nihilistic, psychological framework. The audience walks away with a vocabulary for discussing gender as a form of ontological debt and a structural lack of self rather than an innate essence or a purely political category.