Abstract

Kathy Acker’s work has been praised for the way it highlights the transformative potential of the body in contact with the world. Often, however, such contact also reminds us of the danger involved in the use of the body to disrupt social convention. “Bodies at Liberty” mines this tension, considering Acker alongside three contemporary theorists – Michel Serres, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Mari Ruti – whose disparate theories of embodiment each offer accounts of exposure, vulnerability, and relation as strategies for envisioning human frailty as grounds for meaning-making in our lives. Read together, these texts become examples of the body’s ways of guiding our attention toward new paradigms for thriving and bonding in precarious times.