“My only consolation’s that I’m me—vivacious, dynamic, single, and a queer,” quips Bongi Perez, the intrepid antiheroine of Valerie Solanas’s Up Your Ass. Written between 1962 and 1965, the play features a wisecracking masc lesbian panhandler and sex worker who sounds a lot like the writer herself. Notorious for shooting Andy Warhol and his associate Mario Amaya in 1968, Solanas’s best-known text is her SCUM Manifesto (1967), outlining a program of male elimination. But it was Up Your Ass, a lesser-known dramatic work, that lay at the heart of her conflict with Warhol. Until now, the bawdy and rollicking play has never been published by a major press. This month, it appears via Sternberg’s sub-imprint Montana.
It’s an apt time for the release of Up Your Ass, an absurdist one-act poking fun at post-Pill, pre-Roe 1960s sexual politics from all directions. Although SCUM Manifesto became a fringe classic, many feminists have debated its value as a humorous work vs. a deadly serious homicidal screed. A contrarian who alienated major figures from the women’s liberation movement, Solanas’s famous combativeness led critics to distance themselves from her work. But interest in Solanas has intensified over the last decade, due in part to new scholarship. (In 2014, for instance, Breanne Fahs published an excellently researched biography of the writer through the Feminist Press.) The US’s extreme rightward shift has also cast rageful radicals like Solanas in a more sympathetic light. As the rights of queer and trans people, sex workers, and people capable of pregnancy become further endangered, Solanas’s ribald play fascinates as a relic of taboo-busting sexual content, if not always the most cogent attack on the patriarchal status quo.
Up Your Ass has arguably enjoyed its widest pop-cultural visibility via Mary Harron’s 1996 biopic I Shot Andy Warhol. Starring a young Lili Taylor, the film follows the aspiring writer as she infiltrates the Pop artist’s social circle in the hopes that he will produce her play. Between first sending her script to Warhol in 1965 and shooting him three years later, Solanas wandered in and out of the Factory scene. When she was particularly hard up for cash, Warhol paid her a measly $25 to play a lesbian character in his 1967 film I, a Man. In an improvised scene in a stairwell, Solanas shifts between light flirting and sparring with Tom Baker before turning down his advances. The tension in I Shot Andy Warhol escalates as Solanas, after signing a dubious contract with publisher Maurice Girodias, enters a psychosis fueled by public humiliation and paranoia over the ownership of her works. She attempts to assassinate Warhol and his studio staff after claiming that he lost the “only” copy of her play. In the ensuing decades, there’s been a mistaken conflation between Solanas’s life and art: Up Your Ass as a forgotten dry run of the SCUM Manifesto, SCUM as a manual for deadly violence against men, and Solanas’s attack on Warhol. Like all events involving Valerie Solanas, the reality is more complicated.
Warhol did lose his copy of Solanas’s manuscript, which was later recovered in a silver-painted trunk belonging to Billy Name. It is untrue, however, that it was Solanas’s only copy. The writer had high ambitions for the play, filing multiple copyrights for the manuscript, staging small readings, and producing mimeographs of it for sale. As the radical feminist activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz recalled, Solanas spoke unceasingly about the play during her psychiatric holds and incarceration following the shooting. In the early 1970s, she performed a one-woman version of it while imprisoned for first-degree assault at Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane.
Despite Solanas’s insistence on its artistic significance, the play was eclipsed by her strident SCUM Manifesto, published by Girodias’s Olympia Press immediately after her arrest. In fact, Up Your Ass has only been staged once by a professional company. In 2000, George Coates Performance Works mounted a version with an all-female cast in San Francisco, just blocks from the SRO where Solanas died alone, a dozen years earlier, at the age of fifty-two. In 2001, the production saw a short run at New York’s P.S. 122. “Far from being a museum piece, ‘Up Your Ass’ is a clarion call,” wrote one reviewer. The show was heralded at the time for its forward-thinking take on genderbending and homicidal frustration with male chauvinism. Today, it stands out as much for its punkish irreverence—Solanas spares no one from her main character’s acid tongue.
Up Your Ass follows Bongi Perez, Solanas’s stand-in, on an average day hustling in the streets of “a large American city.” (Solanas wrote an early draft while living in Berkeley, California, and revised it in New York.) Full of clapbacks and one-liners, the script celebrates the fine art of gutter-talk while offering a parodic send-up of misogyny during the swinging ’60s. Over the course of Bongi’s wanderings, she catcalls women (“You got a twat by Dior?”); shoots the breeze with two single men (Black Cat and White Cat) about pickup strategies; hustles a john for dinner before giving him a quick hand job in an alley; and engages in banter with two drag queens (“Do you know what I’d like more than anything in the world to be?” one muses. “A Lesbian. Then I could be the cake and eat it too”). Bongi then meets Ginger, a demented Helen Gurley Brown type who brings her own turd to a dinner party (“Everybody knows that men have much more respect for women who’re good at lapping up shit,” Ginger says), and her faux-intellectual colleague Russell, whom Bongi cajoles into screwing behind a bush just minutes after he declares her a “desexed monstrosity.” As an absurdist palate cleanser, Solanas shifts the scene to a Creative Homemaking class. There, an instructor advises aspiring wives to integrate fucking into domestic chores—by ramming a soaped-up bottle brush up one’s husband’s ass, recalling the play’s titular expletive. In Bongi’s final encounter, our protagonist befriends a bicurious housewife who murders her penis-obsessed toddler. The grand finale shows the pair walking off into the proverbial sunset, aggressively propositioning women together.
The manuscript’s épater la bourgeoisie sensibility, shot through with clichés about race and sexuality, places it squarely in the twentieth century. But the text also outlines a space of genderqueer possibility that wouldn’t be theorized for years, advocates for sex workers’ rights, and sketches the dark future of reproductive technology through allusions to biological determinism. A line can be traced directly from Bongi’s offhanded political musings—“Maybe being president wouldn’t be such a bad idea . . . I could eliminate the money system, and let the machines do all the work”—to SCUM’s opening sentence, which urges “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females” to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Just as importantly, Bongi expresses a desire that Solanas, who claimed to be asexual, often hid in her public life. The fictional character longs for “real lowdown, funky broads, nasty, bitchy hotshots, the kind that when she enters a room it’s like a blinding flash.” Such heated, desperate attempts at communicating want—in tonally mischievous dialogue that slides between screwball comedy and apocalyptic tirade—crackle throughout Solanas’s script.
Up Your Ass is fascinating, but is it feminist? In Andrea Long Chu’s Females, (2019) her gender-transition-memoir-cum-theoretical-provocation, the same question is posed, but turned inside out. Chu writes that “one could be forgiven for wondering if Solanas’s art, not unlike that of the male artists she despises (and occasionally shot), might have represented its own kind of attempt to repress the very femaleness she hoped to unleash, like a biological weapon, upon the world.” The “always selfish, always cool” vision of femaleness that Solanas laid out in SCUM simply reversed the traditional poles of misogyny. Chu, for her part, embraces Solanas as an avatar of the self-negation she argues is intrinsic to the female condition. “Everyone is female,” Chu declares, “and everyone hates it.”
