The Critic and Her Tweets

A (sort of) unpopular opinion on Andrea Long Chu's Authority

Andrea Long Chu receiving the Pulitzer Prize for criticism

When New York magazine critic Andrea Long Chu won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2023, she took, as was her wont, to Twitter. So am I really the first trans person to win a Pulitzer? Can we fact check this? she asked her followers, who then numbered in the tens of thousands – a rockstar amount for any essay-writing millennial, much less one with big opinions about Lauren Berlant and Sweeney Todd. While Chu may very well be the first trans person to win a Pulitzer, she certainly wouldn’t be the first winner of the prize to elevate r/TheRedPill discourse to the level of manifest cultural criticism. Philip Roth, who won a Pulitzer in 1998 for American Pastoral, seized upon Bill Clinton’s impeachment to lament a recasting of feminism as “the new righteousness…women are blameless.” Chu herself took a more direct approach in her 2019 Verso tract Females, citing an actual post from the subreddit as proof that even the most macho pickup artists must submit to some form of feminization. Her essay-length book, which Chu has described as a “work of psychoanalytic theory, a downtown hagiography, a manifesto for failed artists and by one,” reads more like autotheory by way of a late-aughts LiveJournal, posted under cover of night to a score of heavy breathing.

To be clear, my intention here is not to accuse Chu, as many have, of either fashioning misogynistic fetish into theory or sinfully disclosing desire to the benefit of gender-loathing conservatives. As a critic – of novels, of TV, of her own experience, of criticism simpliciter – Chu is cosplaying as no one but herself, less queer in the “lived embodiment” sense or a theorist in the French post-structuralist sense than a writer of autocrit. And here I intend not to invoke autotheory or even autofiction, the memoir-novel hybrid subgenre made famous by writers like Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgaard and Leslie Feinberg, whose Stone Butch Blues well predates Females as a needle-moving entry in the queer canon. Chu’s brand of criticism – forged in equal parts by an enraged laptop Leninism, the need to become the highest scorer on the culturati leaderboard, and plain old magical thinking – is more evocative of fan fiction. Penned by the extremely online millennial-and-Z cohort in the aughts onward, these Wattpad and Tumblr retellings of everything from Harry Potter to Hey Arnold! constitute as comprehensive an investigation of homosexual desire and the maddening vagaries of identity and the body as anything by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – or, for that matter, Dennis Cooper and Eileen Myles. Like any fanfic writer, Chu is invested in a reworking of given material (Harry makes out with Draco; trans woman “Chili’s-Awesome-Blossoms” her sex, to use Chu’s own turn of phrase) as a satisfaction of desire played in the major key of liberation. To this end, she is also a self-insert character in the great, unedited nonsense-fic that is our country’s gender discourse, a drama unfolding both online and IRL whose various players (Judith Butler, Jordan Peterson, etc.) are LARPing as experts they are not. It is as a writer of autocrit, which I’ll define as the willful and often polemical conflation of preference with axiom, that Chu – self-identified as a woman and public intellectual – makes herself known in Authority, a collection of her essays published this month by FSG.

For a critic against givenness, Chu does a lot of giving

The Latin phrase de gustibus non est disputandum translates roughly to “taste is not to be disputed,” and is suspected to have roots as old as the 12^th century Scholastics. These Aristotelian Schoolmen weren’t so much condoning aesthetic tyranny as inviting its opposite: since taste is such a singular and sense-mediated thing, it would be a category error for me to describe your dislike of pistachios as moral degeneracy, or for you to describe my romantic preference for women as such. But then good old Immanuel Kant body-checked this apple cart with his Critique of Judgment, in which he suggested that consensus-based aesthetic judgments were possible if only we investigate our common sense. By this the Enlightenment philosopher didn’t mean remembering to bring your umbrella if the forecast says rain, but an appeal to deductive reasoning: if we just reason through our tastes, he argued, we’ll find that there are universal principles guiding our judgments of beauty. And thus was born a tension that haunts both philosophy and politics to this day: Whence our judgment of beauty: social, a priori, or a combination of both? What material effects do our judgments have on the lives of the judged? Can our judgments be made more politically expedient, or at the very least examined to that end?

From this confounding morass we expect to emerge the critic, learned arbiter of taste and sense, benevolent separator of wheat from chaff so the plebes may feast on the Good Art. But in her book’s titular essay – one of two whole new ones in the collection – Chu offers a breathless history of Western criticism only to conclude that the authority-imbued critic is an outmoded and even dangerous figure. She’s right, of course, as she is about authority’s being an incoherent governing concept for the practice of criticism; I for one blanch at phrases like he’s the authority on Italian neorealism. But the alternative Chu appears to be proposing isn’t much better: a criticism of Good Politics™, spittle-flecked rage poorly disguised as something between snark and sangfroid, and the dreaded having-of-a-take. This isn’t an authority conferred by academic elites or bankrolled by corporate interests (looking at you, Malcolm Gladwell!) but by retweets and upvotes, Brooklyn warehouses and morning-after brunches, a furtive glance up from one’s phone mid-celebrity TikTok followed by the question: Wait…so do we still like this person? Andrea Long Chu avers that she’s no Lionel Trilling or Harold Bloom, but she’s more than happy to tell you if we still like that person.

