Professor of Culture and Media, New School for Social Research

Sex & Gender

Mothers

An excerpt from Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir by McKenzie Wark

January 15, 2024 • by McKenzie Wark

The thing about becoming a transsexual is that most of us can’t draw on much of a transsexual culture. We have to sort out ways to be by cutting and pasting from the cultural materials that are around us. Which is not what we were supposed to make of those ...

Feminism

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

A conversation with McKenzie Wark, one of our most dazzling contemporary theorists, about what we can learn from one of America’s most dazzling postmodern writers

September 17, 2021 • by Claire Potter and McKenzie Wark

Claire Potter: Let’s begin where the book begins—your relationship with Kathy Acker. McKenzie Wark: I should start by saying that the relationship was incredibly brief. She had a lot of them. It is the kind of thing she did—fall massively in love with somebody. It would last a few weeks, as it did ...

Kathy Acker’s Astrologer Told Her She Would Meet Somebody—and That Was Me

Gender

Cis Lit and the Trans Writer

On Torrey Peters and the possibilities for trans girl fiction

January 12, 2021 • by McKenzie Wark

What would happen if we took seriously the perspectives of trans people, and allowed them to potentially transform how we see the whole of gender? Detransition, Baby is a book about what cis and trans women might have to say to each other. It does allow a certain amount of cis tourism ...

Activism

The Pride Wore White

Black trans women step out of the queer chorus

June 23, 2020 • by McKenzie Wark

I’d come for Brooklyn Liberation for Black Trans Lives. We were asked to wear white. I blended in easily with the human snow of the crowd, wrapped all around the museum. Coming up Washington Avenue, so many white-clad bodies streaming, milling, chatting, buying ice cream from the truck, clapping and cheering ...

Reviews

Void Bitches

To be trans is to be already left out of the design of the world.

May 21, 2020 • by McKenzie Wark

If trans writers have an affinity for the disaster of the world, maybe it’s because our bodies are a disaster already. Now that the whole planet has some kind of dysphoria, maybe it’s our time to shine. It’s a ludicrous idea, I know, but one reads in these times with a ...

Race

Paul Gilroy: Race and ‘Useful Violence’

December 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

Aimé Césaire called it: the so-called west is a decaying civilization. In both the United States and Europe, where institutions are receding, a base level of race-talk and racial solidarity is revealed as metastasizing beneath them. In such dim times, I turn to the writings of Paul Gilroy as offering ...

Sex & Gender

The Sun is the Size of a Human Foot

An Interview with Andrea Long Chu

October 29, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

But I think the more proper question is: “Whose foot?” It’s not about the foot not “actually” being the size of the sun. It's the fact that there's necessarily a subjective relation that changes from person to person. So I think the place where truth becomes important is not actually ...

Sex & Gender

The Many-handed Hunger of Transsexuality

On T. Fleischmann

October 21, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

What do we do with what’s left over, with what is in excess of bare life, if we have it? Denounce it as privilege, perhaps. I’m not a particularly moral person. Sure, that’s bad. I’m not very moralistic either. That’s probably good. With what’s left over in my life, I’d ...

Feature

Commitment to the Bit

On Andrea Long Chu

September 3, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

The way to have the most fun with the writings of Andrea Long Chu is to read them as satire. Most of her texts work by taking some familiar habits of thought and pressing them to extremes, to the point where they disintegrate. Their virtue, as texts, is what Chu ...

Feature

The Potential of the Queer

On José Esteban Muñoz

February 22, 2019 • by McKenzie Wark

“I was a spy in the house of gender normativity.” - José Esteban Muñoz I too have been a spy in the house of gender normativity. This is what I saw: Work, eat, breed. That, in effect, is how production and consumption are supposed to operate. You have to do work in ...

Education

Cultural Studies Threatened in Poland

An Interview with Ewa Majewska

November 2, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

Ewa Majewska, could you first sketch out for me a little about your own work? I am a feminist philosopher who is currently working on theories of subaltern counter-publics in the peripheries, weak resistances, and the avant-gardes. I am also interested in the resistance to fascism, and for this some Habermassian belief ...

Theory & Practice

After Capitalism, the Derivative

For Randy Martin

April 9, 2017 • by McKenzie Wark

We forget that Marx’s Capital starts with the appearance of what is new in the world of its time: the abundance of commodities. So why always keep starting with commodities now that they are old, rather than starting with a form of exchange whose abundance is relatively new, with derivatives? ...