ABSTRACT
Chapter 7 shifts focus from the intimate circuits of desire to the public realm of the American polity: its domestic and imperial machinations and its foundational “sexual contract”. Acker rewrites Cervantes’s Don Quixote to make a contemporary political allegory. The punk girl as knight errant is on a quest to find love and knowledge, and meets with various strange creatures and incidents as manifestations of the polity: the rock star Prince, abortion, President Nixon, Godzilla, and the religious white men. Her adventures in liberal democracy result in a disenchantment—in both senses of the word—with the system, as the punk girl knight-errant receives lessons in the gendered and changing contours of political power.
