Thesis: “Everyone is Female and Everyone Hates it”

the crux of this book really does come down to how much you are willing to let Long Chu take you for a ride: i like her theory of gender, her bio-ontology of femaleness which is pretty tightly constructed. even tho there are maybe a half-dozen points where i was like “why” and “says who”, i don’t think that she is being arbitrary or even wooly. at the same time, femaleness as totality kind of runs itself down, and by the end of the book a certain semantic satiation has set in, which yes i think is part of what the book’s de/re-mystification machinery is orientated towards accomplishing but also i wonder if, actually i think that in doing so, it obscures some important sui generis qualities on the part of maleness to equate all positions and logics of power, domination, subjectification, objectification, orientation to femaleness. the institutions of armies, creation of boys in particular, as fundementally female runs the risk of being understood as merely female, producing a certain kind of vanishing male, as it were, where specific analysis of patriarchy’s recruitment/conscription and reproduction could have been explored. that is to say, yes everyone is female, but part of the architecture of femaleness is the way some/all are called on/forced to also be Not Female, etc. see especially 11-14 on the book’s thesis, 18-21 on style. See also pg. 34, which argues that Valerie locates herself at the vanishing point of gender.

There are no good female poets, simply because there are no good poets.

Framing Device: Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass, SCUM

The close reading of Up Your Ass and SCUM were excellent touchstones, most especially (perhaps exclusively?) as objects of analysis by a transgender theorist. I feel inspired to mimic this technique in my thesis RE the Gospels.

“There’s a much more obvious interpretation, of course: that the little boy, forced by the abyssal glimpse of female genitalia to consider the possibility that his own penis will be removed, secretly finds the idea arousing. “Women…don’t have penish envy,” Valerie fumes in SCUM. “Men have pussy envy.” As usual, she was right. Indeed, the castration complex is easily mistaken for the fear that one will be castrated; in fact, it is the fear that one, having been castrated, will like it. Pussy envy is therefore not the mutually exclusive opposite of penis envy, but a universal desire atop which the latter develops as a reactionary formation: Everyone does their best to want power, because deep down, no one wants it at all.” (24-25).

Long Chu elucidates Freudian concepts precisely by outdoing Freud, by pushing further into the profound reversals which may or may not undergird the structure of the psyche. I find her analysis challenging, invigorating, and occasionally horrifying, a kind of angry stilted leg-locked horror which usually means 1. that the text is really onto something and 2. that i’m not quite ready, willing, and/or able to process it, though such capacity may be just out of reach. see also the depiction of narcissism (26-27).

The text talks a lot about misogyny and its place undergirding femininity and i think sometimes Long Chu cashes checks she hasn’t fully backed up when she repurposes such mysoginy for her own ostensibly constructive ends, see esp. the section’s end on pg. 30.

Fundamental Objection—(Quint)essentialist definitions used by Long Chu necessarily make Females as totalizing a text as the ontosex it discusses, though of course the former counter-oscillates and cuts against the later in interesting ways. The presumption of an essence, eg pg. 31, is where Long Chu most frequently loses me, I’m afraid, ultradox existentialist that i am. pg. 48 has a good point about essentialism =/= untrue, and fair, but insufficient for some of the other cases.

A female is one who has eaten the loathing of another…Gender is not just the mysoginistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalization itself, the self’s gentle suicide in the name of someone else’s desire, someone else’s narcissism. (pg. 35)

…see the same page on social construction, the unique quality of gender as outward-pointing, always expressing the desire of another. this second person quality of the self is rather interesting, a rather theo-tragic quality which is repeated on page 38 vis-a-vis truth about oneself, the ontological secondary/johny-come-late nature of consent and ethics vis-a-vis being. would like to do a theological reading of this section

!Theological Reading of Females

“Hold still, we are going to do your portrait, so that you can begin looking like it right away.” (MacKinnon, quoted in Females pg 37).

The part about Jamie Loftus eating Infinite Jest was pretty funny but, again, there was a meanstreak in Long Chu’s analysis i didn’t like, that Loftus was necessarily “wasn’t just performing female stupidity; she was also literally being a stupid female.” silly, yes, as Loftus herself declaims, but stupid? idk Andrea you’re kinda reaching here.

Etymology of female and male 44-45 pretty interesting.

! “Heaven’s Performance-Enhancing Drugs” — pretty funny, good Div-Fi idea. pg. 47.

Part 2