McKenzie Wark and her epistolary autobiography: gender, beauty, and transsexuality

Writing a letter involves something improvisational, a jazzy display that involves playing with words to convey what one wants to say. The epistolary genre is also a kind of monologue ; letters are sometimes too intimate, and we suspect they are not addressed to their intended recipient, but rather that the author is writing to resolve or simply reflect on some ongoing drama or conflict.

McKenzie Wark invokes the second person to create a discontinuous, epistolary autobiography in Love and Money, Sex and Death (Caja Negra Editora). The emphasis on the second person is key because although she alludes to ex-lovers, partners, or herself in the past or future, we might think it's a single person (her or her mother, according to her own admission) in a sort of fictionalized interior monologue.

The format of a letter allows her to experiment with a hybrid genre that allows her to review her experience of transitioning from man to woman, defined in lighthearted terms when she maintains that “transitioning serves to save oneself from boredom” or more politically when she understands her decision as a way of “editing her relationship with history.”

The trans category joins the exercise of writing as a bricolage effect reminiscent of Severo Sarduy's notion of baroque when the Cuban poet describes the transvestite organization of a body as an assembly of diverse parts , a sort of Frankenstein that is updated and recreated in each subject.

But on the other hand, the professor of cultural studies and media at the New School for Social Research in New York understands that there is something old-fashioned in her own reflections, that perhaps we are witnessing the latest theoretical or biographical impressions about an experience that in a few years will be quite common or habitual.

“Editing one’s own flesh” is another expression that involves the act of transitioning through writing, inventing a new gender, changing the entity of the body and sex , generating substitutions; everything can be seen and read from that transsexual condition as an open, imprecise, unstable state.

McKenzie Wark decided to transition after the age of forty with several partners and children , with an academic life and with certain class privileges that she always points out to affirm that no matter how difficult everything has been in her situation, racialized and poor people have suffered much more or have simply not managed to survive.

But changing sex in midlife leads to a rethinking of relationships in relation to the place this change creates in one's environment, especially among one's children, who continue to see one as a father even though one is now a trans woman.

Beauty is a theme that is deciphered in this text translated by Lola Copacabana, which could be a personal diary, a novel, or autofiction, although it also moves towards the chronicle when she recounts her adventures at rave parties or at the Black Lives Matter demonstrations as two instances where bodies collectively participate in something that transcends them, that mixes them and gives them a certain lack of definition.

In both cases , the group is what builds a body and not so much the individuality that allows for an instance of risk and contagion with the imprint of others.

The body time that trans women experience does not follow the narrative arc of biological women according to McKenzie Wark , there is something discontinuous in that woman who has just been born in the skin of an adult man.

The entire text of Love and Money, Sex and Death engages in a dialogue with the temporalities of a life where sex substitutes one identity for another, imprints and juxtaposes one gender with another, and it is there that the notion of beauty becomes more like a connection of parts than a possibility of harmony. Amidst the rejection of being an imitation (the great challenge to avoid when transitioning, when the body goes against biology), the proposal is to "inhabit this flesh as my own work of art."

McKenzie Wark understands that being a woman is a political concept rather than a vested right . That is, it's not a given possibility but a concrete action on one's own body that takes its own toll.

This allows her to consider difference without mitigating factors . Not only because she recognizes the envy other women's bodies provoke in her, but also because she wonders if equality is possible when there is no homogeneity.

In fact, she devotes a lot of space to thinking about appearances , the bodies that attract her, men with gym muscles who are neither athletic nor virtuous, skin color, the way she can be attractive, the ways in which she is accepted in certain spaces because they deduce that she has money, beyond her condition as a trans woman, all these elements that could be a light enumeration of daily events are political inscriptions, social readings that are made in the speed of life in common and that McKenzie captures to bring her point of view closer, to share it and expand it, to lead us to look from her own routine when she walks through the city.

For the Australian author , transsexuality affects not only the body but also the text as two supports, two similar technologies where a system of montage is created, both the flesh and the technical resources at the time of writing.

In fact, this book is also an associative mechanism where Wark links elements of urban life, her work, and her past to generate a portrait of her transition. The author acknowledges that "for those of us who belong to modernity, the world is autofiction."

Transitioning implies rewriting one's own life and although sometimes that second person saturates and the epistolary form is somewhat tiring or monotonous, what this material leaves behind are some undeveloped ideas (at least not in this book) where McKenzie points out a political functioning not only in the decision to transition but in the economy of one's own body, in the way of seeing and understanding the gestures, manners and habits that make up a social structure that is much denser in that gallery of appearances and looks that she describes so that we can discover her own language.

Love and Money, Sex and Death , by McKenzie Wark (Caja Negra).