ABSTRACT
The final chapter, a discussion of Empire of the Senseless, maps the transition in twentieth-century American capitalism from an Oedipal to a post-Oedipal form represented by the multinational corporation, thus capturing the zeitgeist of the 1980s. Using a mutated version of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer as her ‘host text’, Acker imaginatively and cognitively maps the emerging hegemony of multinational capitalism through the tropes of Algerian revolutionaries, Freud’s Judge Schreber, and the punk girl as female cyborg.
The punk girl has both increased exchange value in the new taboo-less economy, but still has no hospitable place in which to reside or to roam.
