Blood and Guts in High School

Blood and Guts in High School is a novel by Kathy money and leaves. Soon after they part company, Janey
Acker. It was written in the late 1970s and copyrighted in dies.
1978. It traveled a complex and circuitous route to publication in 1984. It remains Ackers most popular and bestselling book. The novel is also considered a metactional
2 Storytelling technique
text, which is aware of its status as a ctional piece. The
novel is interested in exploring politics, history, theories,
In Blood and Guts in High School, Acker uses the techand writing.
nique of collage. She inserts letters, poems, drama
scenes, dream visions and drawings. This creates a challenging text with a disturbed linearity. Acker freely admitted to using plagiarism in her work.
1 Plot summary
The novel is considered an anti-narrative work since it
jumps in and out of narration and contains dierent narrators. At times, its hard to follow the narration of the
story, since readers are interrupted with pornographic
drawings, letters, and dream maps. Ackers novel incorporates at least three main threads of poststructuralist discourse into Janeys narrative. The rst is an exploration
biopower; the second is a reading of the oedipal family
as pathology; and the third is an analysis of the gender
politics of language (Muth 90).

Blood and Guts in High School is the story of Janey Smith,

a ten-year-old American girl living in Mrida, Mexico,
who departs to the U.S.A. to live on her own. She has an
incestuous sexual relationship with her father, whom she
treats as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement,
and father. They live together in Mexico until another
woman begins to interest Janeys father. Janey realizes he
hates her because she limits him and he wants to have his
own life. Her father agrees to let her go and puts her into
a school in New York City.

Ackers work bounces from genre to genre, from location

For a period of time her father sends her money, but later to location, from voice to voice, like a child who wants to
she begins to work at a bakery and is appalled by the cus- experience and express everything (Hughes 127).
tomers. She has many sexual partners. She ends up pregnant twice and has two abortions. She seems to be ad...while writing it, I never considered that
dicted to sex and does not care whom she sleeps with. In
Blood and Guts in High School is especially
New York City she joins a gang, the Scorpions. One day
anti-male, but people have been very upset
the gang crashes a car while running from the police and
about it on that ground. When I wrote it I think
Janey is the only one who survives. Afterwards she begins
it was in my mind to do a traditional narrative.
to live in the New York slums. Two thieves break into her
I thought it was kind of sweet at the time, but
apartment, kidnap her, and sell her into prostitution.
of course its not.
She becomes the property of a Persian slave trader who
Kathy Acker[1]
keeps her locked up, trying to turn her out as a prostitute.
We see Janeys dreams and visions, and read her journal
entries and poems. Shortly before the kidnapper is to reLike her heroine, Janey, Acker also died of breast canlease her to become a prostitute for him, she discovers
cer, twenty years after writing Blood and Guts. Many of
she has cancer.
Ackers heroines have or fear getting cancer.
The slave trader lets her go and she illegally goes to
Tangiers. There she meets Jean Genet, the talented,
iconic French writer, and they develop a relationship.
Janey and Genet travel through North Africa and stop in 3 Critical reception
Alexandria. Genet treats Janey badly, but the worse he
treats her the more she loves him. He decides to leave her. Out of all of Ackers books, Blood and Guts in High
Janey gets arrested for stealing Genets property. Shortly School has received the widest criticisms and reviews.
afterwards he joins her in prison. A rebellion breaks out Many writers have tried analyzing Blood and Guts to unand they are both thrown out of Alexandria. They travel derstand exactly what Acker was trying to accomplish.
together for some time. Then Genet gives Janey some Katie R. Muth in her article described Blood and Guts as
1

a novel that draws arguments from gender studies, global

capitalism, and theories of subject formation (89).
Susan E. Hawkins describes Blood and Guts as a text
that contains plagiarism, parody, pastiche, and other
antirealist techniques that mark her work as postmodern
(Hawkins 637). According to Hawkins, Acker is motivated by two discourses: the oedipal and the imperial
(642). Using the mechanism of sexual and economic oppression, Acker is able to actualize the taboo surrounding incest by associating it with capitalism to demystify
the oedipal formation of desire in the Western culture
(Hawkins 646).
Another critical review that Blood and Guts received is
the narrative technique in the story. Not only is the narrating technique unstable and at times, unreliable, but the
narrator itself, Janey, a 10 year old girl, who lives until
14, experiences things that no little girl should. Kathy
Hughes in her analysis takes a look at this approach by
Acker and the overall eect of the novel when told from
a 10 year old perspective. Hughes argues that Acker attacks and ips the Freudian theory upside down through
sarcasm and irony (Hughes 124). And a 10 year old can
accomplish what society is afraid of doing because of
their simple matter of fact speaking, Janey, as a child,
does not have the socialization to throw the veil of intellectual language over the horrors of her daily, life, thus
Acker does not utilize poetics when describing her life
(Hughes 127).
Blood and Guts was banned as pornographic in West Germany and South Africa.
It is featured in Peter Boxalls book, 1001 Books You Must
Read Before You Die and The Little Black Book of Books.

Adaptations

Laura Parnes has created a re-imagining of this novel

using video.[2]

Notes

[1] A Conversation with Kathy Acker By Ellen G. Friedman. The Review of Contemporary Fiction 9 (3). Fall
1989.
[2]

References
Hawkins, Susan E. All in the Family: Kathy
Ackers Blood and Guts in High School. Contemporary Literature 45.4 (2004) : 637-658. Print.

REFERENCES

Hughes, Kathy. Incest and Innocence: Janeys

Youth in Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts in High
School. Nebula 3.1 (2006) : Print.
Muth, Katie R. Postmodern Fiction as Poststructuralist Theory: Kathy Ackers Blood and Guts
in High School. Narrative 19.1 (2011) : 87-111.
Print.

Text and image sources, contributors, and licenses

7.1

Text

Blood and Guts in High School Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_and_Guts_in_High_School?oldid=579941322 Contributors:

David Gerard, Nyxxxx, Korny O'Near, Dv82matt, Pegship, SmackBot, Elonka, Kevinalewis, Sadads, Gobonobo, Vagary, Aristophanes68,
Khatru2, Fisherjs, Rich257, P.apiski, Lectricky, Skier Dude, GrahamHardy, WereSpielChequers, Tassedethe, Lightbot, NeoBatfreak,
CobraBot, Cleanupthedead, Writingprincess, BattyBot, ArmbrustBot and Anonymous: 13

7.2

Images

7.3

Content license

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0