Up Your Ass reveals Solanas as an equal-opportunity roaster, a role that places her outside of contemporary feminism’s tendency toward self-examination. Rather than shared vulnerability, this sexual comedy is shot through with a tart flavor of camp able to deflect earnest political criticisms directed at the author. Solanas takes aim at the sexual expectations of placed on “groovy,” liberated-but-docile chicks. (In SCUM, she would later damningly term these women “Daddy’s Girls.”) The reader can sense a tension in the play, Solanas knotting her rage into a tightly coiled spring, ready to release at any target that gets in her way—as it did, appallingly, at a fellow queer artist that she once viewed as her potential producer. But we also glimpse traces of Solanas that are more complex and contradictory than her manifesto, or her attempted murders, might suggest. As the old saying goes, women’s greatest fear is that men will kill them, while men’s greatest fear is that women will laugh at them. Rather than programmatic gendercide, her play offers the chance to laugh with her at the grotesqueries of a patriarchy that enmeshes and implicates us all.
Scum as you are : The furious comedy of Valerie Solanas / By Wendy Vogel. Artforum, August 22, 2022
Violent
and corrosively humorous, Dans Ton Cul is a play written in the 1960s by
Valérie Solanas. A short and powerful text by a radical author ahead of her
time, to discover urgently today.
It is often presented for two feats of arms: the publication of SCUM Manifesto in 1967, feminist firebrand and misandre and the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol the following year. Valerie Solanas was radical feminist figure born in 1936 and died in 1988, is again highlighted through the publication in May 2022 and for the first time in France of In Your Ass. This play was translated in France by Wendy Delorme and published by Éditions Fayardin the 1001 Nights collection.
An opportunity to see that the anger of Valérie Solanas is still alive, that his verve still hits the mark, and that his denunciation of male domination and capitalism finds still resonates with feminists today.
How In Your Ass Almost Never Came to Be
In Your Ass (in English Up Your Ass), it is a work of around thirty pages, which Valérie Solanas took three years to write. Claimed lesbian, she then lives in New York, tries to become a writer and earns her living by prostituting herself.
His play almost remained lost in limbo : when in 1967, Valérie Solanas presented her manuscript to Andy Warhol and asked him to produce his play, the latter believed not in a joke, but downright in a set up. Because at that time, he was not in the odor of holiness with the authorities, as he told in his memoirs, co-written with Pat Hackett and published in the 80s: “I quickly took a look at it and it was so lewd, I thought it was working for the police and it was some kind of incitement to crime”. Andy Warhol ends up telling him that he has misplaced the manuscript and, in return, offers Valérie Solanas a role in the film. I, a Man.
It was not until 1999 that the text was found. Director George Coates directs it. It was only in 2014 that it was published for the first time in the United States.
Each dialogue is finely chiseled, rhythmic, everything hits the spot. “It’s extremely built”, tells us the author Wendy Delorme, to whom we owe in particular The time of fire will come at Cambourakis and who translated this first French edition of the play.
The Story of In Your Ass
“In your ass, it’s a fierce and hilarious pamphlet that comes in the form of boulevard theater”, summarizes Wendy Delorme.
The short play features the cheeky Bongi Perez, a sort of incarnation of Valérie Solanas, who like her, prostitutes herself. As they meet and interact, it highlights and denounces the norms, the patriarchal springs and the hypocrisy of the American society of the 60s with a harsh and terribly corrosive spirit.
“She is funny, and her humor is a weapon”, explains Wendy Delorme. “The way she brings form and content together is an example to follow, it’s a source of inspiration. One of the problems in getting the facts about sexual violence across is precisely who you talk to and how you do it. Sometimes a message does not get through, because its enunciation does not get through. Valérie Solanas, while being radical, while seeming excessive, always manages to get a message across.”
Radical, extreme, rabid… There is no shortage of adjectives to qualify Valérie Solanas and her provocations. ‘In Your Ass’ do not take gloves and shows all the irreverence of this author totally out of step with the times : “She is way ahead of her time”, summarizes Wendy Delorme.
“She wrote Dans Ton Cul when we weren’t yet talking about gender issues. She was brilliant, off the charts, but that wasn’t a choice on her part. She went to college, but in her day, women were said to go to college to find a husband and were never given positions in research labs. Her rage comes from there too, she can’t live in that world. “
She is finally even too transgressive for the already very transgressive Factory, she does not fit into the codes of the studio where Andy Warhol and his clique of marginals and artists gather, in no way resembling the stars who gravitate around the artist and populate his universe.
After shooting Andy Warhol, she is brought to justice and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she is diagnosed with schizophrenia. This assassination attempt makes her ironically famous.
The other major work of Valérie Solanas is of course SCUM Manifesto (SCUM for Society for Cutting Up Men, in other words “Society to emasculate men”), in which Valérie Solanas spits this desire to eliminate men. “Un funny and jubilant text, cathartic and humorous. It’s a big puppet that has real political power” describes the author Chloé Delaume, in an article in the World which celebrates 50 years of the work of Valérie Solanas. It was reissued in France in 2021 by Fayard with an afterword by Lauren Bastide.
In Your Ass also exists through a translation into French and a radio play produced by a collective TPG (Trans Pédés Gouines). It is broadcast on Station Station, the media of La Station — Gare des Mines.
Why you should read Dans Ton Cul, a work by Valérie Solanas as funny as it is gritty and radical. By Steven Felton. Soul Mirror One, August 7, 2022.
It is often presented for two feats of arms: the publication of SCUM Manifesto in 1967, feminist firebrand and misandre and the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol the following year. Valerie Solanas was radical feminist figure born in 1936 and died in 1988, is again highlighted through the publication in May 2022 and for the first time in France of In Your Ass. This play was translated in France by Wendy Delorme and published by Éditions Fayardin the 1001 Nights collection.
An opportunity to see that the anger of Valérie Solanas is still alive, that his verve still hits the mark, and that his denunciation of male domination and capitalism finds still resonates with feminists today.
How In Your Ass Almost Never Came to Be
In Your Ass (in English Up Your Ass), it is a work of around thirty pages, which Valérie Solanas took three years to write. Claimed lesbian, she then lives in New York, tries to become a writer and earns her living by prostituting herself.
His play almost remained lost in limbo : when in 1967, Valérie Solanas presented her manuscript to Andy Warhol and asked him to produce his play, the latter believed not in a joke, but downright in a set up. Because at that time, he was not in the odor of holiness with the authorities, as he told in his memoirs, co-written with Pat Hackett and published in the 80s: “I quickly took a look at it and it was so lewd, I thought it was working for the police and it was some kind of incitement to crime”. Andy Warhol ends up telling him that he has misplaced the manuscript and, in return, offers Valérie Solanas a role in the film. I, a Man.
It was not until 1999 that the text was found. Director George Coates directs it. It was only in 2014 that it was published for the first time in the United States.
Each dialogue is finely chiseled, rhythmic, everything hits the spot. “It’s extremely built”, tells us the author Wendy Delorme, to whom we owe in particular The time of fire will come at Cambourakis and who translated this first French edition of the play.
The Story of In Your Ass
“In your ass, it’s a fierce and hilarious pamphlet that comes in the form of boulevard theater”, summarizes Wendy Delorme.
