Frontmatter and Editorial

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial: If gender is enacted like a script, then Kathy Acker's oeuvre can be seen as a re-writing of that script. Acker’s texts feed on and rip off other texts with subversive irony, transgressing the sociocultural script of what women and literature ought to be. Coming from an upper-class family, she chose to speak to the working classes. This conscious choice is linked to her disinheritance because of her marriage to a man beneath her status and her subsequent divorce. Significantly, Kathy Alexander appropriated the name Acker from her first husband, while emancipating herself from the institution of marriage. Similarly, her appropriation of texts as a writer indicates her divorce from these texts, a rewriting of the terms she was expected to agree upon, of the script she - as a woman - was expected to follow. This divorce enabled her to see the upper class narratives she had been brought up with in a different light, as she started working in sex shows and as a stripper. It is this intersection of class, sex, and gender, which defines the trajectory of Acker’s writing.