Kathy Acker

<p>This project is a feminist study of the idiosyncratic <em>oeuvre</em> 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.</p><p>There is no female or feminist writer like Kathy Acker (and probably no male either). Her body of work—nine 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 postmodernist work and of the punk aesthetic in a literary form. Some 20 years after her death <i>Kathy Acker: Punk Writer</i> 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 <em>détournement</em> caricature and montage her <em>oeuvre</em> reimagines the <em>fin-de-siècle</em> 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.</p><p>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.</p>