“This book is dedicated to my tattooist”: Corporeal Inscriptions as Écriture féminine in Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless

Abstract

This article reads Kathy Acker’s 1988 novel Empire of the Senseless in relation to écriture féminine as a specific form of text production. Acker puts French feminist Hélène Cixous’s theory to practice, thus offering a strategy of writing that challenges binarisms and the normative imperatives of a patriarchal order. Writing becomes a productive form of resistance and reinvention, not only on an abstract intertextual meta level, but as a very physical activity: the liberating potential that Cixous and Acker locate in the process of women’s writing is played out in Kathy Acker’s écriture in the motif of tattooing. Writing the body is enacted by writing on the body as a way of negotiating women’s ‘imprisonment’ in a phallocratic culture working to erase its spiritual, corporeal, and political boundaries.