Kathy Acker's sex negativity

Studies in the Maternal, 2012

This collection offers up-to-date insights into the best known, but still critically ignored and often under-valued, work by second-wave feminist Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex (1970). It seeks both to redress flaws in existing Firestone criticism and to explore the relevance of this incendiary manifesto for twenty-first-century feminist concerns. The book comprises a co-authored editors' Introduction, a Prologue by Mandy Merck, and nine chapters. These are organised into three sections; namely: 'Technology', 'Sex, Love, and the Family', and 'Dialectics'. Finally, an Epilogue by Elizabeth Freeman concludes the collection.

This essay explores the politics behind women's writing in the Zionist yishuv, by examining the literary career of Rivka Alper, whose work features a difficult clash between a " feminine " narrative of sexual trauma and Zionist ideology. I discuss Alper's literary trajectory from her first novel, Pirpurey mahapekha, a coming-of-age story of young women, which foregrounds themes of sexual trauma and gendered violence, to her second project, Ha-mitnah. alim ba-har, a biography of a Zionist role model, one of the women founders of the colony of Motza. Alper's transition from " personal " fiction to ideological literature is part of a process of an arduous self-fashioning toward carving a place for herself, albeit marginal, in the Zionist republic of letters. Her process demonstrates the predicament of writing as a woman in a Zionist cultural space that marks writing as an emasculating practice, but exclusively assigns male writers the role of national subjects. In such a space, I argue, transitioning to marginal genres in order to write for the collective emerges as a privileged alternative for an aspiring woman writer. And yet, as contents from Alper's fictional writing infiltrate her biographic writing, the literariness of her " less literary " text exposes the exclusions that lie at the heart of the Zionist ideological project, and, in turn, reinscribes " the feminine " as a composite marker of these exclusions back into the Zionist text.

The charge of narcissism leveled on the work of Hannah Wilke may have been warranted. However, this should not be considered as a pejorative. Rather, the narcissism of Wilke can be viewed as a shrewd creative tactic that was rendered legitimate by Second Wave feminism to which she subscribed. The ‘self-love’ of narcissism is a necessary component to the postmodern feminist impulse towards autobiography. This impulse sought to rectify the prior exclusion of women artists from the canons of the art establishment. Wilke’s early works are compared against her contemporaries Carolee Schneemann and Vito Acconci.

thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory & culture, 2001

In the twenty-five year's since Monique Wittig's novel, "The Lesbian Body", first appeared in print in English, much debate has continued with respect to the strategies for representing the lesbian subject. While undertaking a graduate course, "Theories of Lesbian Sexualities", it became apparent that Wittig's novel remains central to the exploration of the limits, and possibilities, of language within an interrogation of the social construction of sexual subjects. This paper represents a textual analysis of Wittig's work, and an examination of the ways in which this narrative has been taken up by other contemporary theorists.

Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 2022

Though autotheory formally entered feminist critical discourse with the publication of Nelson's 2015 text The Argonauts as a practice that takes on first-person, subjective, autobiographical perspectives to decenter and challenge hegemonic critical theories, several critical movements led to the rise of autotheory. In this paper, I analyze the contexts and influences surrounding both New Narrative and French feminism post-1960 before posting experimental writer Kathy Acker's unique position between these movements in her 1978 novel, Kathy Goes to Haiti. If autotheory sutures together the author and theory, then Kathy Acker predicts and enacts autotheory by enmeshing her body into the theoretical conception of her autobiographical novel. Kathy Goes to Haiti lays important groundwork preceding autotheory and forges a new linguistic form at the nexus of language, disability, and sexuality studies. I call this nexus in Acker "feminine cognitive embodiment." Acker's feminine cognitive embodiment fuses the female body and mental states between traditional boundaries of language. I intend to historicize Kathy Goes to Haiti as an autotheoretical text that preceded works like Chris Kraus' 1997 I Love Dick and Maggie's The Argonauts, and in doing so I analyze the ways Acker's ex-centric language, madness, and pornography anticipate the autotheoretical turn.

