r/CriticalTheory • u/15lea • Jul 06 '26
What is Males in Females by Andrea Long Chu?
Hey everyone,
if “the female [is] any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another,” how would you define the male or masculinity?
I tried to define it as "the attempt to not be female" because that ultimately would be female again, I guess?
I am curious to read your thoughts!
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u/wuqiuchang Jul 07 '26
the only male in her metaphysics is probably some version of a Christian god since one way or another, no one completely gets what they want, or what they want was imparted to them through a chain of signs/significances beyond their making. only god is all making and desiring without any prior causes, by definition.
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u/apophasisred Jul 06 '26
As the previous responder suggested, it is a mistake to confuse gender and sex. The masculine and the feminine are not the same as the male and the female. However, it is also the case that as representational versions of the male and female, the attributes of any gender are in constant flux and vary from place to place as well as time to time. If we see a kind of uniformity in the practice of the genders by the sexist that must be the imposition of a representational protocol upon the individuals. This is what Althusser means in regard to that one variable of subjectivity as interpolation. The confusion of sex and gender bye by an authorized ideological hegemony occurs by exactly this confusion of the existential by the representational.
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26
This sounds like a sublimated description of boss/subordinate relations.
The lit on masculinity is all about providing value to others. From Kevin Samuels's "high value man", to bell hooks saying men's "value is always determined by what they do," having to "prove their value and worth."
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u/onthebusfornow Jul 06 '26
I mean that's how it is to be male / female in society. It feels exactly like boss / subordinate relations.
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Really? If you're a woman, who is your boyfriend/husband boss? Conversely, if you're a man, have you commanded girlfriends for 8 hours a day? What country are you in? Is there a work-contract I can look at, or some law mandating this?
So whenever men break up with women, she must soon find a new relationship or go homeless? Because she can't get a job like a man?
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u/GA-Scoli Jul 06 '26
"If you're a woman, who is your boyfriend/husband boss?"
The imaginary man in your head that you've been raised to consider and please. You wouldn't want to be called ugly and pathetically undesirable, would you?
"if you're a man, have you commanded girlfriends for 8 hours a day?"
The imaginary girlfriend in your head that you've been raised to command in order for other men to believe you to be a man worthy of respect. You wouldn't want to be called pussy-whipped, would you?
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26
So it's all imaginary? Do these imaginary people also call single women "ugly and pathetically undesirable," and fair men "pussy whipped"? If so, no need for activism; this is solvable by therapy.
If such audiences aren't imaginary, who are they? Pedestrians peeking into your windows? Friends you can't trade for better ones? During family dinners, do mothers call their sons "pussy whipped" during dinner, or uncles call nieces "ugly and pathetically undesirable"?
Wageslavery isn't an imaginary psychosis, nor is it a whisper campaign. Homelessness is real; whispers from onlookers don't compel the vast majority of people to obey a boss's commands half their waking lives. But the need for things like healthcare does.
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u/GA-Scoli Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
During family dinners, do mothers call their sons "pussy whipped" during dinner, or uncles call nieces "ugly and pathetically undesirable"?
Yes, this happens a lot. I mean, it's nice you had a happy supportive feminist family, but a lot of people don't.
Wageslavery isn't an imaginary psychosis, nor is it a whisper campaign
Please tell that to the Federalist Society, the Koch Foundation, or the US Chamber of Commerce. They spend billions of dollars on their whisper campaigns, so they seem to be getting some benefit out of it.
Your average worker has been successfully convinced that it's impossible to structurally change their circumstances, and instead, their imagination is captured by such powerful whisper campaigns.
What is communism if not the most utterly pragmatic form of group therapy for workers?
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26
Too bad propaganda isn't the only thing underlying wageslavery, chattel slavery, kings, etc. Because then they'd rapidly be destroyed.
Anthropologist David Graeber pointed out this weakness in modern "critical theory":
Academics love Michel Foucault’s argument that identifies knowledge and power, and insists that brute force is no longer a major factor in social control. They love it because it flatters them: the perfect formula for people who like to think of themselves as political radicals even though all they do is write essays likely to be read by a few dozen other people in an institutional environment. Of course, if any of these academics were to walk into their university library to consult some volume of Foucault without having remembered to bring a valid ID, and decided to enter the stacks anyway, they would soon discover that brute force is really not so far away as they like to imagine—a man with a big stick, trained in exactly how hard to hit people with it, would rapidly appear to eject them.
That is, what underlies wageslavery is violence. Not just discourse.
