Anna Ioanes, Shock and Consent in a Feminist Avant-Garde: Kathleen Hanna Reads Kathy Acker: Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society: Vol 42, No 1

Abstract:  Tracing a genealogy of feminist avant-garde aesthetics from punk feminist author Kathy Acker’s 1979 novel Blood and Guts in High School to riot grrrl performer and activist Kathleen Hanna’s music and zine writing of the 1990s, I argue that this aesthetic formation deploys shock to complicate familiar concepts of consent. Acker’s use of fragmented narrative, plagiarized text, and hand-drawn images compounds the effects of her depictions of shocking sexual violence, forcing the reader into a relationship of constantly renegotiated consent. Because they consent to shocking violence under a kind of duress, readers reimagine the very nature of consent through their experience with Blood and Guts. I posit Kathleen Hanna as one of Acker’s most important readers and demonstrate how her zines and music also deploy sadomasochistic imagery to articulate the varied emotional responses women have to sexual violence. Drawing connections between formal strategies for eliciting shock and the limits of consent, I argue that Acker and Hanna’s feminist aesthetic of shock offers new ways of conceiving pleasure and danger. Shock, I contend, became a strategy for resisting the antipornography ethos that prevailed when Acker and Hanna were writing. In their moment and our own, where consent is a key term in debates about sexual violence, Acker and Hanna offer the possibility of artistic forms that allow for taboo affective responses to violence.