Podcast appearances and mentions of andrea long chu

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Andrea Long Chu about Authority a collection of previously published and new essays and criticism. Authority interrogates what it means to be a critic today, analyzing the work that the critic does in interpreting a book, film, or TV show for us as well as how the status of the critic has developed from antiquity to the present. Andrea, Medaya, and Eric talk about finding one's voice as a critic, how the critic approaches an object of analysis, and the increasingly siloed role of the full-time critic in an era of tectonic shifts in the media landscape. 

Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher speak with Andrea Long Chu about "Authority," a collection of previously published and new essays and criticism. "Authority" interrogates what it means to be a critic today, analyzing the work that the critic does in interpreting a book, film, or TV show for us as well as how the status of the critic has developed from antiquity to the present. Andrea, Medaya, and Eric talk about finding one's voice as a critic, how the critic approaches an object of analysis, and the increasingly siloed role of the full-time critic in an era of tectonic shifts in the media landscape.

Andrea Long Chu was once one of Brittany's favorite Sex and the City bloggers, and she's now a Pulitzer-winning critic. Andrea lends her critical eye to everything from the TV show Yellowstone to the work of Sally Rooney to pro-Palestinian protests and free speech. And she does it with wit, style, and fearlessness. Brittany chats with Andrea about her new book, Authority - a collection of some of Andrea's best work, along with two new essays. They discuss why art is a "fossil record" of desire, what kind of authority critics have, and why we might need to rethink what criticism should do for us.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We discuss Andrea Long Chu's divisive book Females on this week's episode of Ms Informed. Listen now to stay smart, the easy way.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit aspecialplace.substack.comOn this live-streamed (and members-only) episode, the girls/women ponder the merits of yet another titillating essay by Pulitzer Prize winner and aspiring female Andrea Long Chu, who argues that transition should be understood and accepted as a matter of choice, of a “freedom of sex”. Has Chu finally gone too far? Or is this a preview of our glorious genderf*ck future?Then, Sarah finally reveals her misogynoir, appalling Meghan, who is still reeling from her last encounter with Intersectionality Twitter. Finally, they discuss yet another essay by Grazie Sophia Christie, a rising star in the personal essay genre (so say we). Is petty female envy the reason women will not take us to Mars? Did you know? Paying subscribers get bonus episodes AND unedited livestream videos! You read that right: For only $7/month, you can witness a more authentic version of us, feeling closer to your she-ros than ever before. Is this the beginning of a true (parasocial) love? Subscribe to find out. LinksFreedom of Sex The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodiesMy Beautiful Friend

The argument for allowing children to change their sex goes far beyond avoiding the harms of body dysmorphia. Andrea Long Chu, book critic for New York magazine, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss why she believes it is an inalienable right to choose one's sex, why children need to have agency in their own lives, and why the political left and right have their arguments for and against it wrong. Her article is “Why Trans Kids Have the Right to Change Their Biological Sex.”

In a recent article for New York Magazine, Andrea Long Chu asserts the belief that kids should have the freedom to change their bodies and sexual identity at any time for any reason. In this episode, we discuss what that means for the direction of culture and society, and how Christians can courageously and faithfully uphold the traditional sexual ethic.

Model, actress and friend of the pod Salomé joins the ladies to discuss Andrea Long Chu's moral case for trans kids and the TikTok ban.

Tuck chats with with writer Jamie Lauren Keiles (he/him). Topics include: Writing a nonbinary history book that eschews common trans identity rhetoric  Reporting on phallo and blowjob jokes for the New York Times Magazine  Why Jamie will never run another Most Transgender Name Competition  Why everyone in the trans community is annoying in different beautiful ways :) :) :) Plus: “Fake bi to real bi,” best novelty license plates, and Chaz Bono shopping in Miami? This Week in Gender: There's new work by Andrea Long Chu, Beans Velocci, Paisley Currah and Judith Butler… but we instead quote Sawyer Kemp, Lola Pellegrino and Foz Meadows.  Find Jamie at jamielaurenkeiles.com and on Instagram and Twitter. Submit a piece of Theymail: a small message or ad that we'll read on the show. Today's message was from Southpaw Cafe. We've got limited-edition Trans Day of Snack 2024 merch on sale this month, with proceeds benefiting our mutual aid fund. ~~ Join our Patreon (patreon.com/gender) to get access to our bonus podcasts, weekly newsletter, and other perks. Find our starter packs at genderpodcast.com. We're also on Instagram @gendereveal. Senior Producer: Ozzy Llinas Goodman Logo: Ira M. LeighMusic: Breakmaster CylinderAdditional Music: “Syriah” & “The Odd About It” by Blue Dot Sessions Sponsors: ShopEnby.com (code: GenderReveal) and DeleteMe (code: TUCK20)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit andrewsullivan.substack.comAbigail is an independent journalist and author. Her first book, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters, was a bestseller, and her new book is a bestseller even the NYT has had to recognize eventually. It's called Bad Therapy: Why The Kids Aren't Growing Up. She also has a substack, The Truth Fairy. Check it out.For two clips of our convo — on the news of UK restricting puberty blockers, and the harm that therapy can do to normal kids — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the brittle bones and teeth-splitting that result from puberty blockers; their effect on IQ; when blockers are necessary; the suicide canard with trans kids; the radio silence around Bostock; how 40 percent of kids are in some form of therapy — “awash in psychopathology”; kids publicizing their mental health on social media; How to Talk So Kids Will Listen; the work of Haim Ginott; “neurotic hovering parents” who rarely correct bad behavior; parents giving up authority; dysregulated kids; Abigail's upbringing; my tumultuous childhood; Gabor Maté; drug addiction and childhood trauma; iatrogenesis; smartphones; Covid; social emotional learning; why breathwork and mindfulness doesn't work for kids; how SSRIs can kill adolescent sex drive as it's developing; Richard Bing's study on convicts and PTSD; the benefits of therapy for adults; psychotherapy as a literary practice; how therapy has filled the void of religion; kids rushing to become “LGBTQ” because it's valorized; gay kids today are more accepted but more miserable; the parents who use their trans kids as props; the benefits of same-sex schools; the spike in days off for mental health; and the current cover-story by Andrea Long Chu.Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Richard Dawkins on religion, Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs, Adam Moss on the artistic process, and George Will on Trump and conservatism. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other pod comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

