SOURCE: "Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism," in College English, Vol. 52, No. 4, April, 1990, pp. 437-45.

In the following essay, Sciolino examines Acker's hybrid synthesis of poststructural theory, postmodern fiction, and feminist discourse.

By conflating her own lover's discourse with seemingly mutually exclusive productions such as canonical literature and pornography, by using performative prose to launch political and aesthetic diatribes, Kathy Acker's narrative methods are exemplary for postmodern feminism. Materially didactic in its decompositions, any fiction by Acker engages a poststructural skepticism regarding the constative efficacy of language. Aware of its late capitalist milieu, her fiction replicates consumer dynamics in its own narrative cycles. Engaged with her social context, she typically includes the debris of an information age in montage that forces associations between material culled from radically different registers. Acker writes hybrid texts—part narrative, part essay. Her fiction enacts a critical imitation of literary moments...