The short play features the cheeky Bongi Perez, a sort of incarnation of Valérie Solanas, who like her, prostitutes herself. As they meet and interact, it highlights and denounces the norms, the patriarchal springs and the hypocrisy of the American society of the 60s with a harsh and terribly corrosive spirit.
“She is funny, and her humor is a weapon”, explains Wendy Delorme. “The way she brings form and content together is an example to follow, it’s a source of inspiration. One of the problems in getting the facts about sexual violence across is precisely who you talk to and how you do it. Sometimes a message does not get through, because its enunciation does not get through. Valérie Solanas, while being radical, while seeming excessive, always manages to get a message across.”
Radical, extreme, rabid… There is no shortage of adjectives to qualify Valérie Solanas and her provocations. ‘In Your Ass’ do not take gloves and shows all the irreverence of this author totally out of step with the times : “She is way ahead of her time”, summarizes Wendy Delorme.
“She wrote Dans Ton Cul when we weren’t yet talking about gender issues. She was brilliant, off the charts, but that wasn’t a choice on her part. She went to college, but in her day, women were said to go to college to find a husband and were never given positions in research labs. Her rage comes from there too, she can’t live in that world. “
She is finally even too transgressive for the already very transgressive Factory, she does not fit into the codes of the studio where Andy Warhol and his clique of marginals and artists gather, in no way resembling the stars who gravitate around the artist and populate his universe.
After shooting Andy Warhol, she is brought to justice and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she is diagnosed with schizophrenia. This assassination attempt makes her ironically famous.
The other major work of Valérie Solanas is of course SCUM Manifesto (SCUM for Society for Cutting Up Men, in other words “Society to emasculate men”), in which Valérie Solanas spits this desire to eliminate men. “Un funny and jubilant text, cathartic and humorous. It’s a big puppet that has real political power” describes the author Chloé Delaume, in an article in the World which celebrates 50 years of the work of Valérie Solanas. It was reissued in France in 2021 by Fayard with an afterword by Lauren Bastide.
In Your Ass also exists through a translation into French and a radio play produced by a collective TPG (Trans Pédés Gouines). It is broadcast on Station Station, the media of La Station — Gare des Mines.
Why you should read Dans Ton Cul, a work by Valérie Solanas as funny as it is gritty and radical. By Steven Felton. Soul Mirror One, August 7, 2022.
Valerie
Solanas’s rarely published, legendary play, Up Your Ass, explodes social and
sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them
through her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness and camp. The play,
whose full title is Up Your Ass or From the Cradle to the Boat or The Big Suck
or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing
john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag
queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists,
among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled
Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back
alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the
play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting
and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the
way.
Sternberg Press
Sternberg Press
For a
while there, I became obsessed with Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. How can
one not, with this opening line?
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”
This extraordinary opening sentence starts in a mood of studied nonchalance, its participle “being” introducing as a given something which may in fact require argument. It is a sentence which starts in a distinctly camp mode, conjuring a cocktail-party wit—leaning on a bar perhaps—but which, by the time it becomes declarative, swerves to a stark, deadpan seriousness. It showcases Solanas’s intense penchant for lists, here enumerating casually asserted yet wildly ambitious demands. It displays an impeccable sense of rhythm and comedic timing, the final devastating words landing with an almost shoulder-shrugging obnoxiousness. The manifesto’s egregious unreasonableness turns on the word “only” in that perfect first sentence. I laughed out loud in a library on first reading.
I’m not sure Solanas intended the manifesto to be funny. Jeremiah Newton, a 17-year-old boy who turned up for auditions for her play, Up Your Ass, has said that “she wasn’t a comedian by any stretch. Just the fact that she was so serious made her funny.” Seriousness and impatience are key to the manifesto. In an interview in the Village Voice in 1967, Solanas answered Robert Marmorstein, who had asked if she was “serious about the SCUM thing,” by saying “Christ! Of course I’m serious. I’m dead serious.”
Pressed on why peaceful revolution wasn’t possible, she said “we’re impatient”; “I’m not going to be around 100 years from now. I want a piece of a groovy world myself. That peaceful shit is for the birds.” Vivian Gornick has rightly described Solanas’s voice as a voice “beyond reason, beyond negotiation,” but in this disarming statement of desire—I want a piece of a groovy world myself—we glimpse also the longing and perhaps the deprivation that might underlie it.
SCUM Manifesto is tremendous, an awe-inspiring, thrilling piece of writing. It has an urgency and a rage in dialogue with a ludic enjoyment in pure language, as if Solanas has been carried on a wave of her own linguistic capacity and is having a wild ride. It baldly aims to bring forth a future that she makes sound utterly reasonable. She is perennially irritated by others’ slowness, their failure to have reached the self-evident conclusions that she has. Things are very clear for her; hallucinatorily sharp and obvious. It’s uncanny to read; it’s both objectionable and lucid, lucid to the point of being a lurid fantasy.
Amongst much else, she advocates membership of the “unwork force, the fuck-up force,” elaborating arguments for automation that have since flourished in left discourse; she shruggingly asserts assisted reproduction as a self-evident inevitability; she dissects what some might now call emotional labor; she anticipates the ubiquitous surveillance that we’re now in thrall to, as well as a “perpetual hardness technique” (such as Viagra).
And all this from the gutter, from a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of New York, in 1967, its author hawking her mimeographed pamphlet—one of the most searing, brilliant, grandiose feminist texts ever written—around town in an increasingly desperate state.
*
Daddy Issues, my short book about fathers and daughters, emerged in part from the phenomenon of #MeToo; the anguished, rageful reckoning with violence against women that swept through the media in 2017 and 2018. #MeToo elicited plentiful metaphors of beginnings and endings, of tsunamis washing shame away, of wrongdoings being exposed to the light of day and of truth, of a cleansing and a destruction all at once.
Bad men—boyfriends, sexual partners, and bosses in particular—were subjected to intense scrutiny. But fathers seemed to be largely absent from the rhetoric that swirled, and from the remarkable rise in prominence of feminism in the last ten years. Was this the familiar insulation of the private realm, the family, from scrutiny? Had feminism forgotten about fathers?
Daddy Issues also emerged from a fascination I’d long had with that phrase—”daddy issues”; a phrase routinely, knowingly, casually thrown out about a woman’s sexual choices. It is usually invoked to mock a woman for choosing a man who can be construed as a version of her father—by virtue of his age, status, or power. It nods to the power of the father and the patriarch—but then laughs at a woman for being in thrall to these. It fleetingly sees something clearly, but then turns on the woman. It serves to deflect attention and locate in the other—the woman, the girl—dynamics that are interrelational, social, and political.
The phrase also takes as a given, and then scorns, the possibility that our lives and our sexual desires are profoundly shaped by our relationships to our parents or caregivers. This terrain—infantile sexuality, Oedipal desires—often induces a phobic shudder. The phrase “daddy issues” curiously acknowledges this terrain, however, only to then reject it, turning it into a source of derision, at the cost of the women, who, as its target, are asked to be accountable for their sexual and romantic choices.
This is a familiar dynamic: the disproportionate spotlighting of women’s responsibility for sexual relations. A dynamic which, incidentally or not, is what #MeToo was trying—often clumsily, unsteadily—to address and possibly invert. Some—not all—of the disquiet about #MeToo may come from a feeling that simply inverting this structure—turning the spotlight around and interrogating male sexuality—may not be the self-evident solution that it can be felt to be.
