Trans in Retrospect

Abstract

Reverse Cowgirl describes itself as “an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.” The book follows the renowned hacker/new media theorist and writer McKenzie Wark's reflecting on her trans identity; she does so through narrativizing her sex life and its relation to her gender identity via bold vignettes. She thoughtfully scans the landscape of her desires and identifications, historically and into the present, processing and theorizing her experiences as she goes. I would describe Reverse Cowgirl as an autotheory (“self” and “theory”) in which Wark narrativizes her first-person lived experiences and engenders a personal theory of transness by reflecting on her life up to this point. The reader follows Wark through an understanding of her trans identity in retrospect, with Wark moving through autobiographical scenes in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s that were shaped by pleasure, jouissance, and identity confusion—all told from a more confidently trans present. We come to see Wark where she is now, transitioning in her fifties, with her understanding both trans experience and her larger body of work through candid sharing. It is an absorptive, narrative style of writing in which theory hums below the surface—another drive, like sex. Engaging a nascent autotheoretical mode that is still in process, Wark seeks a language through which to articulate experiences that might have once been nameless or nebulous.In a recent conversation about autotheory, Wark asks, “How can we be conceptual about the mundane?” (Fournier and Wark 2020). How can we engender theory and concepts from our particular lived experiences? This is a question at the heart of the autotheoretical turn, and one of which Wark's Reverse Cowgirl provides one example. Autotheory has the potential for taking seriously the ethics and politics and aesthetics of one's own life—including, of course, one's sex life and gender identity. This is not new for the field of transgender studies, which, not unlike the fields of feminisms and women's and gender studies, has roots in autobiographically grounded academic and critical work—for example, the “personal criticism” Nancy K. Miller describes as characterizing much academic work in these emergent departments in the 1980s, which would set some of the groundwork for the eventual development of trans studies in the 1990s and the publication of formative works like Leslie Feinberg's arguably autofictional novel Stone Butch Blues (1993), Kate Bornstein's critical memoir Gender Outlaw (1994), and more recent works like Janet Mock's Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love, and So Much More (2014), Juliet Jacques's Trans (2015), or Kai Cheng Thom's Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars: A Dangerous Trans Girl's Confabulous Memoir (2019).In seeking a language to articulate her trans identity, Wark also seeks to write in an embodied way—a tendency found in longer histories of feminist and queer writing and performance. Wark takes this drive toward “writing the body” to a humorous, logical conclusion when she includes a “user's manual” guide on “how to fuck this book.” Her book on fucking, then, becomes something the reader can fuck, intimating that the reader can fuck Wark too, in a certain sense. The book, folded, can become a glory hole, a sock, or a papery orifice, like a cunt or an ass. In this way, Wark willfully and radically extends the erotics of reading—a theme that arises in other autotheoretical literature, including Maggie Nelson's Argonauts (notably and thoroughly problematized by many trans readers and scholars, who take issue with Nelson's appropriation of transgender experience when she places it alongside her cisgender experience of pregnancy and childbirth) or earlier autotheoretical works like Audre Lorde's Uses of the Erotic and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Touching Feeling. With its explicit approach to erotics, Reverse Cowgirl is at home with autotheory and critical memoirs like Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkie and Jeremy Atherton Lin's Gay Bar: Why We Went Out.Like so much autotheoretical work, Wark's book is not just about herself but, fundamentally, herself as she exists in relation to others. I liked Wark's hailing of the citations at the end as a “chorus,” positioning the range of intertexts with which she writes alongside as accompanying voices that narrativize and sing—polyphonic, melodic. There's something delightfully dramatic about it: the citations as akin to a chorus in a Greek tragedy that allows us to follow the action of the main plot (or line of argument). Only here it is our first-person narrator, Wark herself, writing her life in light of a coming-of-age as trans, and it doesn't read as a tragedy so much as a tragedy, plus time. While she is playful in the book, bringing a keen sense of humor to her deep self-awareness, she does not shirk the seriousness of her topics and does not hide the tragedies of lives lost to drug addiction—something she discusses anecdotally in a recent conversation about autotheory and autofiction for the MIT Press podcast (Fournier and Wark 2020).Wark's book does a deep dive into her life as she lived it thus far, speedy and sexy, while taking a pause, every now and then, to bring in another theorist's, writer's, or artist's voice alongside. Short chunks of writings by others are incorporated into Wark's autotheoretical storytelling, block quotes that Wark, post-publication, expressed some ambivalence about including in their lengthier form, with Wark wondering whether this has become a trope of autotheory that a writer ought to resist (Fournier and Wark 2020).1 But I think this incorporation of passages from other texts works well as a structure, creating a welcoming pace that gives a reader time and space to really absorb Wark's scenes in all their potency: the citations serve as palette cleansers of a sort, as we get ourselves into position, preparing for the next discursive/readerly fucking.