Blood and Guts in Kathy Acker's Bestiary

This book explores Kathy Acker's writing from the 1970s to the 1990s with a focus on her consistent referencing of animals. Where previous studies have analyzed Acker's critique of capitalism and patriarchal norms or her punk aesthetic or cut-and-paste plagiaristic style, this book charts a new course by concentrating on animals as central to her storytelling and the theory that grounds it. She begins her career by finding liberatory possibility in nonhuman species until she finally reaches apotheosis in a becoming-animal, the ultimate weapon in her battle against limiting human power structures. As the curve bends back toward a baseline, in Acker's later career she starts to question the viability of such embodiments, and animals begin to assert themselves more forcefully as agents who have their own interests, beings with value outside of any human gaze. That conflict ultimately redounds to open animal hostility toward human engagement as her writing, cut short by a cancer that would kill her in 1997, comes to an end. This book tracks the trajectory of her representation of animals over the course of her career.