But in Daddy Issues, I wanted to explore how representations of fathers and daughters—in fiction, in film, on TV, in public families—do a tremendous amount of work, teaching us lessons in gender and in heterosexuality, while also revealing and reinscribing an enduring horror at female sexuality—particularly a girl’s emerging sexuality. What happens when we look more closely at “daughter issues”—those of fathers and of the culture more widely?
*
Daddy Issues was a flight of fancy—a format in which I could write something short and fast, without thinking too much about it. Partly this was of necessity; it was commissioned, and by the time I found time for it, I had to squeeze the writing into busy days, writing bits here and there, and not having time to get too self-conscious about it. It came from a place of anger, sadness, unresolved difficulty, but it felt joyous to write. Could I, I wondered, derive some kind of wicked pleasure from dashing off a text that simply leaned into my own hostility, in a perhaps unreasonable, deadpan way? I don’t think Daddy Issues reads at all like SCUM Manifesto, but I know it was there, hovering, with its rage and violence, in my dark little book about dads.
Joanne Steele, a key figure in the emerging women’s movement of the 60s and 70s, has said that SCUM Manifesto “had an important message for women to hear. Nothing else was as virulent. She was the first to say you can hate your oppressor.” This is key. Solanas embraced her feelings of hate; not just a noble feeling of anger about injustice, but a feeling of pure hatred and disgust. Not just for men, either. All women “have a fink streak about them,” she notes, that stems from “a lifetime of living amongst men.” And she is caustic about “passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the ‘respect’ of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny, appreciator of contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.” No one escapes Solanas’s acerbic ire.
When I see women posting on Father’s Day about their dads, it’s possible that I feel some envy, but also some shame, too, about having much more mixed feelings than many of these posts convey. And yet mixed feelings—ambivalence—are the natural state of things, from the day we are born. Mothers, fathers, caregivers provide but also frustrate, and they have to, if they are to provide the conditions for their infants’ development. Aggression and hatred are an inevitable and necessary part of development for infants, and create the possibility for so much else, including love.
Donald Winnicott argued that the child needs to hate and defy someone, without there being a complete rupture in the relationship, in order to develop a sense of self. Adam Phillips has written of the requirement on parents to be both “sufficiently resilient and responsive” to be able to “withstand the full blast of the primitive love impulse”; the full blast that includes aggression. That’s what this little book felt like to me: a blast of aggression that it felt important, and pleasurable, for me to give voice to. Could I be ruthless, as Winnicott argues the baby needs to be in relation to its caregivers?
Solanas took a refusal of deference towards men to a mad, thrilling extent. Was I doing something similar, digging my heels in and refusing any concession of warmth to fathers? Could I write a book about fathers that could play with my own aggression—my need for aggression—and come out safely on the other side? I was diving in, perhaps, to my difficult feelings in the hope that really reckoning with them might be transformative. Writing Daddy Issues was, I think now, an experiment in attempting to destroy an object who could, hopefully, survive that destruction. It was an attempt, in Winnicott’s terms, to feel real.
*
The obvious problem with SCUM Manifesto is that Solanas made good on her promises. She shot Andy Warhol, who survived, but only just. How does one read a book about destroying the male sex when you know the author tried to kill a man and irreparably changed his life? Solanas had been on the periperhy of Warhol’s Factory, Solanas, and she had interested him—he cast her in I, A Man. But then he lost interest and also lost her play. They were both outsiders, Catholics from blue-collar immigrant families, but for Solanas, Warhol (along with her publisher Maurice Girodias) became a metaphor for deception, withholding, and profit—a figure of paranoia.
Yet, as Breanne Fahs argues in her book on Solanas, “Valerie exhibited a unique blend of schizophrenic paranoia and outright accuracy.” Kate Millett has said that “even people who respected Warhol and his work thought that people at the Factory were being used as cannon fodder for avant-garde art.” As Olivia Laing has written of Solanas, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Solanas was excluded and quite possibly ill-treated, not just by the worlds she gravitated towards in New York, but in her volatile early life too. She lived an errant and erratic life that included imprisonment and hospitalization, and died aged 52, her body having been left several days before she was found.
Plenty have found SCUM Manifesto more objectionable than anything else, though plenty of writers (Andrea Long Chu, Breanne Fahs, Avitall Ronell, Olivia Laing) have, like me, been enthralled and thrilled by Solanas’s writing. It feels genuinely alarming to read her, disquieting to love this “indefensible text,” as Ronell puts it. But as Ronell goes on to say, “psychosis often catches fire from a spark in the real.”
Solanas had a lot, still has a lot, to teach us. As for Daddy Issues, any violence there was safely contained in a long essay, steadied by the forces of sentence-making. Though I might have felt alarmed writing it, I guess it worked out fine. Everybody survived.
Texts
Andrea Long Chu: “On Liking Women,” n+1 30, Winter 2018 · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (Picador, 2016) · Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (Feminist Press, 2014) · Avitall Ronell, “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas,” introduction to SCUM Manifesto (Verso, 2004, 2015)
Katherine Angel on Valerie Solanas, Bad Dads, and the Literary Pleasures of Pure Rage. By Katherine Angel. LitHub, July 7, 2022.
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”
This extraordinary opening sentence starts in a mood of studied nonchalance, its participle “being” introducing as a given something which may in fact require argument. It is a sentence which starts in a distinctly camp mode, conjuring a cocktail-party wit—leaning on a bar perhaps—but which, by the time it becomes declarative, swerves to a stark, deadpan seriousness. It showcases Solanas’s intense penchant for lists, here enumerating casually asserted yet wildly ambitious demands. It displays an impeccable sense of rhythm and comedic timing, the final devastating words landing with an almost shoulder-shrugging obnoxiousness. The manifesto’s egregious unreasonableness turns on the word “only” in that perfect first sentence. I laughed out loud in a library on first reading.
I’m not sure Solanas intended the manifesto to be funny. Jeremiah Newton, a 17-year-old boy who turned up for auditions for her play, Up Your Ass, has said that “she wasn’t a comedian by any stretch. Just the fact that she was so serious made her funny.” Seriousness and impatience are key to the manifesto. In an interview in the Village Voice in 1967, Solanas answered Robert Marmorstein, who had asked if she was “serious about the SCUM thing,” by saying “Christ! Of course I’m serious. I’m dead serious.”
Pressed on why peaceful revolution wasn’t possible, she said “we’re impatient”; “I’m not going to be around 100 years from now. I want a piece of a groovy world myself. That peaceful shit is for the birds.” Vivian Gornick has rightly described Solanas’s voice as a voice “beyond reason, beyond negotiation,” but in this disarming statement of desire—I want a piece of a groovy world myself—we glimpse also the longing and perhaps the deprivation that might underlie it.
SCUM Manifesto is tremendous, an awe-inspiring, thrilling piece of writing. It has an urgency and a rage in dialogue with a ludic enjoyment in pure language, as if Solanas has been carried on a wave of her own linguistic capacity and is having a wild ride. It baldly aims to bring forth a future that she makes sound utterly reasonable. She is perennially irritated by others’ slowness, their failure to have reached the self-evident conclusions that she has. Things are very clear for her; hallucinatorily sharp and obvious. It’s uncanny to read; it’s both objectionable and lucid, lucid to the point of being a lurid fantasy.
