The Cis Gaze and its others
McKenzie Wark
Let’s call it the cis gaze.
There’s the male gaze, the white gaze, the colonial gaze. Then there’s the look that polices the normative model of gender and is anxious about deviations from it.
To be trans is to be seen through the cis gaze. To be trans is to develop tactics for appearing in and against it. To avoid, evade, or exploit it. To be trans is to be an artist of appearances—to develop arts of both seeing and appearing.
In this collection McKenzie Wark takes the reader on a journey through what she as a trans writer has learned about the cis gaze from trans artists—and from a few who aren’t, as far as we know.
She engages with the work of Derek Jarman, the Wachowski sisters, Vaginal Davis, Greer Lankton, Juliana Huxtable, and other notable queer and trans artists, and develops the first comprehensive theory of the cis gaze—a compendium of tactics artists have used in and against it.
