Janey Quixote: After Kathy Acker (Signed)
Janey Quixote: After Kathy Acker (Signed)
After (mis)reading Don Quixote, a young boy transforms himself into “Janey Smith,” a character he glimpsed in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. The unnamed Catholic narrator wanders the streets of Pittsburgh, slipping in and out of gender roles, seducing men and women — erasing his sense of his own flesh. Sex and gender are joined in Janey—a dream—who becomes an atheist of desire, on a quest to become an imperceptible shadow.
We don't have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities.—Kathy Acker