Amongst much else, she advocates membership of the “unwork force, the fuck-up force,” elaborating arguments for automation that have since flourished in left discourse; she shruggingly asserts assisted reproduction as a self-evident inevitability; she dissects what some might now call emotional labor; she anticipates the ubiquitous surveillance that we’re now in thrall to, as well as a “perpetual hardness technique” (such as Viagra).
And all this from the gutter, from a precarious, hand-to-mouth existence on the streets of New York, in 1967, its author hawking her mimeographed pamphlet—one of the most searing, brilliant, grandiose feminist texts ever written—around town in an increasingly desperate state.
*
Daddy Issues, my short book about fathers and daughters, emerged in part from the phenomenon of #MeToo; the anguished, rageful reckoning with violence against women that swept through the media in 2017 and 2018. #MeToo elicited plentiful metaphors of beginnings and endings, of tsunamis washing shame away, of wrongdoings being exposed to the light of day and of truth, of a cleansing and a destruction all at once.
Bad men—boyfriends, sexual partners, and bosses in particular—were subjected to intense scrutiny. But fathers seemed to be largely absent from the rhetoric that swirled, and from the remarkable rise in prominence of feminism in the last ten years. Was this the familiar insulation of the private realm, the family, from scrutiny? Had feminism forgotten about fathers?
Daddy Issues also emerged from a fascination I’d long had with that phrase—”daddy issues”; a phrase routinely, knowingly, casually thrown out about a woman’s sexual choices. It is usually invoked to mock a woman for choosing a man who can be construed as a version of her father—by virtue of his age, status, or power. It nods to the power of the father and the patriarch—but then laughs at a woman for being in thrall to these. It fleetingly sees something clearly, but then turns on the woman. It serves to deflect attention and locate in the other—the woman, the girl—dynamics that are interrelational, social, and political.
The phrase also takes as a given, and then scorns, the possibility that our lives and our sexual desires are profoundly shaped by our relationships to our parents or caregivers. This terrain—infantile sexuality, Oedipal desires—often induces a phobic shudder. The phrase “daddy issues” curiously acknowledges this terrain, however, only to then reject it, turning it into a source of derision, at the cost of the women, who, as its target, are asked to be accountable for their sexual and romantic choices.
This is a familiar dynamic: the disproportionate spotlighting of women’s responsibility for sexual relations. A dynamic which, incidentally or not, is what #MeToo was trying—often clumsily, unsteadily—to address and possibly invert. Some—not all—of the disquiet about #MeToo may come from a feeling that simply inverting this structure—turning the spotlight around and interrogating male sexuality—may not be the self-evident solution that it can be felt to be.
But in Daddy Issues, I wanted to explore how representations of fathers and daughters—in fiction, in film, on TV, in public families—do a tremendous amount of work, teaching us lessons in gender and in heterosexuality, while also revealing and reinscribing an enduring horror at female sexuality—particularly a girl’s emerging sexuality. What happens when we look more closely at “daughter issues”—those of fathers and of the culture more widely?
*
Daddy Issues was a flight of fancy—a format in which I could write something short and fast, without thinking too much about it. Partly this was of necessity; it was commissioned, and by the time I found time for it, I had to squeeze the writing into busy days, writing bits here and there, and not having time to get too self-conscious about it. It came from a place of anger, sadness, unresolved difficulty, but it felt joyous to write. Could I, I wondered, derive some kind of wicked pleasure from dashing off a text that simply leaned into my own hostility, in a perhaps unreasonable, deadpan way? I don’t think Daddy Issues reads at all like SCUM Manifesto, but I know it was there, hovering, with its rage and violence, in my dark little book about dads.
Joanne Steele, a key figure in the emerging women’s movement of the 60s and 70s, has said that SCUM Manifesto “had an important message for women to hear. Nothing else was as virulent. She was the first to say you can hate your oppressor.” This is key. Solanas embraced her feelings of hate; not just a noble feeling of anger about injustice, but a feeling of pure hatred and disgust. Not just for men, either. All women “have a fink streak about them,” she notes, that stems from “a lifetime of living amongst men.” And she is caustic about “passive, rattle-headed Daddy’s Girl, ever eager for approval, for a pat on the head, for the ‘respect’ of any passing piece of garbage, is easily reduced to Mama, mindless ministrator to physical needs, soother of the weary, apey brow, booster of the tiny, appreciator of contemptible, a hot water bottle with tits.” No one escapes Solanas’s acerbic ire.
When I see women posting on Father’s Day about their dads, it’s possible that I feel some envy, but also some shame, too, about having much more mixed feelings than many of these posts convey. And yet mixed feelings—ambivalence—are the natural state of things, from the day we are born. Mothers, fathers, caregivers provide but also frustrate, and they have to, if they are to provide the conditions for their infants’ development. Aggression and hatred are an inevitable and necessary part of development for infants, and create the possibility for so much else, including love.
Donald Winnicott argued that the child needs to hate and defy someone, without there being a complete rupture in the relationship, in order to develop a sense of self. Adam Phillips has written of the requirement on parents to be both “sufficiently resilient and responsive” to be able to “withstand the full blast of the primitive love impulse”; the full blast that includes aggression. That’s what this little book felt like to me: a blast of aggression that it felt important, and pleasurable, for me to give voice to. Could I be ruthless, as Winnicott argues the baby needs to be in relation to its caregivers?
Solanas took a refusal of deference towards men to a mad, thrilling extent. Was I doing something similar, digging my heels in and refusing any concession of warmth to fathers? Could I write a book about fathers that could play with my own aggression—my need for aggression—and come out safely on the other side? I was diving in, perhaps, to my difficult feelings in the hope that really reckoning with them might be transformative. Writing Daddy Issues was, I think now, an experiment in attempting to destroy an object who could, hopefully, survive that destruction. It was an attempt, in Winnicott’s terms, to feel real.
*
The obvious problem with SCUM Manifesto is that Solanas made good on her promises. She shot Andy Warhol, who survived, but only just. How does one read a book about destroying the male sex when you know the author tried to kill a man and irreparably changed his life? Solanas had been on the periperhy of Warhol’s Factory, Solanas, and she had interested him—he cast her in I, A Man. But then he lost interest and also lost her play. They were both outsiders, Catholics from blue-collar immigrant families, but for Solanas, Warhol (along with her publisher Maurice Girodias) became a metaphor for deception, withholding, and profit—a figure of paranoia.
Yet, as Breanne Fahs argues in her book on Solanas, “Valerie exhibited a unique blend of schizophrenic paranoia and outright accuracy.” Kate Millett has said that “even people who respected Warhol and his work thought that people at the Factory were being used as cannon fodder for avant-garde art.” As Olivia Laing has written of Solanas, “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.” Solanas was excluded and quite possibly ill-treated, not just by the worlds she gravitated towards in New York, but in her volatile early life too. She lived an errant and erratic life that included imprisonment and hospitalization, and died aged 52, her body having been left several days before she was found.
