Complaint!

McKenzie Wark takes readers into the undisclosed locations of New York's thriving queer rave scene, showing how raving to techno is an art and technique at which queer and trans bodies might be particularly adept, but which is for anyone who lets the beat seduce them.

Contents
1. Rave as Practice 
2. Xeno-euphoria 
3. Ketamine Femmunism 
4. Enlustment 
5. Resonant Abstraction 
6. Excessive Machine 

"How to write a book about raving as a practice that practices rave? From k-nights spent on Brooklyn's and Berlin's junkspace dance floors, McKenzie Wark abstracts a life practice of ressociation in a dance of autoconceptualization and allotheorization. In crossing toward the stranger's gift of 'letting go of ourselves as private property, ' Raving is nothing less than Wark's femmunist manifesto, her tractatus on techno's blackness, her treatise for a twenty-first-century trans ethics."—Kodwo Eshun

Susan Stryker is a foundational figure in trans studies. When Monsters Speak showcases the development of Stryker’s writing from the 1990s to the present. It combines canonical pieces, such as “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” with her hard to find earlier work published in zines and newsletters. Brought together, they ground Stryker’s thought in 1990s San Francisco and its innovative queer, trans, and S/M cultures. The volume includes an introduction by editor McKenzie Wark, who highlights Stryker’s connections to developments in queer theory, media studies, and autotheory while foregrounding Stryker’s innovative writing style and scholarly methods. When Monsters Speak is an authoritative and essential collection by one of the most important and influential intellectuals of our time.

Jill Johnston began the 1960s as an influential dance columnist for the Village Voice and by the start of the next decade she was known as a keen observer of postmodern art and lesbian feminist life who challenged how dance, art, and women can and should be seen. The Essential Jill Johnston Reader collects dozens of pieces of her writing from across her career. These writings—many of which appeared in the Village Voice and the New York Times—survey the breadth of her work, braiding together her thinking, writing, and activism.

From personal essays, travel writing, and artist profiles to dance and visual art reviews as well as her infamous series of columns for the Voice in which she came out as a lesbian, these pieces demonstrate the evolution of her philosophies and writing style. Illustrating how Johnston drew on lessons from dance to reconsider what it means to be a woman, this collection brings a fascinating and brilliant voice of American arts criticism, radical feminism, and gay liberation back to contemporary audiences.

In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work.

Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them.

Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism. The killjoy survival kit and killjoy manifesto, with which the book concludes, supply practical tools for how to live a feminist life, thereby strengthening the ties between the inventive creation of feminist theory and living a life that sustains it.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. 

Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

‘I am concerned with the power of sound! and what it can do to the body and the mind,’ wrote composer Pauline Oliveros. In the body, histories and politics come together with sound and listening, memory and feeling. Bodies of Sound offers a resonant exploration of feminist sonic cultures and radical listening in over fifty contributions. In this book of echoes, a variety of forms – from essays to text scores to art, fiction and memoir – speak across gender, ways of knowing, witnessing, sounding and voicing, translation, displacement, violence and peace.

With contributions from: 

Sara Ahmed, Ximena Alarcón, Svetlana Alexievich, Ain Bailey & Frances Morgan, Anna Barham, Xenia Benivolski, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson & Kite, Elena Biserna, Karen Barad & Black Quantum Futurism, Anne Bourne, Daniela Cascella, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Maria Chávez, Don Mee Choi, Carson Cole Arthur, Petero Kalulé & AM Kanngieser, Lindsay Cooper, Julia Eckhardt, Lucia Farinati & Claudia Firth, Ella Finer, Annie Goh, Louise Gray, Christina Hazboun, Johanna Hedva, Sarah Hennies, Tomoko Hojo, IONE, Lee Ingleton, Hannah Catherine Jones, Christine Sun Kim, Nat Lall, Cathy Lane, Jeanne Lee & Lona Foote, Marysia Lewandowska, Annea Lockwood & Jennifer Lucy Allan, Cannach MacBride, Elaine Mitchener & Hannah Kendall, Alison O'Daniel, Naomi Okabe, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Gascia Ouzounian, Holly Pester, Roy Claire Potter, Anna Raimondo, Tara Rodgers, Aura Satz & Barbara London, Shortwave Collective, Sisters of the Order of Celestial Nephology, Sop, Syma Tariq, Marie Thompson, Trinh T. Minh-ha & Stoffel Debuysere, Salomé Voegelin

With a preface by Reni Eddo-Lodge and an introduction by Sara Ahmed.
Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer. Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent. This edition brings Lorde’s essential poetry, speeches and essays, including ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, together in one volume for the first time.

Stemming from a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen, this monographic catalogue offers a range of perspectives on urgent issues around gender, sexuality and labour in the digital age.

This book orbits “Second Sex War”, a series of works by Sidsel Meineche Hansen addressing political and ethical questions arising from the use of digital bodies in contemporary visual culture and the means of production and distribution for these commodities. Realising that the same avatars are used across the pornographic, gaming and cultural industries, she investigates the working conditions and relationships that structure these fields. Through numerous essays and conversations, Second Sex War, the book, emphasises her collaborations with various practitioners (animators, musicians, writers) and the way they have inflected her practice. Media theorist Helen Hester (author of the Xenofeminist manifesto) reflects on the limitations of the porn industry and the use of female avatars. Artists collective Radclyffe Hall talks to photographer Phyllis Christopher about early lesbian erotica magazine in the 1980s. Linda Stupart compiles quotes by Sara Ahmed, Kathy Acker and Ursula K. Le Guin to consider what is radical sex today.  Artist Hannah Black's contribution, which opens the publication, reads like a manifesto for artists being crushed under the weight of current political circumstances. 

Edited by Sidsel Meineche Hansen and Robert Leckie.

Texts by Robert Leckie, Hannah Black, Helen Hester, Phyllis Christopher & Radclyffe Hall, Linda Stupart, Josefine Wikström. Entretiens with Helena Vilalta, James B Stringer, Melika Ngombe Kolongo (Nkisi) by Sidsel Meineche Hansen.