Kathy Acker's Grave Songs and Visceral Insights

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Kathy Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’ (1996) was published on‐line: http://acker.thehub.com.au/gift.html. ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’ and ‘Requiem’ were published in book form, with excerpts from previous publications under the title Eurydice in the Underworld (London: Arcadia, 1997). Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Peter Wollen, ‘Don't Be Afraid To Copy It Out’, p.6: http://acker.thehub.com.au/ackademy/wollen.html. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’. Kathy Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’ [1995], Bodies of Work: Essays (New York: Serpent's Tail, 1997), p.164. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, p.166. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, p.161. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, p.161. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, p.166. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’, p.167. Acker, ‘Seeing Gender’ 167–8. Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.76. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), p.64. Irigaray refers to Freud's finding of the pre‐Oedipal phase in girls ‘as a surprise, like the discovery in another field [but is it really another?] of the Minoan‐Myceanaean civilization behind the civilization of Greece’. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.131. ‘As guardians of ‘nature’, are not women the ones who maintain, thus who make possible, the resource of mimesis for men? For the logos?’. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.77. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.77. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.76. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.77. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.79. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.6. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.9. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, p.75. ‘We have always talked about breast cancer in militaristic words – the ‘war on cancer’, ‘she lost her battle with cancer’. This comes from approaching cancer as if it were a foreign invader attacking a woman's body, and our job is to kill every last cancer cell. Surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy, (slash, burn and poison) are very crude treatments, attempts to blast away cancer cells while hoping we don't kill too many healthy cells in the process. But, in reality, cancer cells aren't foreign invaders; they're your own cells’. Susan M. Love, Dr. Susan Love's Breast Book, 3rd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Perseus, 2000), p.xviii. ‘I realized that if I remained in the hands of conventional medicine, I would soon be dead, rather than diseased, meat. For conventional medicine was reducing me, quickly, to a body that was only material, to a body without hope and so, without will. To a puppet, who separated by fear from her imagination and vision, would do whatever she was told’. Acker, ‘The Gift of Disease’, p.3. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.1. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.1. Irigaray, Speculum, p.273. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.2. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.25. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.4. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.10. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.11. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.11. Irigaray, Speculum, pp.251 and 263. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.13. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.13. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.12. Irigaray, Speculum, p.274. Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, pp.78–79. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.24. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.19. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.19. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.21. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.22. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.21. Acker, ‘Eurydice in the Underworld’, p.22. We learn over the course of the play that Electra's mother (‘Claire’) attempts abortion when seven months pregnant with Electra, and later, commits suicide when Electra is an adult. Acker's mother committed suicide when Acker was thirty. Acker, Requiem, p.181. Acker, Requiem, p.182. Acker, Requiem, p.183. Acker, Requiem, p.183. Acker, Requiem, p.183. Acker, Requiem, p.186. Acker, Requiem, p.187. Acker, Requiem, p.187. Luce Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother’, Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), p.12. Irigaray, ‘Body Against Body: In Relation to the Mother’, pp.18–19. Acker, Requiem, p.188. Acker, Requiem, p.188. Acker, Requiem, p.188. As she resolves to look death in the face, Electra sees that Orpheus, too, is mortal matter: ‘Take me in your arms, death,/I'm so scared;/ […] while we hurtle through your crags/ to where its blacker:/ Orpheus's head eaten by rats,/what's left of the world scatters […]’. Acker, Requiem, p.187. Acker, Requiem, p.188.