Released to subscribers: 25 Nov 2023 | For full episode, find us via https://patreon.com/newmodels & https://newmodels.substack.com _ The Girlstack w/ theorist Alex Quicho (NM74) A conversation with cultural theorist Alex Quicho. Building on the ideas of Tiqqun's 1999 anti-neoliberal treatise Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Andrea Long Chu's Females and Bogna Konior's work on the girl and the inhuman vis-a-vis the machinic, Quicho has developed a concept she calls the “Girlstack,” which, to borrow her words, models the “ultrasmooth, cybergothic, and angelic dimensions of the girl's natural habitat.” Quicho talks with us about it here. [To be clear… we're speaking of not actual girls or the experience of lived girlhood, but a socially constructed ideation of the girl . . . girl as a vehicle for selling a product, girl as a tool for manipulating entrenched power, girl as living currency, girl as desiring machine.] For more: https://amfq.xyz/ 
 Alex Quicho, “Everyone Is a Girl Online,” Wired (September 2023) Alex Quicho, Small Gods: Perspectives on the Drone (Zer0 Books, 2021)

Andrea Long Chu is a Pulitzer Prize–winning essayist and critic at New York magazine. Her book Females, an extended annotation of a lost play by Valerie Solanas, was published by Verso in 2019 and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction. Her writing has also appeared in n+1, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, Bookforum, Boston Review, Chronicle of Higher Education, 4Columns, and Jewish Currents. Recorded September 26, 2023 at the Shapiro Center at Wesleyan University Edited by Michele Moses Music by Dani Lencioni Art by Leanne Shapton Sponsored by the Shapiro Center for Creative Writing and Criticism at Wesleyan University, New York Review of Books, Lit Hub, and Knopf

This episode features writing from and about Gaza, and explores the imperative to write, between hope and hopelessness, at a time when words both seem to count enormously and to not be enough. Show NotesThis episode's cover art is by Chema Peral @chema_peralLetter from Gaza by Ghassan Kanafani was written in 1956.Mahmoud Darwish's Silence for the Sake of Gaza is part of his 1973 collection Journal of an Ordinary Grief. The poet Mosab Abu Toha has written about his arrest and his family's voyage out of GazaAtef Abu Seif's “Don't Look Left: A Diary of Genocide” is forthcoming from Comma PressFady Jouda's poetry collection [...] is forthcoming from Milkweed PressYou can read poetry in translation by Salim al-Naffar and Hiba Abu Nada, both killed under Israeli bombardment, at ArabLit. Other magazines that have been translating and sharing Palestinian poetry include Mizna, Fikra, LitHub, The Baffler, and Protean magazine.The book that was removed from the curriculum in Newark is the book Sonia Nimr co-wrote with Elizabeth Laird, A Little Piece of Ground. Ghassan Hages' essay “Gaza and the Coming Age of the Warrior” asks: “Is it ethical to write something ‘interesting' about a massacre as the massacre is unfolding?”Andrea Long Chu's essay “The Free Speech Debate is a Trap” calls for “fighting with words.”At the end of the episode, Basman Eldirawi reads his poem “Santa” in honor of Refaat Alareer, an educator and poet who was killed on December 7. #ReadforRefaat is part of a week of action being called for by the Publishers for Palestine collective. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're releasing our June live show from The Bell House in Brooklyn. Previously a patreon exclusive, we've decided to give the masses a peak at what treasures hide behind that little paywall of ours. It features an all-star lineup including Sabrina Wu, Josh Sharp, Aaron Jackson, and the Pulitzer Prize winning Andrea Long Chu. Wow! The anti-intellectual crowd is shaking in their stupid little boots! For access to all of our live show recordings as well as bonus episodes subscribe to our patreon at patreon.com/straightiolab and go to linktree.com/straightiolab to get tickets to our upcoming nationwide (plus canada) tour! See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Writer and critic Andrea Long Chu wanted to ask her family one simple question. The Dig Presents is edited by Liza Yeager and Mitchell Johnson, with editorial oversight from Daniel Denvir and Alex Lewis. Support The Dig at https://www.patreon.com/thedig. Listen the episode of Al Jazeera's The Take featuring Dig Presents reporter Omar Etman and his story, A Garden in Cairo, here.

