Feminist Solidarity and Experiment in Kathy Acker’s Early Writings

Abstract

This essay takes up questions of the relation between political forms of solidarity and literary experiment as feminist homage as these materialize in the early writings of the late modernist experimental writer Kathy Acker. Many of Acker’s juvenilia, written in the 1970s, remain unpublished and have therefore not entered Acker scholarship until now. Acker, a self-consciously radical, political writer, uses experimental composition throughout her entire oeuvre to critique the narratives of late capitalism and American republican political discourse. This critique is, in part, explicit in the content of all of Acker’s works. Richard Nixon, for example, appears in Don Quixote (1986) as the revolutionary female knight’s rival, and George Bush’s political discourse is explicitly parodied in My Mother: Demonology (1993). In response to her political critique, critics such as Alex Houen have rigorously contextualized and analyzed Acker’s works through the prism of biopolitics and liberationary politics.1 Acker’s unpublished, handwritten notebooks, housed in the Kathy Acker Papers at Duke University, reveal a continuing engagement with revolutionary politics and the question of freedom. Acker kept handwritten notebooks throughout her career, in which she would write sections of prose and life writing, experiment with language, and write on politics and philosophy. In one early notebook, titled “On Freedom and Democracy,” Acker explores the issue of equality.2 She opens the notebook with a statement by the French philosopher Edgar Morin—“Communism is the major question and the