Everyone is female. I mean very simply that everyone wants to be a woman. What one does with this desire is what we call gender.

So begins Andrea Long Chu’s investigation into gender and desire, females and bodies, sex and the self, radical dreams and philosophical pessimisms. Feminism, Chu argues, is an untenable claim, and when you make an untenable claim, your desire is showing, like a shy tattoo peeking out from a sleeve.

Drawing inspiration from Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and her forgotten play Up Your Ass, this book in numbered theses whips through a variety of ugly objects (films, manifestos, performance art, psychoanalysis, porn, and the alt-right) to give a portrait of femaleness as a universal category of self-ablation against which all politics-even feminist politics-revolts.

A provocative and searching text from our most exciting new public intellectual. Chu wears her heart on her sleeve with wit, style, and a searching grace.