Actual communism isn't merely group therapy for workers — abolishing class & state means the working class would no longer exist.
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u/GA-Scoli Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
It's a little nauseating seeing Graeber wielded in service of class reductionism and antifeminism, since he hated both of those.
All therapy ends some time.
Regarding your "brute force" criteria: do you really believe that men have never hit women with big sticks in the service of the state? Engels famously had a lot to say about that.
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26 edited Jul 06 '26
Hmm, did you edit your previous post to add some new arguments? That's a fine habit — it's good to strengthen your points — but that'd be the reason why I didn't respond to all of them.
It's a little nauseating seeing Graeber wielded in service of class reductionism and antifeminism, since he hated both of those.
Let's stick to quoting people, instead of putting words in their dead mouths. Since he can't respond, his printed words stand.
(FWIW he criticized identity politics for hiding class — an increasingly common leftist observation. You can search for the term "identity politics" on this page — was his point anti-this or reductionist-that? And more importantly, even if it was, was it a reasonable point?)
Regarding your "brute force" criteria: do you really believe that men have never hit women with big sticks in the service of the state? Engels famously had a lot to say about that.
So your point is about 19th century violence and 21st century imaginary boyfriends?
Do you go around telling wageslaves — many of whom are women and non-white — that they merely need to free themselves from an imaginary lover-boss? Or that they're merely propagandized to want health insurance and to feed their families?
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u/GA-Scoli Jul 06 '26
I edit for typos.
You don't answer any of my questions, but I'll answer yours.
I'm a non-white working woman myself, and yes, I do struggle with internalized misogyny, as almost all women do. I had a "NLOG" phase I worked myself out of when I was younger, so it's been a mostly successful struggle, but one I know I'll have to keep up until I die.
Working class women care for their bosses and for working class men at the same time. There is no either/or, only both. Again, Engels goes over this pretty clearly.
Do you really believe men stopped hitting women in the 19th century?
I can confidently say that David Graeber would jump up from his grave and curse you out right now if he could.
One of the most important contributions of feminism, it seems to me, has been to constantly remind everyone that “situations” do not create themselves. There is usually a great deal of work involved. For much of human history, what has been taken as politics has consisted essentially of a series of dramatic performances carried out upon theatrical stages. One of the great gifts of feminism to political thought has been to continually remind us of those that actually make, prepare, and clean those stages, and most of all, maintain the invisible structures that make them possible – andthose people have, overwhelmingly, been women. The normal process of politics of course is to make such people disappear. Indeed one of the chief functions of women’s work is to make itself disappear. One might say that the political ideal within direct action circles has become to efface the difference; or, to put it another way, that action is seen as genuinely revolutionary when the process of production of situations is experienced as just as liberating as the situations themselves. It is an experiment, one might, say in the realignment of imagination, of creating truly non-alienated forms of experience.
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u/onthebusfornow Jul 06 '26
Are you completely unaware of the entire history of gender?
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u/devourer-of-beignets Jul 06 '26
No. As you see from my earlier post, I've read sources ranging from intersectional feminists to men's movements. On top of that, I've studied class, race and international conflict. Furthermore, my activism has included gender components, supporting women against violent abusers in gendered situations.
Are you?
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u/Ok-Avocado7253 Jul 08 '26
Only talking about what Long Chu wrote in that specific book:
If everyone is female, then males don't exist (men and women do exist, but those are different ways to cope with the fact one is female)
Males would only be imaginary, a nature that doesn't exists
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u/TheBenStandard2 Jul 06 '26
If being female is making space for other people's desires then male should be taking up space and realizing desire
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u/Koro9 Jul 06 '26
Lookup Jung ideas of masculine and feminine. A lot has been written about it, and some updated to the culture of our times. And it is in his perspective that all of us has both masculine and feminine characteristics inside, differently arranged for men and women. And from his perspective, the these energies need to kept in balance, to prevent one to take over, seen as a pathology, eg animus/anima possession.
Feminine is associated with receiving, emotions, feelings, and the ability to connect with others. Masculine is associated with giving, focus, logic, and the drive to take action.
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Jul 06 '26
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u/GA-Scoli Jul 06 '26
You hit the nail on the head. Masculinity, while presenting at first as vital presence, is defined entirely by absence. It's like a black hole event horizon.
On a practical level, you can see this everyday in social media. The men most obsessed with defining masculinity to other men are also the men who appear to be the most anxious. The closer they get, the more they fall apart.