And in Chu’s world of angry autocrit, the answer is most often no, especially if the person in question is a Gen X woman (or, in Joey Soloway’s case, woman-adjacent) with a certain amount of literary or cultural cache. Taken together, Chu’s literary essays for New York are best summarized as “women more famous than me aren’t shit.” And I’m not exaggerating the ad feminam nature of the argument here – Chu herself has been happy to address charges of too-personal criticism head-on: “Why shouldn’t a book review be personal?” she writes. “It’s my understanding that persons are where books come from.” In some cases, her observations are correct: Hanya Yanagihara’s favored topics do seem to alternate between high-end scenery and trauma plots for the upmarket fujoshi, and Soloway is neither self-analyst nor prose stylist. But these and other intelligent criticisms are buried in a thicket of judgments so outlandish as to read like shitposting: Zadie Smith hasn’t written anything good since White Teeth (lol ok); Maggie Nelson is a liberal who doesn’t understand speech acts (Wittgenstein’s spinning in his grave); Ottessa Moshfegh is a fatphobe and apolitical sentimentalist (well, the part about the fatphobia might be right). One can almost see the rigid set of the critic’s jaw as she’s typing, the sweat breaking out on her brow as she crafts another devastating punchline. Is this diagnosing an era’s affect via its literature, or is it PWNing? Of her 2018 pan of Joey Soloway’s memoir, Chu writes: “Viciousness is an attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.” To call such cruelty incisive would be optimistic.

It's in the Soloway essay that the magical thinking of Chu’s autocrit is best on display. Writing of the cancellations of Jeffrey Tambor and Soloway after allegations of Tambor’s sexual misconduct on the Transparent set, Chu describes Trace Lysette, the trans woman who accused Tambor of harassment, as “a former sex worker whose pampered male costar gleefully told her he wanted to ‘attack [her] sexually’…obviously a much more accurate symbol of transness than [the] wealthy professor emerita” played by Tambor. Ok, but what’s an “accurate symbol of transness”? Chu upbraided Soloway for not understanding the plasticity of the prefix trans a mere two pages before, and has in years since made the very public point that anyone who says they’re trans is trans and thus deserves access to gender-affirming healthcare. So why the inclination to the metonymic, the ontological? If the trans club is so non-exclusive that a mere speech act is enough to gain entry, why would Lysette be a “more accurate symbol” of the category to which she and Tambor’s Maura Pfefferman self-evidently both belong? Lysette has done sex work, meaning her body has been commodified by the sex industry, she’s likely endured mistreatment by chaser-clients, lived through the oppression and indignity and maybe even experienced some empowerment on the job – to be clear, I’m talking more about gender affirmation than unionization[1]. By contrast, Pfefferman is an upper-middle-class square – a Jennifer Finney Boylan, or J. Edgar Hoover whose egg finally hatched – well insulated from squalor and fetishists. Could it be Lysette’s closer proximity to sex work, chaserdom and destitution that somehow renders her Platonically trans, more accurately feminized? As always, Chu has a frank answer to this question. “The sections on forced feminization…advanced what is still, in my opinion, the most elegant theory of pornography put to paper” she writes of Females, a book about being symbolically feminized by one’s subjecthood and literally feminized by porn. Does Chu mean to function like an ontological doctor’s note, gatekeeping transness from the insufficiently sissified? To wit, has she read the Marquis de Sade, or Walt Whitman’s personal letters? Sometimes, it seems, we write sentences that are bad for us.

A cover that would have made Jean Genet jealous

But perhaps I ought to give Chu a break. The Soloway essay is from 2018, the same year as her triumphant debut onto the queer theory scene with an accounting of her transition whose broader implications (transition is desire-based, gender is not a Platonic or gnostic concept) I wholeheartedly agree with. The fledgling critic can be forgiven for committing an error of inductive reasoning, suggesting that all those who aren’t in it for her preferred flavor of being-a-woman – the benevolent chauvinism, the bikini tops – are somehow in it less. But the problem with autocrit is that the nature of one’s judgments are dictated by the rules of one’s fandom, and Chu’s is a tightly policed fandom. In 2018, she accused Soloway of being a “fairweather woman” – “female [only] when it’s culturally advantageous to be female” – and used only she/her instead of Soloway’s preferred she/they pronouns to refer to them, justifying the denial as punishment for Soloway’s “disingenuous approach to womanhood as a political category.” But now that Soloway uses exclusively they/them pronouns, Chu has grouchily updated the essay and included this statement: “In truth, this essay was not about Soloway at all; it was about a similarly irritating person of my own acquaintance who was not famous enough to be worth writing about.” Even if we grant Chu this bizarre Control+Alt+Delete, one might still wonder if these are the actions of someone who’s accidentally found herself abreast of some Bad Politics™. Lest we forget: even the mods can get kicked off the message board[2].

