Wanting Bad Things

by Andrea Long Chu, Anastasia Berg

When I sat down to read Andrea Long Chu’s essay “On Liking Women” in n+1, I didn’t expect it to reflect back to me so vividly a key aspect of my own experience of being a woman: wanting to be and to have things I shouldn’t. The essay, which explores the origins of transness in desire on the one hand and in feminist politics on the other, sparked a debate long in the offing about whether desire, and in particular sexual desire, should be seen as the new frontier for social justice. The patterns of desire certainly seemed to follow discriminatory pathways. Was there something we could do about it? Should we try? Amia Srinivasan wrote for the LRB that while no one has the right to demand to have sex with anyone else, perhaps we have a duty to engage with our desire in the hopes of rendering it less exclusionary and less unjust. In late April, I sat down with Andrea in New York to discuss this further.

—Anastasia Berg

9 pages, ebook

Published July 18, 2018

About the author

Andrea Long Chu is a writer, critic, academic living in Brooklyn. Her first book, published by Verso, is Females. As an essayist, her work has appeared in n+1, Boston Review, The New York Times, New York, New York Review of Books, Artforum, Bookforum, Jewish Currents, Chronicle of Higher Education, Affidavit, 4Columns, differences, Women and Performance, TSQ, and Journal of Speculative Philosophy. She is currently a doctoral student at New York University.