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McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.
Another genre for another gender.
What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.
Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.
Author: McKenzie Wark
Paperback Published 18 February 2020 200 pages
Read and Recommended by Remi:
"An experimental autobiography, Reverse Cowgirl meanders from 70s 80s Sydney through to 90s New York City, interspersed with poetic fragments of sex, drugs, politics, fashion and the slipperiness of gender. Razor sharp, humourous and self deprecating, Wark turns the typical transgender coming out narrative inside out and upside down, detailing her vegabondage as gay, as straight and everything in between.
Throughout the book Wark continually returns to her masochistic desire to fuck her gender into a liminal space, complicating conventional stories and tropes of being transgender and asserting bodily autonomy, sexual hunger and a craving to understand her existance.
A must read for anyone looking for more questions about gender than answers."