Who’s Afraid of Kathy Acker

To say that New York’s post-punk cult author Kathy Acker (1947-1997) had an emancipatory influence on the self-consciousness of women would be a great understatement. With her novels, essays, plays, performances and librettos, but above all thanks to her own boundless life, she blew up all the sacred cows that represented what a hypocritical society expected of women. Upper class, highly gifted, classically schooled and out of control, in the footsteps of William Burroughs, Acker rewrote the world in an overwhelming mixture of fact and fiction, biography and portrayal of desires, SM sex and merciless political satire. In her familiar style, she unashamedly converted male protagonists from classic works into female characters that were both unrelenting and fragile. Acker – tattooed, pierced and bursting with coarse language – already managed to express female lust with all its dark sides on paper in the 1970s.
Barbara Caspar portrays the life of the writer she admires with a similar self-confidence. She was able to make use of a vast amount of archive material in which Acker takes part and is interviewed, but digs even deeper in a successful mixture of animations and reconstructions that bring to life the significance, tone and timbre of a unique word artist. She also shows that the present generation of young women need a Kathy Acker.