This week, the girls take their DGAF-ery to the next level and talk about the elephant in the gender room: AGP. Culture critic Andrea Long Chu, who has described autogynephilia in graphic detail (while wisely avoiding the term itself), won a Pulitzer Prize. Does this mean we're finally allowed recognize the existence of something that gender activists say definitely doesn't exist? Meanwhile, Sarah gets tough on pronouns and Meghan visits Target and is SHOCKED by what she finds in the kids clothing section: The tackiest tee-shirts she's ever seen! Plus: Was Amanda Gorman's book really “banned” in Florida? Or is the “middle school library shelf” where books go to hide from a few unhinged parents? IN THE BONUS FOR PAYING MEMBERS ONLY, the girls reflect on last week's interview with sex work tycoon Aella, respond to listener complaints, and debate the pros, cons, and more cons of artificial wombs. Subscribe here to listen! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This week, the girls take their DGAF-ery to the next level and talk about the elephant in the gender room: AGP. Culture critic Andrea Long Chu, who has described autogynephilia in graphic detail (while wisely avoiding the term itself), won a Pulitzer Prize. Does this mean we're finally allowed recognize the existence of something that gender activists say definitely doesn't exist? Meanwhile, Sarah gets tough on pronouns and Meghan visits Target and is SHOCKED by what she finds in the kids clothing section: The tackiest tee-shirts she's ever seen!Plus: Was Amanda Gorman's book really “banned” in Florida? Or is the “middle school library shelf” where books go to hide from a few unhinged parents?IN THE BONUS FOR PAYING MEMBERS ONLY, the girls reflect on last week's interview with sex work tycoon Aella, respond to listener complaints, and debate the pros, cons, and more cons of artificial wombs. Subscribe here to listen!Watch the full episode on YouTube:LINKS:https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/24/opinion/sunday/vaginoplasty-transgender-medicine.htmlhttps://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-long-goodbye-andrea-long-chuhttps://www.nationalreview.com/news/no-florida-school-didnt-ban-amanda-gormans-poetry/https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/06/04/target-lgbtq-culture-wars/ This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aspecialplace.substack.com/subscribe

Andrea Long Chu has claimed that "everyone is female and everyone hates it", but what does that mean?Join us this for this very special 50th episode of Casement's Leftovers for a deep dive into one of our favourite theorists and writers, the recent Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu. Get ready for a new theory of gender that not has not only upended the field of gender studies, but also our way of thinking about what it is that makes us human.How are we all female? What part does desire play in our gender identity? And can sissy porn really make you trans? Helen also talks in depth for the first time on air about their own experience of gender, offering an insight into their conception of what it means to be non-binary. All this and more in this new episode on one of the world's best living writers. You've Been Femaled. Support the show

