The Diary Piece

Chapter 1 draws on archival scenes and materials to trace the formal, political, and feminist complexities of Kathy Acker's early 1970s intermedia, interdisciplinary practice. It uncovers how this expansive, partialized diaristic archive (comprising journals, chapbooks, performances, and mail-art novels—produced as Acker traveled restlessly from New York to San Diego and back again) holds the visceral, messy, material forms of Acker's automatic, autoerotic, close “conceptual” writing. As the chapter considers how Acker wrote within and against the fields of conceptual art, feminist art, and experimental poetry, and in between private and public domains, it argues that the artist-writer's “diary pieces” change our understanding of those art and literary histories while also mobilizing radical “blurrings” of artistic discipline, sickened desire, embodied life, and creative and sexual labor. In dialogue with Jennifer Doyle, this chapter argues for the queer feminist politics of Kathy's bad sex experiments and the reparative effects of ambivalence.