Kathy Acker

Front matter

A

Interdisciplinary Research in Gender

KATHY ACKER

PART I Contexts and configurations of Acker 1 Punk times: the scenes and sounds of punk writing

2 The punk writer emerges: from counterculture to punk culture

3 The punk intellectual: repossessing the European avant-garde

4 The punk feminist novelist: making the novel of cruelty and excess

PART II 5 Heterosexual desire: Blood and Guts in

High School (1978)

6 The family: Great Expectations (1982)

ix

Vill 7:

Contents

The polity: Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream (1986) The economy: Empire of the Senseless (1988)

Index

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 completion 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. 201-220; “Kathy Is a Punk Writer: Kathy Acker’s Punk Self-Fashioning”, Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, vol. 55, no. 5, 2014, pp. 536-550; and “From Counterculture to Punk Culture: The Emergence of Kathy Acker’s Punk Poetics”, LIT: Literature, Interpretation, Theory, vol. 26, no. 4, 2015, pp. 276-297.