Episode Reading List:* From Queer to Gay to Queer, James Kirchick* How Hannah Arendt's Zionism Helped Create American Gay Identity, Blake Smith* When the Pope Hits Your Eye Like a Big Pizza Pie, That's Ahmari, James Kirchick* Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Big Fat Nonbinary Mistake, Blake Smith* Are Conservatives the New Queers?, Blake Smith* Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, John PistelliI have a working hypothesis that no one has suffered a more dramatic decline in a certain kind of social status, as a result of changes in left-liberal elite culture and politics, than white gay men. Less than a decade ago they were at the vanguard of social progress, having led a gay rights movement that achieved an extraordinary series of legal, political, and cultural victories. Now they're perceived as basically indistinguishable, within certain left-liberal spaces, from straight white men. In some activist circles they may be even more suspect, since they're competing for leadership roles and narrative centrality where straight men wouldn't presume (or particularly desire) to tread. My hypothesis, if it's accurate, is interesting on its own terms, as part of a much longer history in America of ethnic and other minority groups rising and falling in relative cultural, intellectual, and literary status. It's also interesting, however, for what it tells us about the recent evolution of left and liberal politics, as they've shifted and reshaped themselves in reaction to both great victories, like the legalization of gay marriage, and to depressingly intractable problems like the persistent racial gaps in wealth, health, incarceration, and crime.I'm less interested in the justice or injustice of this shift in standing (though I'm somewhat interested) than I am in the facts of it and its implications. Why has it happened? What does it feel like for the people who have experienced it? What are its implications? Will there be a backlash? To assist me in thinking through what it all means, I invited to the podcast Blake Smith and Jamie Kirchick. Jamie is a columnist for Tablet magazine, a writer at large for Air Mail, and the author of last year's New York Times bestseller, Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. He has long been an outspoken critic of some sectors of the gay left and what he perceives of as their desire to subordinate the project of achieving full civic and political equality for gay people to a more radical, revolutionary project to tear down conventional bourgeois ideas of gender, sexuality, marriage, family, monogamy, and identity. In a recent essay in Liberties, “From Queer to Gay to Queer,” Jamie compares the liberal tenets of the gay rights movement to the radical aspirations of what he calls “political queerness”: With its insistence that gay people adhere to a very narrow set of political and identitarian commitments, to a particular definition that delegitimates everything outside of itself, political queerness is deeply illiberal. This is in stark opposition to the spirit of the mainstream gay rights movement, which was liberal in every sense — philosophically, temperamentally, and procedurally. It achieved its liberal aspirations (securing equality) by striving for liberal aims (access to marriage and the military) via liberal means (at the ballot box, through the courts, and in the public square). Appealing to liberal values, it accomplished an incredible revolution in human consciousness, radically transforming how Americans viewed a once despised minority. And it did so animated by the liberal belief that inclusion does not require the erasure of one's own particular identity, or even the tempering of it. By design, the gay movement was capacious, and made room for queers in its vision of an America where sexual orientation was no longer a barrier to equal citizenship. Queerness, alas, has no room for gays. The victory of the gay movement and its usurpation by the queer one represents an ominous succession. The gay movement sought to reform laws and attitudes so that they would align with America's founding liberal principles; the queer movement posits that such principles are intrinsically oppressive and therefore deserving of denigration. The gay movement was grounded in objective fact; the queer movement is rooted in Gnostic postmodernism. For the gay movement, homosexuality was something to be treated as any other benign human trait, whereas the queer movement imbues same-sex desire and gender nonconformity with a revolutionary socio-political valence. (Not for the first time, revolution is deemed more important than rights.) And whereas the gay movement strived for mainstream acceptance of gay people, the queer movement finds the very concept of a mainstream malevolent, a form of “structural violence.” Illiberal in its tactics, antinomian in its ideology, scornful of ordinary people and how they choose to live, and glorifying marginalization, queerness is a betrayal of the gay movement, and of gay people themselves. In the podcast I refer to Jamie as “a man alone.” This isn't quite true. He has comrades out there, in particular older gay writers like Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, who share many of his commitments and critiques. Generationally, however, Jamie seems more alone than they do, without a cohort of gay intellectuals of roughly his age who share his intellectual reference points, his liberalism, and his very specific experience of coming of age as a gay man and journalist in America when he did, at his specific point of entry to AIDS, the decline of print and rise of online journalism, and the political advance of gay (and more recently trans) rights. He's a man alone but also, if the premise of this podcast is accurate, a man alone who has been publicly articulating a set of feelings and arguments that is shared by many of his gay male peers, of various generations, but hasn't yet taken shape in the form of a political or intellectual reaction.Blake Smith is my first return guest to the podcast, having recently joined me to discuss Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist and critic Andrea Long Chu (the “it girl of the trans world,” as I called her). He is a recent refugee from academia, now living and working as a freelance writer in Chicago, writing for Tablet magazine, American Affairs, and elsewhere. At 35 he is only a few years younger than Jamie, but is the product of a very different set of formative biographical and intellectual influences. Raised in a conservative Southern Baptist family in a suburb of Memphis, Blake's big coming out, as he tells the story, was less as a gay man than as the kind of academically credentialed, world-traveling, city-based sophisticate he has become. If Jamie's sense of loss is maybe something in the vicinity of what I proposed at the top of this post–that he went from being in the ultimately victorious mainstream of the gay rights struggle to being seen as a member of the privileged oppressor class, at best a second-class “ally” and at worst an apostate to the cause –than Blake's experience is less about any personal or political loss of status or standing than it is a variant of the venerable intellectual and literary tradition of pining for a scene or scenes from eras prior to your own. Think Owen Wilson's character in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris, who was magically transported back to Paris in the 1920s, the scene he'd always romanticized, only to fall in love with a woman from that era who herself romanticizes and eventually chooses to abandon him for another, earlier cultural moment, the Belle Époque scene of the 1890s. For Blake, the key era, maybe, was the brief post-Stonewall period before AIDS superseded all other concerns––so the 1970s, more or less– when gay male life was sufficiently out of the closet for a gay male public to come into existence and begin to define itself and understand how it related, or didn't relate, not just to the straight world but also to feminism, women, Marxism, black civil rights, and other left-wing and liberal movements. In a recent piece in Tablet, Blake writes about the magazine Christopher Street, founded in 1976, and its project of helping to bring into existence a coherent intellectual and cultural community of gay men:In its cultural politics of building a gay male world, Christopher Street featured poetry and short stories, helping launch the careers of the major gay writers of the late 20th century, such as Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Larry Kramer. It also ran many essays that contributed to an emerging awareness that there was a gay male canon in American letters, running from Walt Whitman and Hart Crane to John Ashbery and James Merrill.Christopher Street was by no means the only venue for the construction of a gay world, but [editor Michael] Denneny and his colleagues were perhaps the sharpest-minded defenders of its specificity—their demand that it be a world for gay men. In a debate that has now been largely forgotten, but which dominated gay intellectual life in the 1970s, Denneny's Arendtian perspective, with its debts to Zionism, was ranged against a vision of politics in which gay men were to be a kind of shock force for a broader sexual-cum-socialist revolution.For Blake, what's been lost or trumped is less the liberal politics that Jamie champions and that Christopher Street more or less advocated than the existence of a gay male world of letters that had fairly distinct boundaries, a relatively private space in which gay men–who may always remain in some way politically suspect, even reviled, by the mainstream–can recognize and talk to each other.  As he writes in another recent essay in Tablet, maybe half-seriously, “One should, …know one's own type (Jew, homosexual, philosopher, etc.) and remain at a ‘playful distance' from those outside it, with ‘no expectation of essential progress' toward a world in which the sort of people we are can be publicly recognized and respected. No messiahs, and no end to paranoias and persecutions—but, in the shade of deft silences, the possibility of cleareyed fellowship with one's own kind.”Jamie, Blake, and I had what I found to be a really exciting conversation about all these issues and more. Give it a listen.Eminent Americans is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to Eminent Americans at danieloppenheimer.substack.com/subscribe

