Abstract
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.