Andrea Long Chu's Problem with Authority

a quick succession of essays followed “On Liking Women” that delivered the same satisfactions of baroque argument and hot take, in service of the same themes. “Bad TV,” ostensibly about #MeToo, considered Americans’ attachment to predatory stars and to television itself, seeing both as evidence of “the helplessness of desire in the face of its object.” At the same time, social-justice-minded TV shows like Transparent and Master of None proved “that political was something you could be made to feel.” Chu’s next essay, “The Pink,” explored, in more personal terms, the difficulty of explaining why one wants something (in this case, a vagina). Bottom surgery failed to make Chu “feel any more like a woman”—to transmute her from a person who wants to a person who has. The essay’s parallel reassessment of the pussyhat, that ubiquitous accessory of the 2017 Women’s March, reveals again that feminism expresses a desire for not only justice but also “feelings of belonging, purpose, and importance.”

By 2019, the unsayable had become the already said. In shorter reviews for Bookforum and other outlets, also included in Authority, Chu cleared new paths to the same grove of insight: a Lexi Freiman novel prompts her to wonder “if politics ever transcends adolescent fantasy”; the eponymous trans woman of Gore Vidal’s Myra Breckinridge is a mascot for “that old god they call Desire.” Even a webcomic about a pink blob is mined for aphorisms like “Not getting what you want doesn’t make you not want it.”

Chu’s pose of indiscretion, alternately swaggering and melancholic, also persisted. Her book-length essay Females, first published in 2019 and reissued this spring, reversed desire’s direction. This time, it wasn’t your own wants but another’s holding you captive: “Everyone is female,” Chu declared, female being her name for a universal human tendency “to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense.” It’s possible to square this idea with those in her earlier essays, but the clearest connection is tonal. As Kay Gabriel noted in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the marketing copy promised “the indefensible,” and Chu herself warned that the book’s major argument was (again) “wildly tendentious.” Trusting in desire’s inexhaustibility, Chu would give the people what they want.

Stylistically, Chu seemed to be chasing the first high, in “On Liking Women,” of provocation risked and rewarded. Her confidence on the page—all that sacred-cow tipping—betrayed a certain narrowness in what she imagined an essay might do. Conceptually, our helplessness before desire threatened to become as facile as the idea it would unseat—that desire can be rerouted by belief or force of will. That “politics” itself, feminist or otherwise, is a desire to which we’re in thrall strikes me as both indisputable and in no way compromising; feeling a part of a world-transforming project is good incentive to stick with the work of transforming the world.

at new york, chu’s remit has been enviably wide. The essays in Authority written from her current perch show her striking out for new subjects and arguments, if not quite new ways of making them. Few of the novels and TV shows she has written about ask to be read as allegories of implacable desire, and while I’m sure she could force them into that frame, I’m glad that she’s stopped trying to. A staff job can be stultifying: deadlines, word limits, and the demands of topicality can sap a writer’s momentum and leave her little room to grow. For Chu, these constraints have been a gift. They have compelled her to engage with different minds that have their own ideas.

The first and last sections of Authority collect Chu’s most recent pieces, with no obvious logic to their order. A new essay on the politics of criticism is followed by reviews of To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara (who has “a tourist’s eye for detail”), the TV series Yellowjackets (“capable of doing the television equivalent of patting one’s head and rubbing one’s belly at the same time”—a compliment), and the Broadway musical The Phantom of the Opera (in which “characters declaimed their emotions directly into the audience, as if by T-shirt cannon”). Maybe these amount to a commentary on mass culture, or maybe Chu simply picked her favorites. The reviews have, for the most part, been left unedited—Yellowjackets, currently in its third season, is introduced as “Showtime’s gripping new drama, which concludes its first season on Sunday.” More than once I wondered if the randomness of the essays’ occasions was, in fact, the point. Witness the critic responding to culture as it comes around the bend, before the stream of history can carry it away.

Then again, many of Chu’s readers will have thought Good riddance as the flotsam swept out of view. She rarely makes a case for the enduring value of her objects, and it can be thrilling to watch her dismember them. But who, in 2025, is eager to revisit an exhaustively debated chapter of Maggie Nelson’s 2021 book, On Freedom, about Dana Schutz’s exhaustively debated 2016 painting of Emmett Till? Chu accuses Nelson of “rehashing” stale controversies, and Authority now invites us to do the same.

As reviewing expanded Chu’s subject matter, it also opened different tones to her. In an afterword to the new edition of Females, she defends many of her first book’s arguments but renounces the inflammatory register she made them in: “The strategy of couching the most challenging claims in the language of outlandish provocation appears dubious to me now, not least because the provocateur, as a type, has been so thoroughly claimed by the reactionaries in recent years.” I think she’s right to cede that voice to anti-woke centrists and right-wing trolls. The left has little use for it.