This podcast was recorded about a week before its subject, Andrea Long Chu, was awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for criticism, so it doesn't come up in the conversation with Blake Smith, but it's interesting to keep in mind as he and I analyze Chu and try to understand the particular role she plays in the broader intellectual and journalistic ecosystem.Our story begins in early 2018, when the hipster intellectual magazine N+1 published a long essay titled “On Liking Women.” The essay, which went rather viral, was about the author's transition to being a woman, her fascination with the 1967 radical tract the SCUM Manifesto, the dynamics of sissy porn, and her complicated feelings about wanting to be a woman, wanting women, and the universal fear of being feminized.Its author, Andrea Long Chu, was at the time a doctoral student in comparative literature at NYU, and in all respects unfamous. The essay would change that, rather dramatically. In the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates was, for a time, the black intellectual, and Wesley Yang was the Asian intellectual, Chu became, and perhaps remains, the trans intellectual of the moment. Later that year she wrote another splashy piece,“My New Vagina Won't Make Me Happy,” for the New York Times. Her 2019 book, Females, got an immense amount of attention. In 2021 she was hired as a staff critic for New York magazine, and in that role has written a series of buzzed about reviews. She's not famous, exactly, but she's almost as close to it as journalists get it. She is now friends, for instance, with the genuinely famous Emily Ratajkowski, whom she profiled in The New York Times Magazine, and who later interviewed Chu for her own podcast, High Low with Emrata.As she says to Ratajkowski, some of this success was a matter of timing. There was a space waiting to be filled. Trans issues had gotten big in the culture, and while there were a lot of good trans memoirs out there, and an increasing number of trans people making a name for themselves in the “influencer” space, there was neither an intellectual nor a magazine feature writer who had yet made a name for him or herself reliably and stylishly explaining the trans thing to the world. Chu has been able to step into this space so successfully because she is a stylish writer, because she has a command of the relevant theory, and also because she has that thing that so many it boys and girls of journalism have had: she's a tease. She comes close and dances away. She reveals and withholds, issues grand pronouncements, and then implies that she's just kidding … maybe.Here she is at the end of her breakout essay, I am being tendentious, dear reader, because I am trying to tell you something that few of us dare to talk about, especially in public, especially when we are trying to feel political: not the fact, boringly obvious to those of us living it, that many trans women wish they were cis women, but the darker, more difficult fact that many trans women wish they were women, period. This is most emphatically not something trans women are supposed to want. The grammar of contemporary trans activism does not brook the subjunctive. Trans women are women, we are chided with silky condescension, as if we have all confused ourselves with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, as if we were all simply trapped in the wrong politics, as if the cure for dysphoria were wokeness. How can you want to be something you already are? Desire implies deficiency; want implies want. To admit that what makes women like me transsexual is not identity but desire is to admit just how much of transition takes place in the waiting rooms of wanting things, to admit that your breasts may never come in, your voice may never pass, your parents may never call back.…This is not to garner pity for sad trannies like me. We have enough roses by our beds. It is rather to say, minimally, that trans women want things too. The deposits of our desire run as deep and fine as any. The richness of our want is staggering. Perhaps this is why coming out can feel like crushing, why a first dress can feel like a first kiss, why dysphoria can feel like heartbreak. The other name for disappointment, after all, is love.I've been reading and listening to Chu recently, and I find myself atypically confused. I honestly don't know what she's trying to say, about gender and sexuality and sex and politics, nor whether she actually believes whatever it is she's trying to say. I don't know if she's the real deal or, like so many it boys and girls of the past, she's performing a role that is ultimately too disconnected from a genuinely grounded self to write things that are meaningful.To help me process my confusion, I reached out to Blake Smith, who recently wrote a highly critical piece on Chu. Officially, Blake is an historian of modern France coming off a Fulbright in North Macedonia, and before that a PhD from Northwestern University. Unofficially, but more relevantly for our purposes, he's been writing up a storm of intellectual but accessible essays over the past few years, for a variety of publications, most often Tablet, where the Chu piece was published. These fall into a few different buckets. One is what I'd call his ongoing project to identify potential intellectual and creative resources for the revivification of liberalism. This has manifested in critical essays on various eminent and obscure European and American intellectuals, including folks like Michel Foucault, Philip Rieff, Judith Shklar, Leo Strauss, Jacob Taubes, Richard Howard, and Roland Barthes. Another bucket is criticism of woke thinking and writing, and a third is his interest in queer theory. His Chu piece falls into both of the latter buckets, although Chu has a complicated relationship to woke. It may overlap with the first too, though that's not as obvious a connection.His Chu piece begins not with Chu herself, but with the archetypal conversion (or transition) story of western civilization, that of Saul of Tarsus, who had a vision of Jesus while on the road to Damascus. He abandoned his Judaism, changed his name to Paul, and dedicated his life to evangelizing for the new faith. Or, in Smith's tart description, he just changed his stripes, remaining “what he had been before—an antagonizing, persecutory self-promoter,” but with a new lexicon of values and a new set of targets. Smith writes:In his letters to churches throughout the Roman Empire, Paul gave an account of himself as being uniquely guilty and abject—the “chief of sinners”—and especially favored by God. In doing so, he created a powerful and enduring model for the way people seek attention and influence in Western culture, from the Confessions of Augustine to the ubiquitous self-narrations of our own moment. Flamboyant rejection of a former life, a lurid picture of its depravity and danger, the wrenching rapture of being overtaken and undone by an outward power, a new self to be declared and recognized by others, new enemies (shadows of the old self) to be exposed and attacked, and a continual staggering back and forth between declarations of one's utter unworthiness and ethical exaltation.One of the most successful contemporary practitioners of this mode of confession, in which a conversion is narrated in a mode of self-abasement and self-aggrandizement, is the essayist Andrea Long Chu. In 2018, Chu, who transitioned from male to female, established her reputation with essays for N+1 and The New York Times on her desire for femininity and her feelings about her new vagina. “Few of us” trans women, she argued, “dare to talk about” the truths she purportedly exposed in these essays—that transition is motivated by fetishistic investment in the most external, sexualized aspects of traditional femininity (“Daisy Dukes, bikini tops, and all the dresses, and, my god, for the breasts”)—and that transitioning had made her more dysphoric and “suicidal.”Chu positioned herself in national publications as declaring hidden truths that other people like herself had been too cowardly to avow. Publications from The Point to The Nation to Vogue interviewed her, and New York magazine has more recently hired her, while scholars devote articles and even special issues of journals to her contributions to gender theory. The most notorious of the latter was her 2019 pamphlet-length book, Females, published with Verso, a press that once had something to do with the left. In Females, Chu worked on two different double registers. She played at once comic and serious, giving herself the right to backtrack her most radical claims as ironic “bits.” She gave, moreover, a reading of Valerie Solanas' SCUM Manifesto (1967) as a statement about the nature of desire as such, for everyone, and as a kind of prefiguring of her own transition. It was as if Chu became the protagonist of Nabokov's novel Pale Fire, who is convinced that a local writer's autobiographical poem is in fact the elaborately allegorized story of his own life. Where Solanas had called for the extermination of men, she took her plan only as far as a failed attempt to murder Andy Warhol. Females ends with Solanas, at a distance of half-a-century, killing another “Andy”—Chu's former, male self. 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The ladies discuss RFK Jr.'s presidential bid, mid discourse, Dylan Mulvaney, Justin Pearson, and Blake Smith on Andrea Long Chu.

