Put more simply
The Pulitzer for insulting women goes to…
Andrea Long Chu, a contributor to Artforum and its recently shuttered sister publication Bookforum, has won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. A book critic at New York magazine since 2021, she was honored on the strength of five stories she wrote for that publication last year…
“Each of her subjects is a portal into something broader,” said New York editor in chief David Haskell at the time of her hiring, “and each of her reviews you end up mulling hours after you put them down.” The Brooklyn-based Chu has written for the New Yorker, the New York Times, and n+1, among other publications. Her book Females was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Nonfiction, and her essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2022 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019.
Also, he’s a man, and he has a very…contentious and belittling view of women.
Femaleness is a universal sex defined by self-negation, against which all politics, even feminist politics, rebels. Put more simply: Everyone is female, and everyone hates it.
Cute, but not true.
It’s not even wrong.
Andrea Long Chu. Quite possibly the creepiest, most repulsive trans identified male in the U.S. He is pure misogyny. And he discussed in an essay how, “Sissy porn did made me trans.”
@2: Possibly the most repulsive man in the U.S., trans-identified or not.
Isn’t he also trans-racial, by the way?
WTf? WHy all the pRizes? iS the wOrld nUtS?
@3: I am not aware of any racial or heritage claims by Chu. He seems consumed with his misogynistic thought.
He won for his review of one of my favorite short stories, Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild.
If you haven’t read Bloodchild, do yourself a favor. I’ll post a link.
I read his review earlier. It isn’t bad. It isn’t great. As far as I’m concerned, the most interesting thing about his review is that he points out something others before him (inculding Butler herself) have pointed out: that the story is often taken to be about slavery, and it’s not, and African-American writers aren’t limited to rehashing their racial history. (Butler was black.)
But as far as I’m concerned he misses what to me is the most salient aspect of the story. Bloodchild is about the limits of freedom; limits imposed by our circumstances, our choices, our debts to others, by love and by reality itself.
Chu missed all that. Maybe, possibly, because the story’s central image is childbirth, and he’s a man.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/chap1/bloodchi.htm
There’s a good article profiling and criticising Andrea Long Chu here. It’s by Blake Smith, in Tablet magazine (the US Jewish one, not the UK Catholic one):
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/the-long-goodbye-andrea-long-chu
I liked this bit:
Since killing “Andy,” Chu has transitioned again, shifting the themes of her writing to race, and particularly to what she now identifies as her Asian-American-ness—completing the process of becoming her ex-girlfriend, who is now not only fetishized, objectified, and exoticized, but taken as a model for a fantastically appropriative form of imitation. In her 2021 essay “China Brain” and 2022 essay “The Mixed Asian Metaphor,” Chu—who is three-fourths white—stages her Asian ancestry (which, in a flourish of self-Orientalization, stretches through the generations like “paper lanterns across the sky”) and sets herself once again as a brave truth-teller who can admit what most of us are too timid or unthoughtful to say: that racial identification is a matter of desire, driven by our lonely, desperate longing to be a part of a group.
As she concludes: “People want race … they want friendship from it, or sex, or even love; and sometimes, they just want to be something or to have something to be.”
Looks like Chu is going to do a Jessica Krug or Rachel Dolezal.
Well, in America apparently it’s possible for one of the most repulsive men to be elected president, so why not to get the Pulitzer Prize? :-(
Mostly Cloudy,
I’ve seen that called “skinwalking.” A rather famous autogynephile did it to a friend of mine (they knew each other through work.)
Oh lort, this guy. Yeah. He’s been a twitter weirdo for years. One has to wonder if this Pulitzer was awarded for social-bandwagon reasons unrelated to any actual talent that he exhibited.
Dolezal has no identifiable Black ancestors. I know less about Krug, but it appears the same is true for her, and both were claiming otherwise. Were either to have had even one identifiable Black ancestor, there would have been little or no controversy, she would be Black, regardless of her appearance. In fact, were she then to claim no, she’s not Black, she would be told she’s rejecting her heritage, she’s “passing”.
Andrea Long Chu’s father is half Chinese. He (ALC) has a legitimate and recent claim to Asian ancestry. I don’t know if Asian Americans have the same sense of microdescent, but a Chinese grandparent seems quite legitimate in any circumstances. Denying the remaining 75% of his ancestry might be seen as rejecting his heritage, depending on what it is, but this is true for an awful lot of people of mixed ethnic background. Chu appears to have noticeably Asian facial features. His last name is Chinese, and appears not to have been changed. Unless Chu is claiming more than 25% Asian ancestry, I don’t see anything wrong with emphasizing that part of his heritage.
The Tablet article describes Chu as saying that “racial identification is a matter of desire, driven by our lonely, desperate longing to be a part of a group”. This is definitely true, for a segment of the population, especially those of mixed racial/ethnic background. We see similar attempts to differentiate from the crowd in areas other than race all the time. The difference with race/ethnicity is that it is usually falsifiable.
If we’re going to apply the “one drop” rule to anyone it needs to be applied evenly… But of course no one does…
I’m conflicted about this guy. No matter how repulsive his ideas (woman as hole ffs) I appreciate the honesty which he states them. Of course honestly here is pretty much just psychopathy but unlike with say Trump ramblings I think there’s something to be learnt there.
@Lady Mondegreen
Thanks! That’s a brilliant story. I hadn’t read Butler before though I’ve long wanted too. And I don’t know how anyone could read that story and not understand that it’s about the childbirth (and all the other things). Maybe someone totally obsessed with the self and completely lacking in empathy. . .
Sackbut,
You are right that Chu does have Chinese ancestry, which gives Chu’s embrace of her Chinese identity a legitimacy that Krug and Dolezal’s embrace of non-existent black ancestry lacks. Of course, Chu is driven by guilt over the “white male” part of her identity, so it makes sense that now she is heavily emphasising the “Asian female” part instead.
Given the sexual fetishization of Chu’s previous partner (an Asian woman), there does seem to be an unhealthy salacious element to Chu’s embrace of her Asian identity. Chu’s new hyper-sexualised “Asian woman” persona does seem to draw on elements of the demeaning, hyper-sexual stereotypes of East Asian women in pornography.
Also, suppose a natal male writing were to write in public, today, about how important pornography was to influencing his life? He’d be called a creep, a sexist, a male supremacist and worse.
But Chu’s “woman” persona allows her to write about such subjects and not only have them accepted, but for her to be rewarded.
Sackbut, I agree, with qualifications. In many cases, people want to identify as a group they haven’t lived as, which means they haven’t experienced the stigmas that go with being part of that group. I had a coworker who “discovered” his native American ancestry (no more than Elizabeth Warren had) just in time to use it to move over a number of women who scored higher than him on the civil service exam and get the job…the agency helped him do it, because the other option was to hire a woman, something they would not do. He took a job meant to redress inequalities he hadn’t suffered, having lived his entire life as a middle-class white male.
I have a grandfather who was Swedish; I consider myself part Swedish. I have a grandmother who was Irish; I consider myself part Irish. But I don’t feel the sort of connection to those ethnicities that someone who had been raised in an Irish or Swedish upbringing would. I feel like any other individual born in the US would feel – which is to say, I don’t feel like other individuals in a culture much at all, because we are almost a non-ethnicity. We don’t have distinguishing characteristics that all of us share, other than the country on our birth certificate (or passport for those who weren’t born here but have lived here long enough to be more like us than like their native country). I think ethnicity is more than blood or birth; it is also culture and background.
Guess what I’m trying to say is, I think both of you are right in part…but don’t quote me on that! ;-)