Cirrus@Austlit

'The American punk experimental writer, Kathy Acker, is generally assumed to be an important, if controversial, late-twentieth-century woman writer associated with a feminist politics. An examination of her early reception history, however, tells a surprisingly different story of Acker’s literary location. By examining reviews of Acker’s work in the feminist and the mainstream press, and scholarly accounts in feminist and non-feminist publications up to around 1989, we observe Acker’s relatively marginal position in the rapidly developing sub-discipline of feminist literary studies, and a continuing interest in her work by the mainstream. Acker as a belated woman writer for feminism thereby offers a micro-history of the categories of “the woman writer” and “contemporary women’s writing.” (Publication abstract)