Phoebe Gloeckner’s semi-autobiographical The Diary of a Teenage Girl is a boundary-crossing work in more ways than one. Its form is hybrid: it uses a combination of first-person prose; third-person comic strip sequences; illustrations attributed to the narrator, fifteen-year-old Minnie; and illustrations that appear to reflect the perspective of the adult Gloeckner. Further, the story contained in this unusual form is one that is still very much taboo in early twenty-first century American society. Diary is a tale of the sexual and artistic maturation of a teenage girl, one that touches not just on the tabooed subject of adolescent girls’ sexual desire, but also on sexual abuse, homosexuality, drug use, and incest. Recalling Nabokov’s Lolita, the novel opens on an initiatory event that determines the shape of the book's entire narrative – Minnie loses her virginity to her mother's boyfriend. Yet whether this is a moment of exploitation or of feminist empowerment remains arguable. To use the words of Catharine MacKinnon, in Diary, Minnie’s sexuality is that which is most her own, yet most taken away. Although often exploited and abused in her search for love, affection, and her own identity, Minnie’s journey through the counterculture of 1970s San Francisco provides the foundation of and material for an increasingly mature artistic voice. In this paper, I will argue that Minnie’s story reveals the inadequacy of cultural scripts surrounding sexuality, particularly the sexuality of adolescent girls. Using the sexuality research of Deborah Tolman, I will suggest that the silence surrounding adolescent female sexual desire helps to reinforce the virgin/whore dichotomy that has plagued women throughout most of the history of Western culture. Minnie, as an openly desiring teenage girl, is seen as already tainted by those around her, much as the twelve-year-old Lolita is seen as “already debauched” by Humbert in Lolita (a work that Diary alludes to several times). This “tainted” status enables the objectification and exploitation of both adolescent girls, as their avowed interest in sexuality puts them outside the categories of “good girl” and “virgin,” who by definition feel no such desire. Interestingly, however, for Minnie there is another side to the coin – the sexual experiences that nearly destroy her also ground and develop her artistic voice. As Gloeckner’s alter ego, Minnie’s sexual experiences and mentor relationship with the comic artist R. Crumb lead her to create her first comics, and are the clear precursors to the sophisticated and complex exploration of gender, desire, exploitation, and empowerment that is Gloeckner’s Diary. Ultimately, I will argue that Diary is much more than a cautionary tale, but contains insights about the experiences of American adolescent girls for which Gloeckner’s hybrid artistic form is a uniquely suitable medium. Combining the intense but naive point of view of the fifteen-year-old Minnie with the more discerning perspective of the adult Gloeckner, Diary is intimate, yet also contains mechanisms for the older Gloeckner to pass judgment on the adults in Minnie’s life, as well as on Minnie herself.

