Table Of Content

Kathy Acker This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic oeuvre of Kathy Acker and how her unique art and politics, located at the explosive intersection of punk, postmodernism, and feminism, critiques and exemplifies late twentieth- century capitalism. There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—n ine novels, novellas, essays, reviews, poetry, and film scripts, published in a period spanning the 1970s to the mid 1990s— is the most developed body of contemporary feminist postmod- ernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death, Kathy Acker: Punk Writer gives a detailed and comprehensive analysis of how Acker melds the philosophy and poetics of the European avant- garde with the vernacular and ethos of her punk subculture to voice an idiosyncratic feminist radical politics in literary form: a punk feminism. With its aesthetics of shock, transgression, parody, Debordian détournement, cari- cature, and montage, her oeuvre reimagines the fin- de- siècle United States as a schlock horror film for her punk girl protagonist: Acker’s cipher for herself and other rebellious and nonconformist women. This approach will allow the reader to more fully understand Acker as a writer who inhabits an explosive and creative nexus of contemporary women’s writing, punk culture, and punk feminism’s reimagining of late capitalism. This vital work will be an important text at both undergraduate and graduate levels in gender and women’s studies, postmodern studies, and twentieth- century American literature. Margaret Henderson teaches literature at the University of Queensland. She has published extensively on feminist culture and women’s writing, including a study of feminist cultural memory, Marking Feminist Times, and with Anthea Taylor, Postfeminism in Context: Women, Australian Popular Culture, and the Unsettling of Postfeminism. Interdisciplinary Research in Gender Drag, Interperformance, and the Trouble with Queerness Katie Horowitz Re- Writing Women as Victims From Theory to Practice Maria José Gámez Fuentes, Sonia Núñez Puente and Emma Gómez Nicolau Cultural Reflections of Medusa The Shadow in the Glass Jennifer Hedgecock Representations of Working- Class Masculinities in Post- War British Culture The Left Behind Matthew Crowley Gender and Sexual Fluidity in 20th Century Women Writers Switching Desire and Identity Lesley Graydon Kathy Acker Punk Writer Margaret Henderson Female Sexuality in Modernist Fiction Literary Techniques for Making Women Artists Elaine Wood Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face Paul Morrison www.routledge.com/ Interdisciplinary- Research- in- Gender/ book- series/ IRG Kathy Acker Punk Writer Margaret Henderson First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 Margaret Henderson The right of Margaret Henderson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial- No Derivatives 4.0 license Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing- in- Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978- 1-1 38- 29628- 2 (hbk) ISBN: 978- 1-3 15- 10009- 8 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Newgen Publishing UK For Alix. Contents Acknowledgements ix Introduction: the fin- de- siècle punk writer: the sense and non- sense of revolt 1 PART I Contexts and configurations of Acker 25 1 Punk times: the scenes and sounds of punk writing 27 2 The punk writer emerges: from counterculture to punk culture 46 3 The punk intellectual: repossessing the European avant- garde 63 4 The punk feminist novelist: making the novel of cruelty and excess 83 PART II Acker’s punk tropology 103 5 Heterosexual desire: Blood and Guts in High School (1978) 105 6 The family: Great Expectations (1982) 124 viii Contents 7 The polity: Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986) 144 8 The economy: Empire of the Senseless (1988) 165 Conclusion: what Kathy did 187 Index 191 newgenprepdf Acknowledgements I thank the readers of various drafts of this book for their generosity and insights: Alison Bartlett, Leigh Dale, Natalya Lusty, Maureen Burns, and particularly Alexandra Winter whose support and work made the com- pletion of this project possible. Thanks also to my readers at Routledge, and to Rex Butler for a pep talk at the right moment. I am deeply grateful to the Sallie Bingham Centre for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University for the Mary S. Lily Research Award, which allowed me to work with the Kathy Acker Personal Papers collection. A special thank you to the staff of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, for their assistance and patience. Several sections of this book have been previously published in a slightly different form. I gratefully acknowledge permission to reprint from the following sources: “Kathy Acker’s Punk Feminism: A Feminism of Cruelty and Excess in More Liberated and Liberal Times”, Contemporary Women’s Writing, vol. 11, no. 2, 2017, pp. 201–2 20; “Kathy Is a Punk Writer: Kathy Acker’s Punk Self- Fashioning”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 55, no. 5, 2014, pp. 536–5 50; and “From Counterculture to Punk Culture: The Emergence of Kathy Acker’s Punk Poetics”, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 26, no. 4, 2015, pp. 276–2 97.