Una experiencia inicial

The thesis is divided into three large chapters to demonstrate the three main components of this research. ‘Chapter One: Kathy Acker’ generates a profile of Acker’s writing; ‘Chapter Two: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker’ traces Acker’s influence in Hanna’s writing; and ‘Chapter Three: Riot Grrrl Zines’

examines Acker’s influence in Riot Grrrl writing more broadly. Situated in chronological order, the chapters reflect Acker’s status as a precursor of Riot Grrrl, as well as the degree to which her influence is apparent. Hanna’s reading of Acker is situated immediately after the Acker chapter because the Bikini Kill frontwoman has admitted to being greatly influenced by Acker’s avant-garde writings – a fascination that is clearly reflected in Hanna’s work.

While in other Riot Grrrl zines, Acker’s influence is perhaps more subtle and the zines are less directly tethered to the original source material of Acker’s prose than they are a consequence of these aesthetic and intellectual ideas filtering down from pioneers like Hanna to the wider zine writing

community. The three main chapters of the thesis are further divided into subsections that each deal with either a specific narrative theme or formal component. Considered collectively, the subsections in this thesis will

illuminate certain thematic and aesthetic consistencies between Acker and the Riot Grrrls.

In ‘Chapter One: Kathy Acker’, I reveal how Acker’s punk-feminist novels pose a radical disidentification with core logics underpinning an

interdependent system of patriarchal capitalism. These logics provided, in the 1980s, the rationale for two key manifestations of the anti-feminist backlash:

the discrediting of working women and an attempt to reassert control over female sexuality. I draw heavily upon Kathi Weeks’s theory in The Problem with Work (2011), in which she poses a bold challenge to the overvaluation of work in late-capitalist Western cultures, and suggest that Acker puts forward a similar critique in her novels. I reveal how Acker’s narratives and

postmodern literary devices express her anti-work politics and rebel against a system (work) that is particularly inhospitable to women. I do so to

demonstrate that Acker’s radical critique of the Puritan work ethic in her fictions undercuts anti-feminist backlash rhetoric in the 1980s, which

capitalised on this cultural overvaluation of work in modern America in order to undermine women from the perspective of work and in their newly

acquired roles in the work sphere.

Furthermore, I also reveal how Acker’s sex writing – the other cornerstone of Acker’s radical feminist critique – undercuts anti-feminist backlash rhetoric, which sought to reassert control over female sexuality. I contend that Acker mobilises her aim to restore liberated female sexual desire – which is under threat in the 1980s with the rise of the ‘foetal rights’

movement – in two distinct ways. Firstly, Acker envisages excessive displays of female sexual desire in narratives that follow female protagonists in their quests to realise their carnal, sexually desiring selves. Applying the

theoretical principals of écriture féminine, I argue that Acker writes female sexual desire into existence at a time when it is being obscured in public discourse. Secondly, I reveal how Acker produces texts that are aesthetically constructed to evoke the sensual, therefore eliciting a sexualised response from readers. In this last function, the text itself becomes a utopia for liberated female sexual desire. I start with Acker, and examine her in this way, in order to demonstrate specifically how she incorporates art into her feminist critique,

and how her art responds to manifestations of the 1980s backlash against feminism. In essence, this chapter sets the stage for the following two chapters in which I trace Acker’s literary devices and artistic flourishes into Riot Grrrl literary productions.

In Chapter Two, I map the ideological, intellectual, and aesthetic influence of Acker in the writing of Hanna. Using material from Hanna’s unpublished archival collection, the Kathleen Hanna Papers, 1988-2005, I aim to demystify the connection between Acker and Hanna as manifest in their writing – a connection that, despite being frequently referenced in the literature surrounding both artists, remains obscure. In this sense, I build on important contributions to the field made by Ioanes, in which she traces the formal strategies used by both Hanna and Acker to deploy a ‘feminist aesthetic of shock’. I similarly contextualise Acker’s and Hanna’s writing as responding to the re-energisation of conservatism in US politics and culture in the 1980s and 1990s, arguing that this is manifest in their unifying expression of a punk-feminist anti-work politics. I argue that Hanna appropriates

Acker’s literary devices and artistic methods to express a repudiation of the Puritan work ethic, as well as to write liberated female sexual desire into existence, and that this is set against a backdrop of increasing anti-feminist hostility (with the concept of ‘post-feminism’ gaining traction in the early 1990s), centring on the themes of work and sex. Ultimately, this chapter illustrates how Acker’s artistic influence, by way of postmodern literary devices and aesthetics, appears in Hanna’s work, and highlights the artistic investment in Hanna’s writing – an understanding that moves towards confirming Riot Grrrl as an artistic movement. I pursue this in the

understanding that Hanna’s role as a figurehead of Riot Grrrl means that her artistic influences (Acker) permeated the movement’s literature more

pervasively – a hypothesis I prove in the final chapter of the thesis.

In ‘Chapter Three: Riot Grrrl Zines’, I examine literary devices in Riot Grrrl zines, performing close readings of a selection of zines sourced from The Riot Grrrl Collection. I identify artistic flourishes observable in both Acker’s and Hanna’s writing – punk aesthetics, écriture féminine, erotic splicing, literary vignettes, amongst other avant-garde and postmodern literary devices – that are also traceable in other Riot Grrrl writings examined here. I focus on the rare creative writing pieces in Riot Grrrl productions, observing these as the most revealing in terms of Riot Grrrl’s connection to the literary avant-garde that Acker represents. I conduct this analysis to establish two things: firstly, to demonstrate Riot Grrrl’s artistic investment, further

cementing its status as an artistic movement, and secondly, to show how Riot Grrrl responded artistically to manifestations of contemporary feminism in the 1990s that had evolved from the backlash in the 1980s.

By bringing all this together, I hope to illuminate how art functions as feminist critique and as part of feminist praxis in periods of reinvigorated conservatism in politics and culture. Operating in an age of acute hostility towards women’s rights in America in the 1980s and 1990s, Acker’s and Riot Grrrl’s productions provide fertile ground for study in this respect. With the assistance of punk aesthetics, all the artists I draw upon in this thesis continue a radical form of feminist critique harking back to the 1960s, even if their feminist concerns have evolved at this point. Crucially, this thesis attends to original archival material from both the Kathy Acker Notebooks, 1968-1974 and The Riot Grrrl Collection, some of which has never been analysed in any detail before. By exploring some of these unexamined artifacts, this thesis forges a clearer picture of both Acker’s and Riot Grrrl’s ideological and artistic

investments, leading us towards more nuanced understandings of the critical scope and power of their art.