ABSTRACT
Kathy Acker envisions abortion beyond the dichotomy between choice and life while problematising the biopolitical nation state in Blood and Guts in High School (1978/1984) and Don Quixote, Which Was a Dream (1986). In these two novels, Acker’s representations of abortion criticise heterosexual love as a capitalist patriarchal ideology and create a site of resistance in which women defy the dualist system of power by bonding with other marginalised subjects and queering love. In doing so, Acker effectively incorporates the feminist politicisation of love since the 1970s as well as her critique of the neoliberal policies of the 1980s. Considering that the conceptual framework and the tropes of abortion examined in these novels are recurrent in contemporary public discourse, Acker’s fictional imagination still resonates powerfully in the twenty-first century.
