‘In her hips there’s revolution’

Kathy Acker is famous for her experimental and pornographic writing style, but she is infamous for violating one of the publishing industry’s most sacred taboos: plagiarizing and appropriating others’ works. While critics and theorists have been captivated by this practice, whether positively or otherwise, few have attributed this to Acker’s connection to punk and its DIY publishing praxes. This article moves beyond these critiques and situates Acker’s writing within a larger practice of a punk avant-gardism whose lineage can be traced to punk-adjacent leftist groups like UAW/MF, MC5 and the Situationists. In combatting what Guy Debord calls the spectacle, one strategy the Situationists used is détournement, or the rendering of familiar images as unfamiliar, forcing the viewer into the moment. Jamie Reid famously used this technique on Sex Pistols’s album covers, explicitly connecting punk signifiers with the Situationists. Through critical examination of Acker’s novel Blood and Guts in High School , I will demonstrate that Acker’s appropriation and hijacking of other authors’ works function not strictly as plagiarism but as a punk avant-garde literary détournement, aimed at subverting the capitalist and patriarchal mass publishing industry and reclaiming women’s narratives

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Avant garde · Literature · Punk · Situationism · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Music History and Culture