Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker?

In short everyone was afraid of her. She could probably beat me up. A righteous, postmodernist, sex- positive feminist and experimental writer (Although she would have hated being called a feminist). She shook the literary world by the bookends and thrashed it. Kathy Acker offers a woman’s perspective, challenging the dominant male interpretation of the female experience. Best Known for deconstructing patriarchal “male” texts -by taking snippets of them and translating them as to be written by a female character, or re-writing texts that for many seemed blasphemous to re-pen. Needless to say, often she was accused of a kind of plagiarism. Something not as well known, she made videos of herself and partners, speaking into a microphone about their experience mid-coital.

There are those that called her work pornography… I call them pricks.  There is a pornographic element to her work… but it’s not porn.  Acker was endlessly stripping away the “male” opinion and giving her own raw, angry, ignored two cents, which doesn’t mean that she’s a pornographer. To all the little feminist out there that haven’t met your leader yet… watch this documentary. There are some great minds that speak on Ackers’ behalf in this film, which give us a glimpse at her genius… She was way ahead of her time and should not be feared, but chronicled as an example of a woman speaking freely.

As for my review of the film… this documentary is a goodie! Australian filmmaker Barbra Casper delivers a layered, insightful, vulnerable, portrait of Kathy Acker and the effect she is making on a new generation of women discovering their sexuality, gender and voice.