Andrea Long Chu

“Gender is not just the misogynistic expectations a female internalizes but also the process of internalizing itself, the self's gentle suicide in the name of someone else's desires, someone else's narcissism.”
― Andrea Long Chu, Females

“I’ll define as female any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another. These desires may be real or imagined, concentrated or diffuse—a boyfriend’s sexual needs, a set of cultural expectations, a literal pregnancy—but in all cases, the self is hollowed out, made into an incubator for an alien force. To be female is to let someone else do your desiring for you, at your own expense. This means that femaleness, while it hurts only sometimes, is always bad for you.”
― Andrea Long Chu, Females