Reverse Cowgirl

What is a sex life, and what other “lives” does it jostle out of the way to assert itself as the essential spine of an autobiography? In Reverse Cowgirl, McKenzie Wark relates in careful ways the work that goes into the synthesis of a life out of fragments of experience, identity, and intellection.

Grace E. Lavery, University of California, Berkeley

In McKenzie Wark's Reverse Cowgirl, little black book meets commonplace book. Wark's wild ride through the dream of the 70s and 80s (and beyond) smartly complicates whatever we already knew about transition memoirs—and transition, and memoirs. Wark's life is refracted through fashion and theory and music and fucking (so much fucking!). I'm stunned and grateful for the time spent in the company of this luminous book.

Andrea Lawlor, Author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl

This would be a sexual autobiography if McKenzie Wark did not explode the presupposition that sex and genre are binary and that the subject is one and indivisible. It's both a speculative trans autofiction and a tale of the passage from the analogical pre-AIDS sixties to the digital AIDS and trans 2000s. This book is a polybiography where productive, undefined desires struggle to exist beyond the boundaries of patriarchy, capitalism, but also gay culture. Ingredients include one quarter sperm and ass-fucking, one quarter punk glitter and bitch pills, one quarter communist theory—and you, the reader, add the rest.

Paul B. Preciado, author of Testo Junkie

Wark refuses to call this book a coming-of-age tale, even if it ends up marking her coming-into-identity as a trans woman. If the text may initially feel dystopic in spite of its moments of ecstasy that transcend and descend, it ends in a space of utopic self-invention.

BOMB