Plenty have found SCUM Manifesto more objectionable than anything else, though plenty of writers (Andrea Long Chu, Breanne Fahs, Avitall Ronell, Olivia Laing) have, like me, been enthralled and thrilled by Solanas’s writing. It feels genuinely alarming to read her, disquieting to love this “indefensible text,” as Ronell puts it. But as Ronell goes on to say, “psychosis often catches fire from a spark in the real.”
Solanas had a lot, still has a lot, to teach us. As for Daddy Issues, any violence there was safely contained in a long essay, steadied by the forces of sentence-making. Though I might have felt alarmed writing it, I guess it worked out fine. Everybody survived.
Texts
Andrea Long Chu: “On Liking Women,” n+1 30, Winter 2018 · Olivia Laing, The Lonely City (Picador, 2016) · Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (Feminist Press, 2014) · Avitall Ronell, “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas,” introduction to SCUM Manifesto (Verso, 2004, 2015)
Katherine Angel on Valerie Solanas, Bad Dads, and the Literary Pleasures of Pure Rage. By Katherine Angel. LitHub, July 7, 2022.
Breanne
Fahs: Aileen Wuornos and Valerie Solanas are both known by many people as
perpetrators of homicidal violence against men who wronged them. Looking closely at their stories, as you do
in your new book, Requiem for a Serial Killer, and as I did in my biography of
Solanas, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and
Shot Andy Warhol), their violent rage reflected the profoundly oppressive
conditions in which they lived. We can read Wuornos and Solanas as feminist
characters or as aberrations of feminism. Why should they be embraced?
Alternatively, are there aspects of them we should reject?
Phyllis Chesler: They are both feminist icons, armed Amazon figures, and, at the same time, lone, non-political actors, badasses, folk heroes, like Billy the Kid or Jesse James. They work with no one, trust no one, are literal, concrete, specific; as Solanas might say, they act, while feminists are too often women who just talk. They are also mad women, in both senses of that word. However, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is brilliant and daring, as well as crackpot — political theatre at its best. Wuornos does not think or write in feminist terms. Although both women have lived at the edge of the ledge, endured enormous sexual violence, and gave up babies for adoption when they were teenagers, Solanas did not become a serial killer; Wuornos did. Both women refused to be rescued by feminist leaders who came to their aid. They gave us all a right royal run for our money. I found that I was the revolutionary idealist who wanted to overthrow patriarchy and Wuornos was a petit-bourgeois capitalist, who only wanted a piece of the pie. She did not enjoy the luxury of a life of ideas.
BF: Tell me more about that — the tension between the life of ideas and the act of violence. Solanas’s writing straddled the edge of satire and seriousness, and until she shot Andy Warhol in June 1968, most considered her a “crazy” polemicist, using the SCUM Manifesto as (what she called) a “literary device” rather than as something serious. Yet, her publisher later admitted that if she hadn’t shot Warhol, he never would have published SCUM Manifesto. This suggests that women like Solanas and Wuornos need to “scream to be heard,” that there is no place for them to express rage in moderated, polite, or mediated ways. At the same time, I think we’d both agree that homicidal rage leaves a wake of destruction, particularly for women struggling with severe mental illness. Neither could really get the help they needed after committing this violence. Where does that leave those of us wanting to express rage, or (like Solanas) express radical ideas, while also wanting to embrace non-violence?
PC: I am not sure that Wuornos wanted to be “heard.” All her life she was secretive — even more so after her arrest. But once she was in jail, she became very invested in her own fame, notoriety. She was proud that she’d “made history,” zealously tried to collect all her clippings, and agonized over others being able to make money “offa” what she alone did. This behaviour is also typical for male serial killers. I do not believe that the anger you and I may feel about genocide or femicide, or what we do about it (name it, analyze it, teach it, pass legislation against it, reach out to its victims, march, even go to jail) has anything in common with individual acts of final-straw homicide. We are lucky. We are privileged — we can “de-construct” such concrete acts and try to connect with the actors. Clearly, in both Solanas’s and Wuornos’s case, they viewed the feminist do-gooders with suspicion, contempt, and perhaps hatred.
BF: It is a luxury to be able to think and write about these characters rather than live through their specific material conditions. You’ve just written a book about the much-misunderstood character of Aileen Wuornos. It is an astonishing portrait of Wuornos, filled with a sympathetic understanding of her righteous anger, her severe mental illness, and her drive toward violence. Can you talk about what drew you to her and why she matters, particularly in this moment of COVID-19, the Donald Trump presidency, #MeToo, and the intensification of women’s righteous rage?
PC: I began this book 30 years ago, set it aside, published some law review and op-ed articles about her case, forgot about the book, and then picked it up, liked the five chapters that I’d written, reconstituted my entire Wuornos archive, read everything, and then steadily worked on the book from the summer of 2019 through the summer of 2020. I was originally drawn to Wuornos’s case in 1991 and felt compelled to organize a pro bono team of experts (she wanted this) to educate her first jury about the kind of violence that so many prostituted girls and women routinely face. Her claim that she killed in self-defence was entirely believable to me, but not to anyone who has not studied prostitution, interviewed prostitutes, and who is not familiar with cases of women who have killed in self-defence and with how their cases are handled. These are burning issues that remain with us today. They are as timely now as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries. I agree with you: Wuornos may be of greater interest now than she was in her day. Women are righteously “riled up” about racial and class injustice, sexual harassment, and rape. Also, we are now watching so many movies about female assassins, women dealing with domestic violence who fight back and who kill, female detectives who carry and use guns, female counter-terrorist special agents, etc.
BF: I agree that images and stories of women fighting back are in ascendancy, and I also feel haunted by how many images and stories we have of women being victimized and terrorized. I can’t help but think that this impacts women’s consciousness. You and I are both feminist psychologists and have worked with many women in bad romantic, sexual, financial, workplace, and mental health situations, including many women who have been abused, beaten, dismissed, trivialized, and discarded by (more) powerful men. How does this work — grounded in the material conditions in which women often live — inform how you see Wuornos and Solanas? What do Wuornos and Solanas teach us about how women survive violence enacted by men?
PC: Most severely battered women and child sex abuse/rape victims rarely fully recover. They tend to repeat their original traumas, which have rendered them more, not less, vulnerable to life-long abuse. Solanas and Wuornos got guns, got even, punched up, so to speak. Wuornos took down johns who towered over her in height and outweighed her. Some had been cops and Wuornos viewed such authority as corrupt and hypocritical, just as Solanas viewed Andy Warhol and her publisher Maurice Girodias as rip-off artists who bought and owned her work for a song and planned to hold it hostage for their amusement and profit.
BF: Do you consider their acts of violence a rational — or even predictable — response to the conditions they lived in?
PC: These acts are “rational” given the abuse they suffered for so long. However, these acts are also unpredictable. Most abused women do not kill men. Their abuse has made it difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to get out of harm’s way or to defend themselves from continued harm. To kill, even in self-defence, is rare. Many battered wives have been given life sentences for finally taking the law in their own hands and killing their batterers who had vowed to kill them. Absolutely no one else stopped these batterers.
