Obituaries (Vol. 109)       A controversial avant-garde writer
and cult figure of the punk movement, Kathy Acker was considered
among the most significant proponents of radical feminism and
the postmodern literary aesthetic. Associated with the
discordant, irreverent music of punk rock, Acker's iconoclastic
metafiction—an amalgam of extreme profanity, violence, graphic
sex, autobiography, fragmented narrative, and plagiarized
texts—rejects conventional morality and traditional modes of
literary expression. Her best known works, including Great
Expectations, Blood and Guts in High School, and Don Quixote,
feature female protagonists whose psychosexual
misadventures—involving rape, incest, suicide, and
abortion—underscore their individual struggles to discover
meaning and identity in deconstructed patriarchal language and
sexual masochism. She believed it is through the body that
people come to their deepest meanings, pleasures, and agonies.
Acker was the author of the screenplay Variety, and her later
works in