Yet the evidence of Authority is less conclusive. Its essays seem ambivalent about the role of provocation in criticism. Chu’s New York reviews are less inclined to issue intellectual fiats, and some of her most gratifying pieces vivisect Bret Easton Ellis, Zadie Smith, and Pamela Paul for their aggrieved contrarianism. Even so, while Chu may have retired the word tendentious, she remains committed to the rhetorical tics it describes. Her debate-club flourishes—“The lesson here is that,” “To return to our initial question, then,” “To be clear,” and so on—can feel pedantic, even pushy. Her arguments still tend toward the proudly convoluted and involve occasional sleights of hand in which she poses at having proved something that she’s instead presumed. Most end with an implied QED.

In a new postscript to a 2018 review of Joey Soloway’s memoir, Chu maps her career onto two kinds of negativity: “Viciousness is the attack dog who has not eaten in three days; cruelty is the person calmly holding the leash. These days I aim for cruelty.” It’s easy to imagine the appeal of dispassionate control to a critic who titled her book Authority, and Chu is hardly the first to establish herself by taking down other writers. It’s perhaps less common to graduate from one form of meanness to another. I’m not sure these poles are far enough apart for travel between them to qualify as growth.

rereading her recent reviews, I began to miss the early Chu. If the through line of her first essays was claustrophobically consistent, the later pieces decline to develop one in the first place. (The closest thing to a recurring theme in her work for New York is the speciousness of figures like Paul, whom Chu recently labeled not TERFs but “TARLs: trans-agnostic reactionary liberals.”) Two original essays and a brief epilogue aim to furnish her new book with some heft and her critical project with retrospective solidity. They reveal a shaken faith in the value of criticism, which Chu frames instead as a problem of the critic’s authority—its basis and its uses.

The opening essay, “Criticism in a Crisis,” draws a contrast between two crises: Israel’s war on Gaza and the “self-aggrandizing existential crisis that criticism is always going through.” For as long as there have been critics, they have wrung their hands over the state of the field. Chu suggests that the “moral clarity” of genocide should rouse us from our myopia, helping us distinguish between manufactured professional crises and brutal geopolitical ones “with clear actors and material stakes.” If her earliest writings turned feminist politics into a species of fantasy, here politics is chastening in its reality: it is the urgent stuff out there, Chu at first seems to say, that only a deluded writer could confuse with the insignificant stuff in here. Her about-face testifies to the seriousness of her convictions. But it is an idea about political criticism that threatens to wrench criticism and politics apart.

Chu is right, of course, that the relationship between these two arenas is often muddied, and she means to clarify rather than sunder it. Later in the same essay, she insists that “there is no keeping politics out of criticism,” and her own reviews are persistently political. Whenever Chu seems to be winding up to a critical program, however, she tends toward the incidental—critics should know their history, she counsels, and be honest about their beliefs—or the mystifyingly grandiose. “Criticism in a Crisis” ends with an extended metaphor about “the supreme task of the critic.” “The artist creates by removing something from the world,” she writes, and “the critic’s job is to put it back.” Artists dream, fabricate, “ascend”; critics disabuse, dismantle, “pull” artists “down to earth again.” Her point is sharpened in Authority’s epilogue, where Chu advocates not for a “hygienic” criticism—the kind that aims “to improve society”—but, rather, “as the late John Berger once wrote, the kind that helps to destroy this particular one.”

No wonder Authority has assembled not a pantheon but a rogues’ gallery, in which the artist is either deceiver or dupe; no wonder Chu devotes relatively few words to art she likes. The critic’s subject is power, and her role is to attack it head-on. “Criticism in a Crisis” will have planted some doubts in the reader’s mind about her efficacy: Chu can’t believe that her enemies in the wide world of politics are listening very closely to what literary critics say. Her epilogue acknowledges these limits, stating of her own power: “I do not think it is much, though I am not foolish enough to suppose it is nothing.” Exactly what is accomplished in that zone of minor influence—the means by which criticism might contribute to society’s destruction—she doesn’t say.

Where does a critic’s power come from, and what is its character? If an answer is to be found anywhere in Authority, it should be in the long titular essay. “Authority” recounts the history of critics’ efforts to defend the legitimacy of their judgments, from the seventeenth century to the present. You might expect this broad survey to culminate in some position-taking. But it doesn’t. Authority, which Chu herself has installed at the heart of criticism, turns out to be an “altogether empty thing.” She wants to do away with authority in its nefarious guises—the claim to wield power, I guess, or to serve it—while preserving those aspects she enjoys: she cops to an “authoritative style” and nods respectfully at “scholarship, tradition, history, wit, [and] charisma.” A characteristically provocative note sounds in her call to “reckon with our longing for authority.” But it’s hard to imagine who might object to this when our key word has been so drained of meaning. We hardly seem to be losing anything at all.

