ABSTRACT
Now, well into the twenty-first century, to look back at Acker’s work is to observe a singular achievement from a woman writing from outside the women’s movement and who came belatedly to feminism, instead being located within a cultural underground and using a largely male intellectual lineage to make a literary form of punk and a punk form of feminism. Acker reimagines women’s location in the late twentieth-century United States as something strange and estranging, but also uncomfortably familiar for many Western women, making her one of Jacqueline Rose’s “women in dark times” who
forge a new language for feminism. One that allows women to claim their place in the world, but which also burrows beneath its surface to confront the subterranean aspects of history and the human mind, both of which play their part in driving the world on its course, but which our dominant political vocabularies most often cannot bear to face.
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