In September, will publish LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH. A very special, personal book of mine. You can pre-order a signed copy from Brooklyn booksellers :
spoonbillbooks.com/products/signe
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chica marx
@mckenziewark
Theory icon. Bad Marxist. Transsexual menace. Media & Culture Prof, “Hudson University,” NYC. My book LOVE AND MONEY, SEX AND DEATH out with Verso in September.
chica marx’s posts
Its not just teaching through a pandemic and weird weather—its trying to convey the power and pleasure of learning when the world we'd be learning for isn't actually going to be there, and everyone sort of knows it.
Foucault worked with prison activists and the anti-psychiatry movement. As for ppl who think those are trivial 'neoliberal', 'identity politics' concerns: I see you.
So much of STONE BUTCH BLUES is about learning the habits of solidarity. It really needs to be more widely reward.
Speaking of "useless degrees": how is a degree in marketing or business going to help you confront the inevitability of your own death?
Feels to me like there's too many content creators and not enough form destroyers.
I’ve always had an appreciation for ppl who craft their own lives as works of art. So it was perhaps inevitable that I found myself among transsexuals.
At the rave, on the dance floor, someone leant in to shout in my ear "I cited you in my thesis!" Then walked away. I love everything about this. Life and learning overlapping. And this person's most excellent manners in keeping the interaction brief.
My 61st birthday. This part of my life may not be long but it’s very sweet. Thanks to all the special ppl in it.
Y'all posting wordle results on the TL when you should be posting tweets that amuse and delight me.
Being lectured about gender by the ppl who are still on the starter pack—
Princeton University finds more expensive way to demonstrate what we already know about how language works.
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Wow. Huge if true.
"According to a machine learning analysis of dozens of languages [...], the meaning of words does not necessarily refer to an intrinsic, essential constant. Instead, it is significantly shaped by culture, history and geography." phys.org/news/2020-08-m
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I was handed home-made translations of Foucault in the late 70s by gay liberationists. You could get locked up for being gay in those days, by both psychiatrists and cops. It's about as 'materialist' a politics as you could fucking get.
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At the time, most Marxists could only think one institutional site of struggle, and that was 'factory.' After Foucault, one could engage with 'prison' or 'psychiatric ward' and 'school' as having their own materiality, not just as adjuncts or doubles of 'factory.'
To the younger dolls: what I can tell is that time speeds up as you age. Fill your time with love and pleasure. Be intentional about efforts to make the world livable for all. Live as many moments as u can as if they are works of art.
For those who wanted to know the readings for my autotheory class:
I’m supposed to buy the book with the transphobic premise and read it before deciding it has a transphobic premise?
Writing is just manual labor. Don't think—type. Start anywhere. Write anything. Practice your instrument—the keyboard.
Hot take on NTFs: it's the art market perfected. The art market is all about provenance: the chain of authentication and verifiable ownership of the art work. It's that, automated, making the art work itself redundant. The destiny of minimal and conceptual art revealed.
If you are an international student at : I’d be willing to do in person independent study, if it can help u meet visa requirements and if I can supervise something that fits your program of study.
Just signed my contract with to edit WHEN MONSTERS SPEAK: A READER. Looking forward to bringing this edited collection of some of Susan's finest work to the world in 2024.
To the haters I haven't blocked yet:
1. "paraphilia" is not the insult you think it is and p.s. your sex life is probably very boring.
2. yes, I take a lot of selfies and I look great in them.
3. yes, I'm old. You'll be glad to look this good when you are.
As I've been saying: there's a new kind of ruling class, in addition to landlords and capitalists. I call them the vectoralist class. They own and control the vector of information. The ruling by enforing asymmetries of information.
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From “ all the good ones are gay” to “all the good ones turned out to be trans women” in a generation.
The problem with writing about the self is that selves are fictions. One is trying to write honestly about something whose sole purpose is to front, to evade, that is self-deluding.
Happy tranniversary to me! 4 years ago today I started 'mones, after a period of social transition. Enjoying this version of being a body in the world much more.
Somebody had an elite education but still doesn’t understand Walter Benjamin.
Artists are just ppl who have an aesthetic relation to their own pathologies.
Unpopular opinion: Goddard is vastly overrated. His rep was made by cineastes. Men who preferred cinema to life. In Goddard's leading ladies they saw idealized versions of the students and assistants and secretaries they so desperately wanted to fuck.
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I was on edibles waiting for a show at the shed one night and became convinced that it’s purpose is to mark the ambience around it in the psychogeography of the city as one of pure evil.
It was one of Marx’s most profound insights that revolutionary movements think current struggles through past languages. And yet ppl do exactly what he said not to do—in his name.
How to rave at 59 years of age:
1. Come for the opener. Small crowd, lots of space on the floor. Usually sonically adventurous.
2. Go home and nap.
3. Come back for the closer. Not hard to match the crowd's energy. All bangers set.
4. Back home and nap.
Back in the late 70s, an older comrade said to me: "I won't live to see communism, but you will."
Sometime late last Friday night I said to a younger raver: "I won't live to see the end of civilization, but you will."
Grad students are under so much pressure to reference *all* the literatures. What if we changed the criteria to referencing the *interesting* ones? And making a case for them as interesting? Rather than the banality of citation and the citation of banality...