Though Chu gives it little attention, the history of leftist criticism is vast and deep. Just as her reviews often focus on artists she dislikes, her titular essay lingers on critics whom she finds pernicious, misguided, or (at best) of modest use today. But there are many figures who have a more constructive vision of the critic’s social role—of her limited forms of efficacy on politics’ terrain. Of several absences, two struck me with particular force.

There’s Alexander Pope and Immanuel Kant, Matthew Arnold and F. R. Leavis, Susan Sontag and (again) Zadie Smith. But where, I wondered as I read “Authority,” is the reader? Authority—on the page, at least, which is the critic’s territory—isn’t secured through arbitrary claim, blunt force, or dispassionate reason. It depends on the reader’s assent. It has to be earned. When readers appear in Chu’s titular essay, their role is passing and passive: they are there to be taught, molded, or shown a model of intelligence. Maybe this kind of authority—authority over—is what Chu means to abolish. I hope so. It’s fatal to condescend to the reader in this way, as any magazine’s letters page will show you. Fatal to thought in that it breeds overconfidence, pedantry, bullying argumentation, and sloppy, impatient chains of reasoning. And fatal to style, which is the critic’s attitude made material.

Chu appears to understand this in “Criticism in a Crisis” when she tells us: “I do not write to persuade the reader; I write to give her a chance to experience herself as the subject of thought.” The disclaimer may seem dubious coming from a critic who so doggedly argues her case, but it is, in a way, self-aware. I have sometimes suspected that Chu’s fans are drawn as much to her posture of eviscerating intelligence as to the substance of her claims. We read her to feel our hand on the leash (“political was something you could be made to feel”). And while I often quibble with particular ideas, it has also occurred to me, when I’m feeling resistant, that Chu’s style is the thing I’m resisting. Though she may not write to persuade, the experience she offers is prosecutorial. But I don’t want to debate power—at least not in a book review. I don’t think power reads book reviews.

In criticism as in politics, you don’t want to misrecognize the polity. The republic of readers is much smaller than the nation, its borders drawn by the confluence of venue, subject, and style. Which brings me to the second conspicuous absence in “Authority.” When Chu’s history of criticism reaches the 1970s, the field is taken over by academic theory. You would never know that in this decade, a generation of feminist critics, from Barbara Smith to Andrea Dworkin, elaborated an activist criticism. Nor would you know that Chu had read these feminists, much less been intellectually formed by them. Perhaps moving on from “On Liking Women” also meant moving on from the second wave, or perhaps the critics in that cohort were never particularly important to Chu. She gravitated instead to “oracular” and “outrageous” polemicists like Ti-Grace Atkinson and Valerie Solanas, whose “preference for indefensible claims” Chu identifies with in Females. But feminist critics might have offered Chu and us a different way of triangulating writer, reader, and authority, predicated neither on pitching our prose at indifferent enemies nor on morally instructing a passive readership.

In magazines such as off our backs, Aphra, and Conditions, at rallies and readings and conferences, feminist critics wrote to and for each other. They thought together about how politics had shaped the books they read and the lives they lived, and how they might read and live differently. Their criticism struck at power, but they also sought out the sources of women’s own. In 1983, Catharine R. Stimpson called this “the dual activity of pulling down and putting up.” Sometimes these feminists addressed men, but more often they spoke to an aspirational community of readers who might be moved to confront power together, whose work of self-organization and ‑understanding might be aided by the critics among them. When, in 1977, Smith called “for non-hostile and perceptive analysis of works written by persons outside the ‘mainstream,’” she also dreamed of an audience of “Black women who know and love these writers as I do.” When Dworkin began her book Woman Hating (1974) by saying, “This book is an action,” she imagined it acting not on Washington but on fledgling feminists. These writers knew who they might hope to hail on the page, and who was beyond reaching. As Elaine Showalter wrote in 1989, quoting her mother: “Why talk to the wall?”

These precedents envision a criticism that is both more realistic and more ambitious than either the self-aggrandizement or the defeatism in which Authority indulges, and to which Chu also seems to be searching for alternatives. Maybe our landscape is no longer theirs. Maybe, at this historical moment, a vibrant activist literary culture—a conversation that we on the left might have among ourselves, no matter who’s in power—is an inconvenient thing to want. But as Chu herself has argued, we take shape around even our least realizable desires.