Kathy Acker: Jewish Woman Writer

Despite the importance of Jewish women experimentalists in the 20th century, such as Gertrude Stein and Jane Bowles, as well as Kathy Acker, it is their feminism or their textual experiments that dominate critical attention. This essay adds Acker’s Jewishness to an understanding of her authorial position, one consistent with her feminist, trickster, zombie, pirate personae—expressions of the consummate outsider of which Jews have been an historical example. The anarchical, autobiographical voice of Acker’s fiction is very much a Jewish voice, consistent with certain myths and traditions having to do with the figure of the Jew. In Acker’s fiction, the repressed is embodied by figures and concretized as acts outside the social code--outlaws, outcasts, taboos--that threaten it—a role in which Jews have historically been cast. Acker as Jew is one explanatory narrative of the particular position out of which her narratives spill. Although Acker includes a Jewish ancestry for only a few of her protagonists and although they appear in a large range of outcast forms, mainly as women, the aggregate of markers attached to them are consistent with traditions and legends of Jewish identity. As exiles and outcasts, as purveyors of disorder, Jews historically and as tropes are particularly relevant in this diasporic moment of U.S. and European repulsion of migrants and exiles. Seeing the figure of the Jew in Acker’s outcasts helps to link her formal experimentation to an even more radical politics than her feminism. The trope of the Jew as read in her outsider figures emphasizes how far outside Western epistemology her texts are despite the fact that they are cut and pasted from within that epistemology.