The chandelier crashes for a final time as Broadway's longest-running musical, Andrew Lloyd Webber's extremely '80s Phantom of the Opera, closes after 35 years and nearly 14,000 performances. Vulture's Andrea Long Chu assesses its cultural staying power. This episode was produced by Siona Peterous, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Victoria Chamberlin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Despite the progressive politics of early zombie films like George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, modern narratives about zombies are often strikingly conservative, displaying a world that rewards rugged individualism and presents a pessimistic view of human nature. The recent HBO drama The Last of Us, based on the acclaimed 2013 video game of the same name, exemplifies this tendency. The show takes place two decades after an outbreak of a zombifying fungal infection triggers global societal collapse. In this post-apocalyptic world, a fascist government violently maintains order within walled-off “quarantine zones,” while a brutal resistance group called the Fireflies strives to overthrow them. The Last of Us follows the cynical smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) and a teenager named Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who is immune to the fungus, on their treacherous journey to meet up with a team of Fireflies who believe they can use her to create a vaccine. As Joel and Ellie bond against the backdrop of a dog-eat-dog world where no one can be trusted, the show presents a largely right-wing vision in which the only path to redemption is through caring for one's immediate kin. According to Neil Druckmann—the co-creator of the series as well as the game and its sequel, who spent his early childhood in a West Bank settlement—elements of The Last of Us are informed by the politics of Israel/Palestine. On this week's episode of On the Nose, editor-in-chief Arielle Angel, managing editor Nathan Goldman, fellow Dahlia Krutkovich, and contributor Hazem Fahmy discuss the politics of the show, its relationship to Israel/Palestine, and its evocations of the Holocaust.Note that this episode includes spoilers for the HBO series, as well as the game and its sequel, which will form the basis of future seasons of the show.Thanks to Jesse Brenneman for producing and to Nathan Salsburg for the use of his song “VIII (All That Were Calculated Have Passed).” Articles Mentioned:“‘The Last of Us' Is a Very Conservative Show. Really,” Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times“The Not So Hidden Israeli Politics of ‘The Last of Us Part II,'” Emanuel Maiberg, Vice“The Evolution of Ellie,” Elise Favis, The Washington Post“The Gray Zone,” Primo Levi (from The Drowned and the Saved)“The Last of Us Is Not a Video-Game Adaptation,” Andrea Long Chu, Vulture

Andrea is a critic at New York magazine and the author of Females. Her searing critiques of writers like Ottessa Moshefegh and Bret Easton Ellis are as hilarious as they are insightful. Her essay “On Liking Women” has been credited as launching the “second wave” of transgender studies. I first met Andrea when she profiled me around the publication of my book and we have since become friends. We talk about writing, flirting via text, gender politics and so much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The ladies discuss the Iran protests, the Italian elections, Andrea Long Chu on the mixed Asian protagonist, and Adam Levine's cheating scandal.

The Goop Detox is here and we're not doing it, but we're talking about it anyway. Plus, Andrea Long Chu's disembowelment of Hana Yanagihara, Gerda's views on IF, smoothie city and more!

Today on StraightioLab, Sam and George find themselves in new territory after hearing each other's Saturday morning sexy hookup voices, challenging the professionalism of this now for-profit podcast. Plus Andrea Long Chu joins to explain the MCU, as well as an exciting new theory about how time makes lesbians of us all, and to tell the boys of the various micro aggressions they've committed simply by having a podcast. There are no post credit scenes in this episode, but we did consult with the military before releasing. 

