GLR November-December 2023

I WAS INTRODUCED to the work of McKenzie Wark in 2021, with her book Philosophy for Spiders . This book is part memoir and part literary criticism of Kathy Acker, Wark’s friend and lover. I appreciated their candid conversa tions about solitude and sexual desire, mas turbation, and what pronouns to use for Acker’s dildo collection. Both saw experi mentation, specifically through language, as something equally present on the page and on the body. Acker and Wark met in 1995 and continued emailing back and forth for over a year, the result of which was collected in I’m Very Into You, published in 2015, eighteen years after Acker’s death. The emails are sporadic and passionate. They range from cultural commentary to discussions of sex and gender play, each message a window into the ways we receive and appreciate in timacy, and the ways we notice those we adore, even (espe cially) when they’re not physically with us. Wark’s latest memoir, Love and Money, Sex and Death, re turns to letter-writing as a way of revisiting past lovers and past friends, and those who fall somewhere in between. She turns the idea of a traditional, linear memoir on its head, using hind sight as a tool to reapproach, and in some cases recover, past relationships: “Changing sex edits your relation to a lot of things. Including history.” Growing up in Newcastle, Australia, Wark was heavily in fluenced by poststructural theory and became interested in the ways that language—written, spoken, or performed—is used to establish difference and build identity. She published Virtual Ge ography in 1994, one of her first theoretical works, which looked at the relationship between physicality, or embodied experiences, and digital spaces. Phones, computers, and TVs all become part of our “virtual geographies,” dictating how we move through time, present and future. Her more recent works explore these questions through personal experience. Her 2020 genre-bending Allison Armijo, the web editor for this magazine, is a creative writing student at Emerson College in Boston. November–December 2023 Grace probably did more to educate the American public than almost anything anybody has done so far.” W&G had fairly low ratings until the episode in which, furious that their favorite show censored a same-sex kiss, Will and Jack storm into the NBC offices to complain. Executives brush them off saying: “You’ll never see two gay men kissing on network TV.” But on their way out of the building, they wind up in a crowd outside a tapingof The Today Show . Will waits until a camera is close, grabs Jack, and plants an exaggerated kiss on his face, making it the first male same-sex kiss in TV history. Baume sees Modern Family (2009-2020), which featured the wedding of Jay and Cam, as the culmination of years of progress in gay visibility and the fight for equal rights. As the show’s ho-hum title suggests, a gay couple is just part of today’s

modern family. A sea change in attitudes going back to the 1970s allowed the series to flourish and become a critical hit and a ratings juggernaut. Hi Honey, I’m Homo offers a fast-paced sweep across LGBT representations over time. They’re important because the media play such an important role in defining what’s normative and what’s cool. “Television isn’t just a piece of furniture to watch,” writes Baume, “it’s a conversation, a tool, a weapon, a war, a party, an instrument, and an opportunity. It’s a project to par ticipate in rather than passively watching in the dark.” LGBT people are no longer invisible on TV, but calls to participate proactively rather than remain complacent are as urgent now as they were in the 1960s and ’70s, as the forces of resistance and intolerance have never gone away.

Revisiting Past Selves

memoir Reverse Cowgirl weaves queer the ory into personal experiences of stumbling into and out of gender identities, of search ing for language for growing up trans and not knowing it yet, or recognizing it without language to claim it. In the preface of Love and Money, Sex andDeath , Wark writes to her childhood self: “You—what do I even remember of

A LLISON A RMIJO

LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH AMemoir by McKenzie Wark Verso Press. 176 pages, $24.95

you? Our past selves are probably extensively edited edi tions.” The relationship between writing and the body is something Wark frequently interrogates, using revision to il lustrate the ways a body is similarly edited, revisited, and ex perienced. In Philosophy for Spiders , she writes: “Language has digital bits that bodies don’t.” Language gives the body more flexibility, more permission to transform, change, see itself outside of a linear narrative. Wark argues that one can revise, edit, and reintroduce the body to the present by revis iting memories of another life. The use of second person demonstrates this reflection as a kind of forced separation be tween her past and present selves. The work is divided into three main sections—“Mothers,” “Lovers,” and “Others”—in which Wark writes to people like her own mother, Joyce, who died when she was five, and Cy bele, the Phrygian goddess of trans women (to put it in modern terms). The letters range from comical anecdotes to questions about the past that were left unexplored. These questions infil trate memory, confronting changes in patterns of thought from past relationships, though not necessarily toward reconciliation. Among many of the selves that Wark revisits is that of pro fessor, where she writes to one of her students who passed away, a Black trans woman named Venus. “[Your death], Venus, came from the violence of marginal labor, from the order of the straight family, from anti-Blackness,” Wark writes. “Nothing will ever extort a reconciliation from me to any of that.” While much of Wark’s memoir details challenges she has faced as a trans woman, her letter to Venus acknowledges the privilege within her lament. The epistolary form allows Wark to revisit a time in her past in a way by paying attention to those around

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