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I'm going to reproduce a text that I sent to the person who recommended Females to me at about 25% in:
I started Females, btw. Finding it interesting so far. Reviews on Goodreads are a nightmare. People really missed 1. That it's written in response to Valerie Solanas's ideas, 2. That Chu is committing to a bit and making provocative claims in order to explore ideas, a la Solanas, and 3. That "females" in the book does not mean AFAB people, it's an ontological category and socially constructed and in the scope of the book, includes everyone. And it's interesting that they miss these things, because they are explicitly stated in the first quarter of the book.
You'd think TERFs would have to hand it to a book that says "Janice Raymond was kind of right," but no!
(To quote Andrea herself: "That's a joke, of course, whether or not you find it funny.")
Since it's so short, I'll give the obviously bad-faith one-stars the benefit of the doubt and believe that this time, at least, they actually read the whole book. They just (willfully?) missed the entire point and apparently suffer from a tragic condition that renders them incapable of discerning when a writer is stating her own opinion or beliefs and when she is stating an assertion made by another author or another work.
So what did I think? I found Females interesting, but up its own ass (pun intended) in the way a lot of highly specific academic writing often is. The person who recommended it says that she interprets this quality as intentional, an effort to be full of oneself metaphorically, as the condition of being female in society is to be full of others, metaphorically. And I think this is a valid enough reading, even if I didn't arrive at the same conclusion, myself.
Where I get hung up the most is in wondering whether it's all that worthwhile to expend such time and energy engaging with the work of Valerie Solanas. YMMV. Not mad that I read it.
I started Females, btw. Finding it interesting so far. Reviews on Goodreads are a nightmare. People really missed 1. That it's written in response to Valerie Solanas's ideas, 2. That Chu is committing to a bit and making provocative claims in order to explore ideas, a la Solanas, and 3. That "females" in the book does not mean AFAB people, it's an ontological category and socially constructed and in the scope of the book, includes everyone. And it's interesting that they miss these things, because they are explicitly stated in the first quarter of the book.
You'd think TERFs would have to hand it to a book that says "Janice Raymond was kind of right," but no!
(To quote Andrea herself: "That's a joke, of course, whether or not you find it funny.")
Since it's so short, I'll give the obviously bad-faith one-stars the benefit of the doubt and believe that this time, at least, they actually read the whole book. They just (willfully?) missed the entire point and apparently suffer from a tragic condition that renders them incapable of discerning when a writer is stating her own opinion or beliefs and when she is stating an assertion made by another author or another work.
So what did I think? I found Females interesting, but up its own ass (pun intended) in the way a lot of highly specific academic writing often is. The person who recommended it says that she interprets this quality as intentional, an effort to be full of oneself metaphorically, as the condition of being female in society is to be full of others, metaphorically. And I think this is a valid enough reading, even if I didn't arrive at the same conclusion, myself.
Where I get hung up the most is in wondering whether it's all that worthwhile to expend such time and energy engaging with the work of Valerie Solanas. YMMV. Not mad that I read it.