Nothing Until It Is Made Actual; or, Acker versus Growing Up

This essay argues for reading Kathy Acker in terms of what the author calls the “plasticity” of her sentences. These syntactic structures disclose Acker's attempt to expose and negate a bourgeois ideology of adolescence and maturity. The essay pursues this argument through a reading of Acker's novel In Memoriam to Identity, in particular its interest in Rimbaud as both biographical icon and literary precedent. The essay then argues that Acker's concerted literary attack on an ideology of maturity relates to the projects of trans literature at several critical junctures.