Charles & Laura invite favourite female, Lev, to read Females by Andrea Long-Chu, so that you don't have to! Forced sissification is kind of foxy-moronic, so when she says 'everyone is female, and everyone hates it,' they kind of take it in their stride. They straddle the axes of critical desire, homophobic gay porn, 'you are valid' culture and macrophillic compulsions. Listen, as they dive head-first with Lana Wachowski's twice-daily blue estrogen pill, into Lana Del Rey's enormous vagina. Head over to their Patreon for paywalled episodes and more: www.patreon.com/vanity_project

Our very first guest, long time friend and fellow gay goblin Aurelia Grierson joins us to preach the gospel that Taylor Swift is bisexual. We look at all the bisexual clues presented in T-Swift's canon, especially on sister records Folklore & Evermore. Is Taylor Swift bisexual? Does it even matter if she writes bisexuality authentically? Why do we as queer people search for and create queer narratives? Where is the line between T-Swift and Talyor? Do we ship trans Severus Snape and Taylor Swift? Does Pia have a shot with Caroline Calloway? All questions posed; some answered. Additional Reading: Is Taylor Swift the World's Most Powerful Psychic? by Brandon Taylor on The Cut Gay For Play Episode 2 “A Bi-Pride Flag On Acid” (Sayonara Wild Hearts) Norman Fucking Rockwell! by Lana Del Rey (Mom needs a new iPhone case) On Liking Women by Andrea Long Chu in n+1 Extra Credit: Follow us at @wedidthereading Follow our very first guest, Aurelia Grierson The Juvenilia Collective, listen to their podcast That Do It For Ya, and engage with their personal musings at @nonbinarybutler on Twitter or @shesagoodboy on Instagram Read more of Clementine's words at @clementinevonradics See more of Pia's drawings at @pia_marchetti Thanks to Mirin Doja for creating our theme song! Listen to more of her music and follow them @mirin_doja

Mit der Psychoanalytikerin, Autorin und Ex-Universitätsdozentin Edith Seifert spreche ich über die weibliche Lustposition in der Psychoanalyse. Es geht um das Verhältnis von Jouissance, Sprache und Körper, um Lustschmerz und Hingabe der Mystikerinnen, und um soziale Skripte und persönliche Drehbücher der Lust. Wir fragen, ob angesichts zeitgenössischer Entgrentzungsangebote wie BDSM Praktiken von einer Mystik des Alltags gesprochen werden kann, und ob innerhalb dieses kulturellen Rahmens das sexuelle Genießen eher als Refugium oder als Zwang empfunden wird.

Antibody is a narrative series about how Covid-19 has changed everything and nothing at all. In this episode: The Corner (featuring Pablo Alvarado and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network) Stranger Pleasure (featuring Samuel Delany; produced by David Gutherz) One House in Oakland (produced by Sophie Kasakove) Role Call (produced by Andrea Long Chu) Support day laborer economic survival with a contribution at ndlon.org

In dieser Episode denke ich über das Verhältnis von Ich und Wir nach. Ohne Gast, denn es ist Mai 2020 und wir sind mitten in Corona-Krise. Es geht um Orte des Sprechens, um die Schwierigkeit Ich zu sagen, um das Manifest als künstlerisches Format und das Wir als literarisches Mittel. Es geht um Roland Barthes Buch "Die Lust am Text" und meine darauf aufbauende Theorie eines möglichen Textbegehrens. Außerdem geht es um Judith Butler und ihren Überlegungen zu Allianzen und Signifikanzen von Körpern im öffentlichen Raum, die nochmal wichtiger geworden sind in Zeiten wo Körper nicht zusammen kommen können.

There’s a website that shows seven sites on which European castles once stood - only partial structures now, but the site has filled the towers and other structures back in. Plus: the blare of a neighborhood car alarm gives Brooklyn musician Andrea Long Chu some inspiration. This Is What 7 Castles Across Europe Looked Like Before Falling Into Ruins (Bored Panda) This Woman Transforms An Annoying Car Alarm Into A Stroke Of Musical Genius (Digg) Our Patreon backers are pretty inspirational, come to think of it --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/coolweirdawesome/message

Greeting Quaran-queens! Join us as we take you through our quaran-tines (quarantine + routines lmfaooo) before continuing with a clitical discussion of the woman of the moment - COVID19! We ask all the chill questions… like who deserves to live? Is the human experience just for those that contribute to the economy? And since when does balsamic vinegar go off, and can it comatose you? (Asking for a friend).Slavoj Zizek - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HabyJi66l0w&list=WL&index=31&t=0sTrump’s endorsement of false coronavirus medication:https://www.theguardian.com/science/2020/mar/25/can-chloroquine-really-help-treat-coronavirus-patientshttps://www.forbes.com/sites/tarahaelle/2020/03/23/man-dead-from-taking-chloroquine-after-trump-touts-drug-for-coronavirus/#2ac43c9172e9New Zealand’s Government text vs. Australia’s:https://www.pedestrian.tv/coronavirus/nz-government-coronavirus-text-message/https://www.sbs.com.au/news/how-does-australia-s-covid-19-response-compare-to-new-zealandClosing schools exposing class divisions:https://theconversation.com/schools-are-moving-online-but-not-all-children-start-out-digitally-equal-134650Eco-Facism: https://ketanjoshi.co/2020/03/20/watch-out-for-this-symptom-of-corona-virus-lazy-ecofascism/amp/?fbclid=IwAR1rbzyNNMSbGyEqW2BADFrMDgyiL-2NCIvKPpR0O2TEeKIj-6uzm9GlF_wClimate barbarism (Naomi Klein) - https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/climate-change-naomi-klein/Unabomber - In His Own Words (2020) - NetflixManhunt - Unabomber (2017) - NetflixEugenics and Coronavirus: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/03/eugenics-isnt-going-to-save-you-from-coronavirus.htmlIs Barbarism with a Human Face our Fate? - Slavoj Zizek - https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/18/is-barbarism-with-a-human-face-our-fate/?fbclid=IwAR3cMcaMVTUIH2Fb_-Czm05nTvTPT_mv34TFG7428F9FYJR8_66MwMyhsPICoronavirus causing a social recession: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/america-faces-social-recession/608548/?fbclid=IwAR2NLh0FkdYZEob1_GfLKPOBR3sj6XpDpbmVoeyJ33JNuGQp0Z_uyzCahLAClits of the week:Females by Andrea Long Chu (2019)Succession (2018- ) (HBO)Years and Years (2019)Netflix:The Big Short (2006)Paterson (2016)Flowers - (2016-18)Dark - (2017-)

