Valerie Solanas’ utopian world-building: Feminist poetics of anger and political violence in SCUM Manifesto (1967)

Abstract

Although SCUM Manifesto has enjoyed a steady feminist readership ever since its author attempted to kill Andy Warhol, scholars are hesitant to consider it as an actual political text. I analyse the dominant feminist reception of Valerie Solanas’ infamous document, particularly her use of rhetorical anger and threats of violence, at two points in time, the 1960s and 1970s, and the 1990s and 2000s. While her contemporaries misread her revolutionary call to action through the immediate context of the Warhol shooting, the next wave of scholars attempted to retrieve Solanas from the archive as a satirical social critic. By underscoring the violence in the manifesto to an exaggerated degree, both interpretations effectively conceal its political aim: an alternative world order founded on the principles of love, female friendship and mutual care. Building on Black feminist thinking on anger as a site of resistance and knowledge-making, my rereading of SCUM Manifesto fills the gaps left by earlier interpretations. First, using Brittney Cooper’s concept of ‘eloquent rage’, I frame the threatening exclamations as a literary device employed to strengthen the substantive clarity of her arguments. Second, I build on Sara Ahmed’s writing on anger as ‘a form of “against-ness”’ to show that Solanas is not only ‘against’ the patriarchy but also ‘for’ a new world order that thrives post revolution. I demonstrate that it is not Solanas’ literary anger or her call for male gendercide that ultimately caused her text to be dismissed in popular discourse but rather her threat to dismantle the status quo. Informed by the recent return to the second-wave archive in women’s studies, my article explicates the necessity for a feminist poetics of political violence within the imaginaries of women’s liberation.