ABSTRACT
Acker is commonly described as a feminist writer, however, the nature of this literary feminism is largely left unexamined. Chapter 4 discusses the way in which Acker extends and intellectualises punk aesthetics with elements of the European avant-garde to reconfigure the novel, making an idiosyncratic feminist politics. I discuss The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec to illustrate the ways in which she uses theoretical insights from Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, and the Marquis de Sade to overlay and merge with her punk aesthetics in terms of reception, language use, and the representation of the social and femininity. The outcome is a literary punk feminism characterised by cruelty and excess, which functions as a necessary supplement to the moderating languages of American feminism from the mid 1970s onwards.
