ABSTRACT
In legacy, as in life, Kathy Acker continues to raise hackles. A decade on from her death of cancer in a Mexican alternative-medicine clinic in 1997 the courts of opinion differ almost totally, praise for her soaring iconoclasm in the one quarter, wariness, even dismissal, in the other. Is she to be thought a kind of meta-feminist, a brilliant writer-diagnostician answering back misogyny and the circumscription of women’s lives through her own recriminatory sexual fi gurations and mythologies? Is she, on the opposite tack, to be thought simply the opportunist dispensing cartoon erotica or violence dressed up in postmodern games and circles?