2003

This thesis argues that representation is the embodiment of erotic thought. It does this by focusing on literary representations of the penetrated male body and challenging the standard approaches to masculine embodiment as a form of denial or absence: the male bodyin its always already _penetrated stateas a presence, though one which lurks behind representation. It argues that the (penetrated) male body is often characterised as a taboo the breaching of which is traditionally named 'feminine' or 'psychotic'. The dominant representation of this body links it with a chain of equivalences that binds it to a culturally abjected 'feminine paradigm'. Works by Huysmans, Baudelaire, Wilde, will demonstrate how the limits of the male body are mapped within a boundary that both excludes and necessitates an act of penetratioa But it also demonstrates the ways in which this taboo has been challenged. Schreber, Genet and Joyce jplay with that boundary, push those limits, suggesting that penetrability becomes a condition of the emergence of modern male subjectivity within the rubric of its own logic. For as much as the penetrated male body is marked by 'femininity' and 'psychosis', it in turn marks a discursive 'blind spot' which the thesis terms the 'behind', in order to highlight its links to the anusa site of anxiety for masculinity. This articulation of a discursive aporia and corporeal liminality is shown to generate a specifically modern 'poetics'. This poetics will help to restate a logic of the neither/nor as expressed by Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Kristeva, in particular. One major consequence of such conditionality is that thought must be seen as in a very real sense 'embodied', and that this process of embodying thought is predicated upon an eroticism that is subsequently denied. The 'behind' names that denial. This thesis examines literary representations of the male body in what is perhaps its most estranged form: in the process of being penetrated. It does this both in order to suggest that penetration is a condition of modern masculine subjectivity^ and to reclaim the male body as a penetrative body. It will argue that the submission by which 'masculinity' registers within the socio-symbolic order is effected by a process of penetration that remainders the male body, marking it as 'waste' and associating it with a pejorative femininity. Taboos not only against analiry and anal intercourse^ but, by extension, against so-called passivity and powerlessness, come into play in our traditional understanding of the penetrated male body. Through the traditional cultural associations that exist between the concept 'body' and the concept 'woman', the name 'feminine' is given to any breach of the taboo against jpenetrating the male body. As will be shown, the chain of equivalences which binds these two abject bodies significantly includes the notion of 'psychosis' and 'waste'. The abjection or taboo 1700, as Randolph Trumbach's work on eighteenth century sexuality clearly shows. The only remotely acceptable form of male-male sodomy became that performed by an adult male upon an adolescent boy, who was seen to exist "in a transitional state between man and woman" (Trumbach 1993, 255), and therefore neither fully male nor fully human. Trumbach's research reveals a consolidation offender difference taking place in the 1700s by which effeminacy became associated with anal passivity: "Adult men were deemed effeminate only when they allowed themselves to be sexually penetrated" (Trumbach 1995, 255). To analyse, to think, in other words, is always already to insist that in doing so thought invites an act of penetration which occurs behind the thinker. Amongst other things,, this thesis wants to stress the anal in analysis. As such, it is concerned with the claim that thought is embodied, and that, moreover, such embodiment is first and foremost erotic-first and foremost concerned with the body and its sensations. Given that concepts are often seen somewhat simplistically as belonging in discrete pairs, belonging on either side of a boundary or division which poses them as not only opposites but also as fundamentally oppositional-what this thesis calls the logic of the either/or-then the challenge that such division is neither possible nor adequate gestures to another form of logic altogether: a logic of the neither/nor, a point I will develop throughout this thesis. The 'behind', registering as both discursive aporia and corporeal liminality, enables a thinking that moves beyond the 'either/or' of traditional logic. Moving beyond the 'either/or' What does it mean to move beyond the strictures of the 'either/or' logic that often obstructs critical thinking? How is such a move achieved? This concern is expressed by thinkers such as Lacan, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva who have begun this exploration of a logic that does not reduce to a position of either/or. The thesis 13 well as with God, both cultural signifiers of the giving of life. Schreber's submission to God's will, and his subsequent transformation into a woman, are in order to create a new world, linking the penetrated male body to a Utopian dream. In Wilde's Dorian Gray, the male anus equates with the ear and flowers, delineating a process of crossfertilization centred upon the production or dissemination of discourse. For Wilde, 'world-view', so that "to juxtapose two or more free-standing discourses is to juxtapose disparate worlds, different reality templates"(McHale 1992, 54). Furthermore, as might be expected, none of these reality templates is ever in a state of stability; each of them will impact upon the others. Nothing about them is absolutely discrete or motionless. As such, there is always a surplus or excess to both discourse and language, with the consequence that all claims to an absolute 'truth' are seriously undermined. Things get 'said' or 'written' that either do not conform to the dominant fiction, or produce meanings that exceed its maintenance: this is what I am calling 'poetics'-that which can't be named but which still has a logic to it. It is a conceptual excess that cannot be 'gram'; "a kind of general strategy of deconstruction"(DQmda, 1981, 41, original emphasis). Sue Golding also calls this unsayable something a poetics, "a kind of dirty, bloody poetics, one which insists on, say, bodies and skin and smells and imagination in the face of it all"(Golding 2000, 286). For Golding, it is always dynamic, always political, always a risky and violent place to inhabit (Golding 2001, 52). It insists on a multiplicity or multi-dimensionality irreducible to the consolations of identity thinking and dialectical analysis. This poetics, then, exposes the conditions of its own emergence at the risk of being rendered meaningless. It takes the substance of discourse (language) and uses itnot always knowingly or deliberatelyto scramble discourse's code, rearranging it into other patterns, other codes. It differs both from Aristotle's use of the term as form of textual analysis, and from Todorov's use of it to name a form of structuration within textual practices. These uses of the term poetics seek to unveil or expose something considered hitherto hidden. They work with metaphors of the visible. The poetics I am attempting to articulate focuses more on how what is known is contoured by what is not. Significantly, both the ear and the anus are bodily orifices that cannot be seen directly by the subject. In Chapter Two, Wilde's use of the ear as a site of penetration upon the male body by which masculine subjectivity takes control, and the further understanding of how this ear functions as a displaced anus, will work with this kind of This sodomitical founding6 moment of Western thought is something of which Derrida states "I do not know or do not yet want to see"(Derrida 1987, 18), placing this penetrated male body under erasure, characterising it as a blind spot at the precise moment it comes to view. It is, for Derrida, "a catastrophe, right near the beginning, this overturning that I still cannot succeed in thinking"(Derrida 1987, 19); an "overturning and inversion of relations"(Derrida 1987, 22, emphasis adding), moreover, which could be said to be characteristic of his own deconstructive project. Twice Derrida refuses or is incapable of thinking such a thought (perhaps because it 5 On this point, see Chapter Three of this thesis. 6 Lee Edelman calls this phenomenon of a posteriori thought '(be)hindsighf, "in order to figure its complicitous involvement in the sodomitical encounter". Homographesis (London & New York, 1994, 176). 7 "It has become a commonplace of criticism to argue that modernist literature is about language itself... behind the fa9ade of utility we find another language, which is the real realm of modernity",

2020

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-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, 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, caricature, 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.

2018

The shifting cultural landscape of human sexuality has undergone significant movement over the last 50 years. This thesis addresses an important gap within this landscape: the work that is involved in the construction of femininities. The study navigates the complex human capacities of female sexuality by deploying critical theory relative to the ways that understandings of sexuality have changed in modern social and intellectual history. Twenty heterosexual and lesbian-identified women were interviewed and their narratives form the basis of this thesis. It is evident from these narratives that, through upbringing, experience and education, discourses are socially mediated in complex ways to generate our individual worlds. The thesis tells the stories of the women who participated in the study and reveals their experiences of growing up as girls against the backdrops of time, context, and social interaction. This research utilises Foucault's work on technologies of the self, and...