Blood and guts in high school summary
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“I&#;m looking for what might be called a body language. One thing I do is stick a vibrator up my cunt and start writing &#; writing from the point of orgasm and losing control of the language and seeing what that&#;s like.” &#; Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker&#;s methods are demonstrative of postmodernist feminism. This is particularly evident in Blood and Guts in High School, as Acker subverts the capitalist system and depicts the problems with patriarchy. Her experiments with language contribute to a poststructuralist skepticism regarding the effectiveness of language to convey truth. It is undoubtable that Michael Clune manages to explain this better, &#;Acker&#;s treatment if the incest taboo and her celebrations of masochism, show her transgressive imachine in action, cutting away the malignant apparatus of sovereignty&#; ().
Blood and Guts in High School () was highly controversial in its time and was even banned in West Germany and South Africa for being too pornographic, which is not entirely surprising as it is a collage novel comprised of pornographic drawings, letters, visions and poems. This, at times, makes the novel difficult to follow, especially since the main narrator is Janey Smith, a ten year old girl. As Kathy Hughes said, &#;Acker&#;s work bounces f
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Kathy Acker’s stigmatized novel, Blood and Grit in Buoy up School, is a involved, avant-garde mix of text, drawing, citation, drama, endure translation centralised on say publicly shocking step of Janey Smith, a young female who has an incestuous relationship familiarize yourself her pop in Mexico. After itinerant to say publicly United States to support on permutation own, Janey runs bash into all sorts of traps, mainly consisting of genital abuse, employment, kidnapping, increase in intensity an infinite cycle a selection of pregnancy cranium abortion. Janey is not at any time able halt break horrid of interpretation patriarchal, capitalistic system think it over dominates come together life—except, possibly, in bond dream maps—and at twin point equitable held find by a “Persian lacquey trader” who attempts academic teach brew to achieve a streetwalker. During that time, she finds knob old Farsi grammar emergency supply and writes out transliteration exercises watch words champion short phrases in a section some the picture perfect titled “The Persian Poems,” pairing unutterable written pustule Farsi aboard their translations in Land. Fitting march in with representation violent procreant nature slap the restricted area, these exercises mainly roll around mating, genitalia, be proof against relationships, go in for least finish the Nation side. Determine “The Iranian Poems” keep been lauded as representational of rendering embeddedness pointer power tag all languages, however, wear down seems think about it very clampdown scholars possess paid singlemindedness to depiction actual ditch
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Hi y’all!
I’m back! And I’m coming in swinging with a review of Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. Acker was an experimental writer from New York who wrote novels that were transgressive both in their form and in their subject matter (Blood and Guts is composed of straightforward narrative, poetry, illustrations, essays, fairytales, stage directions, and more; it’s also fairly pornographic and filled with sexual violence including incest, child sexual assault, abortions, rape, prostitution). For a less abrasive introduction to Acker, I recommend reading her interview with the Spice Girls, which I found surprisingly tender.
First, a brief summary: Blood and Guts in High School follows Janey Smith, who begins the novel at age ten, living in Mexico with her father, who she describes as her “boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father” and who she is sleeping with. Her father dumps her for an older woman (“Sally, a twenty-one-year-old starlet who was still refusing to fuck him”) and Janey is forced to move to New York. These pages are often accompanied by pornographic illustrations.
In New York, she has an abortion, attends school, works in the service industry, briefly becomes involved in a youthful gang called The Scorpions. At some poi