Gender and the Labyrinth

2025/10/01 by Schulz, Daniel
#Blood and Guts in High School #Empire of the Senseless #Seeing Gender #gender #sex

paper · doi:10.18716/ojs/gefo/2019.2510

Abstract

This essay analyses the labyrinthine nature of Kathy Acker‘s texts “Seeing Gender” (1995), Blood and Guts in High School (1979, publ. 1984) and Empire of the Senseless (1988). An understanding of Acker’s writing as a re-writing of the concepts of sex and gender will be linked to her negotiation of concepts of corporeality and temporality as forms of entrapment of the self.

Related

• “This book is dedicated to my tattooist”: Corporeal Inscriptions as Écriture féminine in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless
• Kathy Acker’s Dildos: Literary prosthetics and textual unmaking
• Introduction to ACME Special Issue on Sexuality and Gender: Sexed, Unsexy and Gendered Spaces of Inversions and Reversals Kathryn Besio
• Drag’s Double Inversion: Insufficient Language and Gender Performativity in The Well of Loneliness and Nightwood
• Gender, Ontology, and the Power of the Patriarchy: A Postmodern Feminist Analysis of Octavia Butler’sWild Seedand Margaret Atwood’sThe Handmaid’s Tale