My Cunstruct (A Cunt) and I Had to Find the Code

Gender Forum, 2019

Reading Acker through the lenses of Paul B. Preciado, Linda Williams, Pierre Guyotat and Georgina Colby, Finch proposes to think of Acker’s literary practice as a series of “dildos”: textual prosthetics that perform protocols of textual unmaking. Finch bases her textual reading on Acker’s early typescripts, recently published for the first time, providing an original analysis of these archival materials that works to bridge ‘70s avant-garde literary practices with current queer theories of immersive embodiment.

2021

Arriving on the New York literary scene in the late 1970's, Kathy Acker has been hailed as a punk beatnik virtuoso. Her style of writing has been referred to as "equal parts gossip, kinky sex and high theory." Her stylistics have been eagerly digested according to the tenets of postmodern discourse while her protagonists are held up as proof of her generation's rage against "control societies." The transgressive sexuality enacted in her texts, including sexual masochism, sexual violence and self-mutilation, is frequently interpreted as anarchic attempts to circumvent this logic. I purport to show that these tactics do not, in fact, spring from a reactionary politics. Rather, Acker is attempting to convey an abject carnal sexuality that struggles for expression within the name-of-the-father logic that structures conventional language and a lack of alternative feminist propositions. Key Words: Kathy Acker, feminism, literary criticism, French feminism, sexu...

2002

Feminist Theory, 2019

In this article, I argue that queer women – especially cis and trans lesbians – have more in common than contemporary fissures either allow for or acknowledge. Lesbians who recognised their queer sexuality in the 1970s have in common with trans women the shared condition of being, in the words of the 1970s radical feminist Marilyn Frye, ‘spat summarily out of reality’. We also share the experience of refusing to accept this condition. I make this argument by manoeuvring away from questions of gender identity and focusing instead on gender’s ontoformativity: the astonishing, welcome and transformative fact that new social realities are brought into being by new social practices. I turn to experimental writing to explore this matter. Through this medium, the cis lesbian poet Nicole Brossard and the trans lesbian poet Trace Peterson wrote themselves into worlds, languages and social orders that refused to acknowledge their existence. Brossard was writing in 1970s Montreal, Peterson in ...

Journal of Lesbian Studies, 2024

This essay situates Kathy Acker’s work in the feminist sex wars debate of the 1980s. I suggest that the critique of Acker’s work as a “nihilist version of the personal is political” is not ungrounded but might more usefully be understood as a “sex negativity” that emerges from specific feminist avant-garde lit- erary devices. I discuss Acker’s early texts, “Politics” (1972) and “Stripper Disintegration” (1973) to show how sexuality defines Acker’s esthetic and political project. I consider the (negative) feminist reception of Acker’s work, lay out how Acker was involved in the pornography debate, and I bring Acker’s work into conversation with Andrea Dworkin’s thought. The essay argues that Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical strategies and montage techniques pose a problem for the feminist politiciz- ing of self-knowledge and the genre of autobiography as a privileged site of identity formation and emancipation. In the reordering of materials, by way of replacing, exchanging, and negating, transformation is made possible by the act of rewrit- ing’s capacity to reveal substitutability. Acker’s “nihilist” feminist politics challenge the self-determination and authenticity often assumed in the politicizing of lived experience. I also suggest that “the lesbian” functions as a phantasmatic figure in Acker’s early work to circumvent the subject-object logic of the por- nographic imagination. In short, Acker’s early work illuminates the complex relation between sexuality, self-objectification, and the act of writing itself. With Acker’s pseudo-autobiographical texts we can conceive of a sex negativity that is not anti-sex but challenges what Michel Foucault calls the “monarchy of sex” through non-positive affirmation.

PhaenEx, 2010

The story of queerness-as a story about madness-begins with the story of a split: the great division between reason and unreason. That split generates a story about the Western subject as an othering process that produces madness. (Huffer 82).

University of Toronto Quarterly, 2004

2018

This dissertation, Deviant Sexualities: Placing Sexuality in Post-'68 French Lesbian, Gay, and Queer Literature/Politics, argues that modern French sexual minority politics, whose origins can be traced back to the student and worker uprisings of May 1968, has largely been about the making, unmaking, and remaking of space. In it, I analyze the artistic, theoretical, and activist work of four 20th-and 21st-century French figures politically invested in matters of gay, lesbian, and/or queer sexuality. Tracking the spatial configuration and logic of these thinkers' political visions brings to the fore the underappreciated ways in which post-'68 French LGBTQ thought is responsive to and conditioned by the French nation-state's foundational principle of Republican universalism. The first chapter's examination of iconic gay liberationist leader Guy Hocquenghem's activism, theory of desire, and the motif of travel in his understudied novels brings to light the "hyper-pluralistic universalism" that animates his politics. The second chapter dispels radical lesbian and materialist feminist Monique Wittig's reputation as the advocate of a parochial lesbian separatism by turning to Wittig's fiction to clarify her vision for the abolition of hetero-patriarchy called for in her essays. The third chapter elucidates the trenchant critique of Republican universalism at the heart of Guillaume Dustan's highly controversial "gay ghetto" autofiction. The fourth and final chapter addresses the emergence in the late 1990s of queer theory, culture, and politics in France and the nationalistic, anti-American overtones of its notoriously hostile reception. In it, I argue that French queer feminist performance artist, writer, and activist Wendy Delorme's work and the reactions it has inspired reveals sexual minority politics to be a site where the forces of sexism, heterosexism, cissexism, and nationalism converge. the support, encouragement, expertise, and inspiration of a number of people. First and foremost, my utmost thanks go out to my advisor, Christy Wampole, for her attentive supervision, contagious commitment to feminist scholarship, and unwavering generosity with her time, kindness and insight. It would be difficult to overstate my gratitude to Nick Nesbitt for his mentorship from my very first days on campus. During my time at Princeton, I have benefited immensely from the wisdom and critical acumen of Gayle Salamon, Wendy Belcher, Katie Chenoweth, Göran Blix, and Heather Love, whose seminar on queer and feminist method forever changed the way I approach scholarly research. I would also like to thank Lucien Nouis and Emily Apter, who fostered my appreciation for French literature and feminist theory during my undergraduate years at New York University and encouraged me to pursue graduate study.