![]() ![]() ![]() Juliet Jacques: I’d like to ask you about the line on the back cover of Reverse Cowgirl, which says that ‘the established narratives of being transgender don’t seem to apply’ to you. Wark began her literary and academic career in Australia during the 1980s, and is the author of numerous books, including Hacker Manifesto (2004), Gamer Theory (2007) and last year’s Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? Wark and I became friends in 2013, when I interviewed her about her work on the postwar avant-garde movement Situationist International. ![]() Reverse Cowgirl (2020), the latest book by writer and scholar McKenzie Wark, follows in this tradition, while also subverting the linear form of transition memoirs, interweaving fragments of biography and auto-fiction with emails and Facebook posts. Following Sandy Stone’s imperative, in her influential 1987 The “Empire” Strikes Back: A Post-Transsexual Manifesto, for such writers to create new genres in order to explore new genders, over the last 20 years this literary subculture has blossomed into a vibrant world of novels, short stories, poetry, plays, essays and journalism. Throughout the 20th century, academics, activists and writers gradually shifted their focus from memoirs that would explain transsexual living towards more theoretical texts that incorporated personal material but eschewed the autobiographical form. Trans and nonbinary people have long struggled to find effective language and useful forms to express themselves in the face of widespread transphobia in the media, politics and society. ![]()
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