SOURCE: "Dominance and Subversion: The Horizontal Sublime and Erotic Empowerment in the Works of Kathy Acker," in State of the Fantastic: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Fantastic Literature and Film, edited by Nicholas Ruddick, Greenwood Press, 1992, pp. 149-56.

In the following essay, Peters explores the narrative techniques and language of dominance and submission employed by Acker to subvert patriarchal hierarchies and conventional notions of sexual identity.

Cosmo Landesman, in his (unfavorable) 1984 review of Kathy Acker's novel Blood and Guts in High School, describes her writing as having "the gothic perversity of Lautremont [sic] mixed with the glory and the gore of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre." Others have been less kind. Acker has been accused of being everything from merely irritating to the most evil person in the world. She is a tattooed feminist punk linguist who writes possibly the most subversive novels in contemporary American fiction...