Kathy Acker’s sex negativity

Abstract

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 literary 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 politicizing 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 rewriting’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 pornographic 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.