Raving by McKenzie Wark

What is an art of life for what feels like the end of a world?

In Raving McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving underground queer and trans rave scene. Techno, first and always a Black music, invites fresh sonic and temporal possibilities for this era of diminishing futures. Raving to techno is an art and a technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Extending the rave's sensations, situations, fog, lasers, drugs, and pounding sound systems onto the page, Wark invokes a trans practice of raving as a timely aesthetic for dancing in the ruins of this collapsing capital.

"Wark's new book, Raving, is both a chronicle and a critique of her experience--a queer, trans, cripped, middle-aged one--articulated over the course of six essays, which put her friends and intellectual influences in conversation on the dance floor. To read it as a raver is to feel understood. To read it as anyone else is to get a glimpse of a world, enclosed and artificial, that, after the course of a loud, damp night, can leave its marks on everything outside."--Zoë Beery and Geoffrey Mak "The Nation" 

Paperback / 136 pages