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He had to create an entire worldview to be able to exist independently of it. Not that you'd know any of this reading American opinionators who just read some texts in American grad school, as if that was the institutional form in which the texts themselves emerged.
I'm editing an issue of journal on trans | fem | aesthetics. Contributors are paid. Anyone want to pitch me? If u know the journal you'll know the vibe. DM me.
Twitter is owned by the same ruling class today as it was yesterday and as it will be tomorrow.
Things that can be erotic, a list:
• stepping out in clothes you know you look good in
• a gym in a working class neighborhood
• a conversation had just for the pleasure of it
• dancing with strangers in a queer bar
• hot chocolate on a cold morning
The reckless and destructive policies of President has pushed faculty to consider a vote of no confidence.
Two years ago today: the first social event I attended as an out trans woman.
Never trust an Ivy Leaguer who does not view that institution with the utmost contempt.
Best not to sound off about gender when you've only ever attempted one of them.
Paul Virilio passing is the end of an era for me. He was central to my thinking in the 80s. And also a great example of low theory as a genre of writing.
All of the claims to the sovereignty of our bodies are connected. To decide when to fuck, to abort, to transition. To not be killed, incarcerated, excluded. One struggle, different bodies.
This is so true it’s uncanny
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My youngest explaining to a new d+d friend over the ether that I'm their dad but that they use she/her pronouns for me. Took less than a minute. The zoomers have got this. It's not complicated.
It would appear that quite a few ppl have very limited notions and awareness of what 'the erotic' can be. Its capacious and gentle at the edges. Its not sex, altho that too can be more varied things than ppl want to think about. Your model of these things is not universal.
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There's several eras to Foucault's work. 'Discipline and Punish' and 'Birth of the Clinic' is just one moment in it. I see it as descending from Bachelard and Canguillem's work on philosophy of science, but extended to the social sciences and their material effects.
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I had a newspaper column for 10 years, hun. I don't recall ever writing about people without reading or interviewing their advocates. I might have disagreed with them but I'd want to show I knew their position. That you did not do.
Contrary to a common belief: the sex of the 'biological' body can be complicated & strange. It's the social roles of gender that are rigid and fixed. Some bodies just don't fit into those gender roles, which after all are just handed out after a quick visual inspection at birth
Only 3 ppl from PARIS IS BURNING are still alive. Junior is one of them.
I don't know what the fuck i was thinking but i decided to create this new course on Trans | Media for undergrads. To show all the cool stuff our ppl have been making lately & invite some whose work i admire to come in and share. The adventure begins next Tuesday. Wish me luck!
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Has to be said tho: the prevalence of Foucault in American grad schools is an indirect result of the black listing of communist intellectuals in the 50s. He filled a void still there decades later.
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I have to take that on trust, given that no trans ppl who work on this stuff appear in the piece at all. I hope you know what you're doing. Your piece is proving popular with ppl who do not have our interests at heart.
St Louis Post Dispatch manages to do what and have failed to do on this topic—report it.
I came out several times. As bi, a gay man, as nonbinary, as a trans woman, as a trans lesbian. Besides being functionally a heterosexual man for long periods. Gender and sexuality can be complicated, can change, can take time to figure out, or not.
#NationalComingOutDay
Claudia Rankine. Getting this out there in advance of trans day of visibility...
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It's ironic, because the context in which Foucault worked was one in which it was very, very hard to be a left-wing intellectual outside the orbit of the communist party (from which he broke pretty early on).
What a day. I’m crying. And my feet hurt. Giving thanks to the leadership of Black trans women. 🖤 twitter.com/tim__fitzgeral
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Today's ruling class, the worst the planet will ever endure, is telling us very clearly that they don't care about mass extinction, including the future possible disappearance of most of their 7 billion fellow humans.
What we do to make a living is not to be confused with what we do to make a life.
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In most contexts I highlight the positive effects of communist intellectual work because the Cold War has erased it. But here, the thing to stress is the space to its left that Foucault created. This is a directly political history, not a 'history of ideas' thing.
Trans ppl spook the cis when we show to them that the body itself is just another technics of mediation. That this applies to all bodies.
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Common trope among white Americans about Australia: unconsciously pining for something like America before the Civil Rights movement.
Or maybe its because everyone is living paycheck to paycheck in a pandemic in a dying civilization...
Happy Castration Day to me! Two years since my orchiectomy. Two years as an "orchid."
I wanna be canceled. I need the career boost. I want gigs with bigger appearance fees.
We need to hear from adult trans ppl who transitioned young. There's several out there who are public about that experience. Also, wrote a whole book on the history of the transgender child. Havta *know* the terms to change the debate...
"My field is psychology."
"Mine is media studies."
"How is that a field? What is it even about?"
"Media, which is real. Psyche is a character in Greek mythology. How the fuck is *that* a field?"
My kids made me 'nonbinary parent's day' cards and, while this is mostly the estradiol talking, my heart just burst. I just want every trans person to love and be loved like this, by someone. Doesn't matter who or why.
If u recognize me in the club, please feel free to say hello. I love attention. But pls be understanding if I don't want to engage much. I'm there to get free from the part of me that writes the books, does the talks, etc.