And what is Chu’s message board, you may wonder? Her fandom? It’s extremely online leftism – less We are the fourth estate than We are pissed off on Bluesky – and it’s doctrinally hidebound to an identity discourse forged on a variety of online platforms. It’s on Tumblr, Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and even Instagram that the theory met the meme, and soundbites from someone’s dissertation on Hegel commingled with well-intended efforts to “uplift marginalized voices” and before and after looksmaxxing photos. This diffuse digital space is where millennials such as Chu and myself learned the right and wrong politics to commit to: one must be pro-personal freedom (but not in the libertarian sense) and anti-tradition (but not if it’s the yearly warehouse orgy) and studiously avoidant/critical of anyone who stands athwart these beliefs. Well, what’s wrong with that? you may be thinking, and reader: there’s nothing wrong with caring about individual autonomy and dispensing of social frameworks that devalue and subjugate those within them. The issue is when thinking is traded for catechism, when one must toe lines and tick boxes and maintain that even the most inchoate or conflicting terms are wholly accurate reflections of the real world all while generating hot new takes that will gain you more brunch invitations. It’s an exhausting enterprise, and it certainly does not a critic make.

So, Soloway asserts that they are nonbinary and, regardless of her feelings about Soloway’s disrespect for political categories, Chu must fall in line and claim she wasn’t really ragging on Soloway after all. Yet Chu believes that, because the critic cannot help but have moral and political beliefs, “the reading public has a right to judge her by her actual, sincerely held values and not just by how politely she applies them in the company of strangers.” But what are Chu’s moral and political beliefs? She dutifully name-checks hot-button issues of the past 5-10 years (Gaza, Trumpism, prison abolition), saying little of them that would prevent her from a guest appearance on Chapo Trap House. Indeed, she says little of them altogether – so much that it’s reasonable to suspect these are leftist-acceptable garnishes on the main course of Chu’s sincerely held values. Even though she claims to be “moving in a broadly materialist direction” with her criticism, focused on real-world books and TV instead of wishy-washy things like notions and beliefs, at least one of Chu’s sincerely held values is that she is entitled to the satisfaction of her desires, irrespective of those desires being deemed “good” or “bad” by herself or others. It’s because identity-leftism coheres with this highly cherished value that Chu finds herself within its fandom.

Chu is “bored” by the prospect of determining whether Maggie Nelson’s objections to art world censoriousness are correct. She can recap a season of Yellowjackets with the best of them. But when it comes to the topics of desire and wanting bad things, she is so full of boisterous explanation that you can practically hear her talking over your own thoughts. On #MeToo: “What hurts isn’t when the people we love do unlovable things. What hurts is when, afterward, we still love them…Politics, too, can be a guilty pleasure.” On other women and vaginoplasty: “I don’t want what you have; I want the way in which you don’t have it. I don’t envy your plenitude; I envy your void. Now I’ve got the hole to prove it.” On the dilemma of Germaine Greer’s attractiveness: “[She] was hot in the 1970s, but that was nothing time and transphobia couldn’t fix.” On freedom and pleasure in Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild”: “Pressing his naked flesh against T’Gatoi’s velvety body, Gan accepts the risks of being unfree; in return, he wins fidelity, purpose, and a deeply compromised version of love…that may nonetheless form the basis of a good life.” I include these quotes not to accuse Chu of things like internalized misogyny or fetishism – that would be boring – but to underscore the sheer energy she brings to the topic of taste on turbo drive. Desire is clearly her métier, and its fulfillment her political project.

Given that Chu’s is a politics less overt than, say, Zadie Smith’s or Cynthia Ozick’s, and only #FreePalestine by association, it’s quite reasonable to charge her with obtuseness, as Becca Rothfeld does in her excellent Washington Post review. The graver charge would be that Chu’s political line-toeing is a shell corporation for the real substance of her autocrit, a nihilistic work of sine qua non-fiction in which the galaxy-brained critic outsmarts us all by throwing together an aesthetico-politics that affirms her inalienable right to get precisely what she wants, regardless of its moral value. Like any work of fan fiction, Chu’s is a framework built in an inherited universe – that of queer and affect theorists and those who retweet screenshots of their books – with a canon she can choose to strategically contravene or not, but it is most importantly a closed system. Which means that for all her crowing about the phenomenology of the sissy GIF and Twitter trolling being “an absurdist practice as expressive as any oil painting,” Chu is self-circumscribed to a rather small and cloyingly in-the-know forum. And the good news is that if you don’t like the values of this forum, you can perform the most decisive act of judgment available to us in 2025: close your laptop and put down your phone. Go outside and, as they say, touch grass.

A very popular writer of autocrit! (Art by Liz Johnson)

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[1] The Fourth Wave’s new slogan: “Buy sex from women.”

[2] It’s called “consent of the governed,” look it up ;)