BF: In that sense, Wuornos and Solanas were aberrations. Both Wuornos and Solanas had complicated relationships with men. Solanas lived with several different male partners, was sexually abused by men, worked as a sex worker with men, publicly derided men, shot two men, and wrote a manifesto calling for the elimination of all men (SCUM Manifesto) — a manuscript written for, in her words, “whores, dykes, criminals, and homicidal maniacs.” Wuornos was sexually abused by both her brother and grandfather, worked as a sex worker with men, and shot seven johns after they raped (or attempted to rape) her. Both women expressed rage at men in extreme and violent ways. That said, they both had many complicated and arguably justified reasons for feeling the rage they felt. How are these representations of men, as imagined by Wuornos and Solanas, a reflection of normal versus extreme toxic masculinity? Additionally, because both of them relied on men as a means of financial survival, does that relationship of economic dependence predict rage, anger, and violence toward men? How do we draw lines between childhood abuse and later acts of rage and violence?
PC: The economic dependence on men alone should drive women to violence. It does not. Because, as you say, it’s “complicated.” We are (falsely) reared to see men as our protectors; Daddy will take care of us if we take care of Daddy. By and large, for many women, this “peculiar arrangement” (which is how slavery was described) works, or is acceptable. They see no other alternative. As I reveal in Requiem for a Female Serial Killer, Wuornos insisted that she did not hate men; in fact, she viewed many of her johns as “boyfriends,” and was atypically very affectionate with them. She had a series of non-john boyfriends with whom she physically fought. She did not think of herself as a “lesbian” although the only person she was able to live with for 4 1/2 years was a very butch gay woman, one whom she said she “loved.” Tyria, who took the stand against her, also said that Wuornos was not really a “lesbian.” As you’ve shown in your excellent biography of Solanas, she, too, had boyfriends — and, at the same time, in blazing prose, told us that we had to eliminate the male sex. If you read enough about who the real serial killers are (men) and if you understand the nature of battering, and prostitution (mainly driven by men for money and “pleasure,”) it is not hard to understand Solanas’s point.
BF: Both Wuornos and Solanas are figures of anger but also of tragedy, resilience, and victimization. You’ve written extensively about how, when anger turns inward toward the self, it appears as depression. Both Wuornos and Solanas managed to resist a deeply depressive way of relating to their conditions of abuse and degradation. Why is it so hard for many women to validate and nurture their own anger? What lessons should we learn from Wuornos and Solanas?
PC: Women who act as if they are men — who act out their anger — were once diagnosed as “crazy” and punished as criminals. They have not been forgiven as many men are. I am not sure that anger turned outward is a way of expressing or avoiding depression. It might not even be “anger.” Women who kill their rapists or batterers in self-defence are often given life sentences. Wuornos killed in self-defence, at least the first time. Women do or should have the right to kill in self-defence, regardless of whether they are working as prostitutes, perhaps especially if they are, because many are battered and raped by multitudes of men, not just by one man. Most women are not permitted to express anger and then to let it go. It would be better if we learn how to do so.
BF: What would you say, drawing on the experiences of Solanas and Wuornos, to those who claim that people can engage in sex work in a consensual manner? How do their stories complicate the notions of consent, sex work, and mental health?
PC: Perhaps one to two per cent of prostituted girls and women, working alone, without pimps or Madams, especially as dominatrixes, may view what is a forced (economic) choice as a free choice. Everyone else has been trafficked into hell, especially young women of colour. As I write in Requiem:
“As an abolitionist, I do not view prostituted women with distaste or disgust — but I do see them as human sacrifices. I understand all the forces that track 98 per cent of girls and women into the ‘working life’: Dangerously dysfunctional families; physical and sexual abuse; drug addicted, absent, or imprisoned parents; serious poverty; homelessness; being racially marginalized; tricked or kidnapped into prostitution by a trafficker; sold by one’s parents; having too little education and few marketable skills; and, having absolutely no other way to eat or to feed your children.”
However, I do not view prostitution as an act of feminist resistance any more than I view marriage as one. The proposed solutions (legalization, decriminalization, etc.) will not abolish sexism, racism, poverty, war, genocide, or rape. What will? Until we find that magic bullet, starving and homeless girls and women will do whatever they can in order to afford their anesthetizing drugs so they can endure their work and put food on the table. And, as Wuornos said, men will keep taking their penises out of their pants and their money out of their pockets.
BF: Perhaps what you’re saying most clearly here is that options are limited for how oppressed people regain power, dignity, and autonomy, and that sex work cannot serve as a panacea for taking back power and dignity. One thing that sets these two women apart is their relationship to violence, and their use of violence as a way to regain dignity and power. Aileen Wuornos and Valerie Solanas exist on the margins of feminist consciousness as women who embraced violence as a form of fighting back against patriarchal oppression. Frantz Fanon wrote, in Wretched of the Earth, of the necessity of violence for oppressed people:
“From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence… And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.”
I wonder if we can also read Wuornos and Solanas in this way, as the question of violence as useful must be seen through the lens of both class and gender simultaneously. Do people engage in violence if they have other options? Is there a place for violence in feminism? How can we make sense of women’s violence toward men outside of the framework of crimes of passion?
PC: I used to teach Fanon and Freire — Memmi too — in Women’s Studies but I’m not sure I’d do so today. Women’s position is a caste position, one that class, race, geography, education, luck, etc. does not seem to change. A girl or a woman cannot say: “No FGM for me, I believe that I’m really a boy;” “No sexual harassment my way, I’m an important scientist who is about to solve the three-body problem;” “You can’t rape me, my father is a wealthy and important man;” etc. Class and anti-colonial/anti-racism struggles have required a violent overthrow of kings and masters but have focused far less on incest, rape, woman-battering, trafficking, FGM, honour killing, femicide, etc. Legislation against sex slavery hasn’t done so, nor have conferences, brilliant books, or individual acts of sacrifice and heroism. Even vibrant feminist movements, which have named and analyzed violence against women, have failed to do so. What will? Solanas’s shot landed her in a psychiatric facility. Wuornos’s shot landed her on death row and in an execution chamber. True, if there were millions of women out there, targeting known and specific pimps, sexual harassers, pedophiles, and rapists, that would eliminate those particular fiends. But would that eliminate such practices among others and among future generations? And do we really favour vigilantism? Or mob rule?
BF: I know our job is not to provide answers to the provocative questions you raise, because in part your work is so valuable because it highlights the way that we are trapped within these systems and there is no easy solution. We are not creating a feminist utopia here, but rather, trying to better understand the nature of the trappings we are in. What do you want readers of your book, and those interested in Wuornos and Solanas more broadly, to understand about the particular conditions women are living in today?
PC: Radical feminism has been neutralized and disappeared both in the academy and in the media. Had our early 1970s work (both academic and activist) on sexual harassment and rape been continuously taught and updated, we might have had a #MeToo movement much sooner.
BF: That’s why we need radical critiques of sexism and misogyny, a “going to the roots” approach to why oppression exists in the first place. When we work in solidarity with each other on radical critiques of the status quo, new worlds open up.
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and the author of twenty books, including Women and Madness, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist. In 1969, she co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology, and in 1974, she co-founded the National Women’s Health Network. She continues to work on political activism and legal work on behalf of women seeking political asylum.
