Kathy Acker (born April 18, 1947 in Manhattan and died November 30, 1997 in Tijuana, Mexico) is an American sex-positive feminist writer. After supporting herself as a stripper, Acker's first work appeared in print as part of the burgeoning New York literary underground of the mid-1970s. She remained on the margins of the literary establishment, only being published by small presses until the mid-1980s, thus earning herself the epithet of literary terrorist. 1984 saw her first British publication, a novel called Blood and Guts in High School.
From here on Kathy produced a considerable body of novels, almost all still in print with Grove Press. She wrote pieces for a number of magazines and anthologies, and also had notable pieces printed in issues of ReSearch and Rapid Eye. Towards the end of her life she had a measure of success in the conventional press--the Guardian newspaper published several of her articles, including an interview with the Spice Girls, which she submitted just a few months before her death.
Acker's formative influences are American poets and writers (the Black Mountain poets, especially Jackson Mac Low, and William S. Burroughs), as well as literary theory, especially Michel Foucault. In her work, she combines plagiarism, cut-up techniques, pornography, autobiography, persona, and the personal essay to confront expectations of what fiction should be. In this vein, she acknowledges language's performative function in drawing attention to the instability of female identity in male narrative and literary history (Don Quixote), creates parallelism in characters and autobiographical personas, and rids of pronouns, thus upsetting conventional syntax.
In In Memoriam to Identity, she draws attention to popular analyses of Rimbaud's life and The Sound and the Fury, constructing or revealing social and literary identity. Though she is known in the literary world for creating a whole new style of feminist prose and for her transgressive fiction, she is also a punk and feminist icon for her devoted portrayals of subcultures, rape, and violence.
In April 1996 Kathy Acker was diagnosed with breast cancer, and began to undergo treatment. In January 1997 she wrote about her loss of faith in conventional medicine in a Guardian article, "The Gift of Disease." In the article she explains that after unsuccessful surgery, which left her physically mutilated and emotionally debilitated, she rejected the passivity of the patient in the medical mainstream and began to seek out the advice of nutritionists, acupuncturists, psychic healers, and Chinese herbalists.