Cutting Up: A manifesto on gender and desire channels would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas

In 1988, Valerie Solanas, the author of the 1967 female-supremacist pamphlet SCUM Manifesto, died from pneumonia at the age of fifty-two, in a single-occupancy hotel room in San Francisco. The decomposing body of the visionary writer, who famously set forth her plans “to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex,” was discovered kneeling, as though in prayer, slumped over the side of the bed. First-person writing would have been anathema to Solanas’s imperious voice; Chu uses Solanasian bluster as something of a Trojan horse for memoir. To articulate the species-wide sameness of the predicament, Chu selects vivid examples as far-flung as YouTube star Gigi Gorgeous, a trans woman Chu describes as “Kardashian-adjacent,” who built a following with makeup tutorials before beginning to document her transition online; Mike Haines, the incel-adjacent author of the 2016 r/TheRedPill subreddit post “HOW TO GET LAID LIKE A WARLORD: 37 Rules of Approaching Model-Tier Girls”; and Chu herself.