The first time I spotted McKenzie Wark at a party, she was writhing by the DJ booth at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club, cutting a striking figure amongst a gaggle of Zoomers.
So many feel self-conscious about aging in a scene that romanticizes youth, but not the 61-year-old Wark, who blooms on the dance floor as she grooves with the sweaty, eyes-closed gusto of someone who truly believes.
The New School professor turned diehard raver is a star of a growing milieu of writers attempting to catalog contemporary rave culture and capture its ephemeral essence. Drawing from her exploits in Brooklyn’s queer underground nightlife scene during the late-2010s and 2020s, Wark’s new book Raving is out this week from Duke University Press.
The bite-sized text approximates an etiquette guide on the practice of partying, and is buoyed by the emotional intimacy of autofiction. Critical theory provides a conceptual framework—including Wark’s tongue-in-cheek taxonomy of the archetypes of people found at raves, from the “coworker” to the “punisher.” (You might already be familiar with the types).
The book ultimately asks: who is raving for—who really needs it?