We discuss Females, by Andrea Long Chu. This is our first episode, and could be better. We'll be experimenting with planning and preparation and recording for the next few.Thanks for listening! And apologies for misusing the word "frisson" in the intro. We'll do better next time. 

Old emails are a fossil record of our lives. What were you doing this time last year, or two years ago, or ten? Even if you don’t keep a diary, you’ve got email... and this week, we're digging through ours. With Allison P. Davis, Mona Chalabi, Maddie Aggeler, Lisa Miller, Andrea Long Chu, and Stella Bugbee. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ladies discuss the "emotional labor" Twitter thread and review Andrea Long Chu's new book "Females."

In this marvelous amazing episode we have a guest, we talk about Y’all, checking in on ourselves, Coffee, Allergies, Klaus, Support Groups, *self references*, names, emo music and so much more! Big thanks to Erin!! Links discussed: John McWhorter: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/guys-gender-neutral/568231/ Andrea Long Chu https://nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/

Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and The X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men with tinfoil hats decrying the deep state from the heights of power, and the possibilities of stitching socialism and queer politics together into a robust movement for human liberation. Thank you to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig

Marissa Brostoff and Andrea Long Chu discuss Sex and the City and the X-Files, unraveling the tangled history of Marxism and queer theory, Cynthia Nixon the democratic socialist versus Miranda the straight corporate lawyer misrecognized as a lesbian, feminism as consumption in Giuliani's New York, the remarkable resilience of heterosexuality, the Cold War's paranoiac aftershocks, history's startling return, the alt-right’s nostalgia for postmodernism, the takeover of reality by reality TV, men with tinfoil hats decrying the deep state from the heights of power, and the possibilities of stitching socialism and queer politics together into a robust movement for human liberation. Thank you to Verso Books. Check out their huge selection of left-wing titles at www.versobooks.com. Please support this podcast with your money at Patreon.com/TheDig!

Andrea Long Chu's controversial op-ed, "My New Vagina Won’t Make Me Happy" ... The non-medical complications of gender confirmation surgery ... Katie: "People want shit that's bad for them" ... Are young people too wrapped up in gender identity? ... Tomboys and catpeople ... Your census form is not you ...

A painfully honest and disturbing editorial by Duke University PhD candidate Andrea Long Chu, a young man who longs to be a woman, recently appeared in the New York Times. Chu’s central thesis is that gender-dysphoric persons are entitled to surgery and that surgeons have an obligation to provide it regardless of their beliefs about what constitutes harm. In Chu’s skewed and revolutionary view, “surgery’s only prerequisite should be a simple demonstration of want…. [N]o amount of pain, anticipated or continuing, justifies its withholding.” Chu, who has been taking estrogen and evidently had breast implants, is scheduled for “bottom” surgery …

Brooklyn-based journalist Harron Walker (Jezebel, Vice, BuzzFeed, Vulture) interviews some of her favorite people to find out why she keeps doing this thing (men) that makes her feel bad.

On Episode 3 of Rather Be Reading, Anastasia Berg interviews Andrea Long Chu about her debut essay in n+1 “On Liking Women” and the problem with trying to get our desires to conform to our political principles (1:03). Then Rachel Rosenfelt, the founding editor of the New Inquiry and new publisher of the New Republic, joins us to talk about the history of Occupy at leftist magazines and the future of the New Republic (26:24). Finally, we call up Jon’s mom for her two cents on Doris Lessing, sexist bosses and Bernie bros (36:59). Editors: Jon Baskin, Anastasia Berg & Rachel Wiseman 
Guests: Andrea Long Chu, Rachel Rosenfelt & Judy Wise Relevant Sources:
 - “On Liking Women” by Andrea Long Chu in n+1:  nplusonemag.com/issue-30/essays/on-liking-women/ 
- “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” by Amia Srinivasan in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-have-the-right-to-sex 
- “Lesbianism or Feminism: Synonyms or Contradictions?” by Robin Morgan, 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference address: http://www.onearchives.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Lesbianism-and-Feminism-Synonyms-or-Contradictions-by-Robin-Morgan-April-14-1973.pdf 
- “Tired of Winning” by Jon Baskin in The Point:
thepointmag.com/2018/politics/tired-of-winning 
- “Occupy a Bank” by Sarah Leonard in the New Inquiry:
 thenewinquiry.com/occupy-a-bank/
 - “Switching Off” by Rachel Wiseman in The Point:
thepointmag.com/2018/examined-life/switching-off
 - “Leaving Herland” by Nora Caplan-Bricker in The Point:
thepointmag.com/2018/politics/leaving-herland + the rest of our new intellectuals symposium: https://thepointmag.com/point_symposia/what-are-intellectuals-for