McKenzie Wark - Reverse Cowgirl (book presentation)

What if you were trans and didn’t know it? For the first time in Austria, author McKenzie Wark presents her work Reverse Cowgirl, spinning a comedy of errors between trying to live as a gay man and being a man with women – from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today.

As part of imagetanz, McKenzie Wark presents her work Reverse Cowgirl, in which she raises the questions: What if you were trans and didn’t know it? What if there was a gap in your life that you had no more than a vague idea existed? If you only felt at home in your body when you were high on drugs or having sex? From Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, McKenzie Wark embarks on a journey through the changing political and media landscapes and describes the attempt to find a home between the fractures of identity and body. Borrowing from the genres of autofiction and fiction criticism, the result is a deeply moving exploration of the self – an autoethnography of the opacity of our selves. The German translation of Reverse Cowgirl was published by August Verlag in 2023.

McKenzie Wark is best known for a series of books on 21st century critical theory and on alternative histories of Marxism. Her most recent, post-transition works of autofiction and autotheory – including Raving, Reverse Cowgirl and Love and Money, Sex and Death – brought her a lot of media attention. She is a professor of media and cultural theory at the New School in New York. For Ariadne Randall’s piece Reverse Cowgirl II: Ride To The Top, which can be seen as part of imagetanz 2025, she wrote a entirely new text.