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Performing Sex, Valerie Solanas, Out for Blood, Women, Sex, and Madness, and Firebrand Feminism, and co-editor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Transforming Contagion, and the newly released Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. She is the founder and director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group and also works as a clinical psychologist in private practice.
Phyllis Chesler: They are both feminist icons, armed Amazon figures, and, at the same time, lone, non-political actors, badasses, folk heroes, like Billy the Kid or Jesse James. They work with no one, trust no one, are literal, concrete, specific; as Solanas might say, they act, while feminists are too often women who just talk. They are also mad women, in both senses of that word. However, Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto is brilliant and daring, as well as crackpot — political theatre at its best. Wuornos does not think or write in feminist terms. Although both women have lived at the edge of the ledge, endured enormous sexual violence, and gave up babies for adoption when they were teenagers, Solanas did not become a serial killer; Wuornos did. Both women refused to be rescued by feminist leaders who came to their aid. They gave us all a right royal run for our money. I found that I was the revolutionary idealist who wanted to overthrow patriarchy and Wuornos was a petit-bourgeois capitalist, who only wanted a piece of the pie. She did not enjoy the luxury of a life of ideas.
BF: Tell me more about that — the tension between the life of ideas and the act of violence. Solanas’s writing straddled the edge of satire and seriousness, and until she shot Andy Warhol in June 1968, most considered her a “crazy” polemicist, using the SCUM Manifesto as (what she called) a “literary device” rather than as something serious. Yet, her publisher later admitted that if she hadn’t shot Warhol, he never would have published SCUM Manifesto. This suggests that women like Solanas and Wuornos need to “scream to be heard,” that there is no place for them to express rage in moderated, polite, or mediated ways. At the same time, I think we’d both agree that homicidal rage leaves a wake of destruction, particularly for women struggling with severe mental illness. Neither could really get the help they needed after committing this violence. Where does that leave those of us wanting to express rage, or (like Solanas) express radical ideas, while also wanting to embrace non-violence?
PC: I am not sure that Wuornos wanted to be “heard.” All her life she was secretive — even more so after her arrest. But once she was in jail, she became very invested in her own fame, notoriety. She was proud that she’d “made history,” zealously tried to collect all her clippings, and agonized over others being able to make money “offa” what she alone did. This behaviour is also typical for male serial killers. I do not believe that the anger you and I may feel about genocide or femicide, or what we do about it (name it, analyze it, teach it, pass legislation against it, reach out to its victims, march, even go to jail) has anything in common with individual acts of final-straw homicide. We are lucky. We are privileged — we can “de-construct” such concrete acts and try to connect with the actors. Clearly, in both Solanas’s and Wuornos’s case, they viewed the feminist do-gooders with suspicion, contempt, and perhaps hatred.
BF: It is a luxury to be able to think and write about these characters rather than live through their specific material conditions. You’ve just written a book about the much-misunderstood character of Aileen Wuornos. It is an astonishing portrait of Wuornos, filled with a sympathetic understanding of her righteous anger, her severe mental illness, and her drive toward violence. Can you talk about what drew you to her and why she matters, particularly in this moment of COVID-19, the Donald Trump presidency, #MeToo, and the intensification of women’s righteous rage?
PC: I began this book 30 years ago, set it aside, published some law review and op-ed articles about her case, forgot about the book, and then picked it up, liked the five chapters that I’d written, reconstituted my entire Wuornos archive, read everything, and then steadily worked on the book from the summer of 2019 through the summer of 2020. I was originally drawn to Wuornos’s case in 1991 and felt compelled to organize a pro bono team of experts (she wanted this) to educate her first jury about the kind of violence that so many prostituted girls and women routinely face. Her claim that she killed in self-defence was entirely believable to me, but not to anyone who has not studied prostitution, interviewed prostitutes, and who is not familiar with cases of women who have killed in self-defence and with how their cases are handled. These are burning issues that remain with us today. They are as timely now as they were in the 19th and 20th centuries. I agree with you: Wuornos may be of greater interest now than she was in her day. Women are righteously “riled up” about racial and class injustice, sexual harassment, and rape. Also, we are now watching so many movies about female assassins, women dealing with domestic violence who fight back and who kill, female detectives who carry and use guns, female counter-terrorist special agents, etc.
BF: I agree that images and stories of women fighting back are in ascendancy, and I also feel haunted by how many images and stories we have of women being victimized and terrorized. I can’t help but think that this impacts women’s consciousness. You and I are both feminist psychologists and have worked with many women in bad romantic, sexual, financial, workplace, and mental health situations, including many women who have been abused, beaten, dismissed, trivialized, and discarded by (more) powerful men. How does this work — grounded in the material conditions in which women often live — inform how you see Wuornos and Solanas? What do Wuornos and Solanas teach us about how women survive violence enacted by men?
PC: Most severely battered women and child sex abuse/rape victims rarely fully recover. They tend to repeat their original traumas, which have rendered them more, not less, vulnerable to life-long abuse. Solanas and Wuornos got guns, got even, punched up, so to speak. Wuornos took down johns who towered over her in height and outweighed her. Some had been cops and Wuornos viewed such authority as corrupt and hypocritical, just as Solanas viewed Andy Warhol and her publisher Maurice Girodias as rip-off artists who bought and owned her work for a song and planned to hold it hostage for their amusement and profit.
BF: Do you consider their acts of violence a rational — or even predictable — response to the conditions they lived in?
PC: These acts are “rational” given the abuse they suffered for so long. However, these acts are also unpredictable. Most abused women do not kill men. Their abuse has made it difficult, perhaps impossible, for them to get out of harm’s way or to defend themselves from continued harm. To kill, even in self-defence, is rare. Many battered wives have been given life sentences for finally taking the law in their own hands and killing their batterers who had vowed to kill them. Absolutely no one else stopped these batterers.
BF: In that sense, Wuornos and Solanas were aberrations. Both Wuornos and Solanas had complicated relationships with men. Solanas lived with several different male partners, was sexually abused by men, worked as a sex worker with men, publicly derided men, shot two men, and wrote a manifesto calling for the elimination of all men (SCUM Manifesto) — a manuscript written for, in her words, “whores, dykes, criminals, and homicidal maniacs.” Wuornos was sexually abused by both her brother and grandfather, worked as a sex worker with men, and shot seven johns after they raped (or attempted to rape) her. Both women expressed rage at men in extreme and violent ways. That said, they both had many complicated and arguably justified reasons for feeling the rage they felt. How are these representations of men, as imagined by Wuornos and Solanas, a reflection of normal versus extreme toxic masculinity? Additionally, because both of them relied on men as a means of financial survival, does that relationship of economic dependence predict rage, anger, and violence toward men? How do we draw lines between childhood abuse and later acts of rage and violence?
PC: The economic dependence on men alone should drive women to violence. It does not. Because, as you say, it’s “complicated.” We are (falsely) reared to see men as our protectors; Daddy will take care of us if we take care of Daddy. By and large, for many women, this “peculiar arrangement” (which is how slavery was described) works, or is acceptable. They see no other alternative. As I reveal in Requiem for a Female Serial Killer, Wuornos insisted that she did not hate men; in fact, she viewed many of her johns as “boyfriends,” and was atypically very affectionate with them. She had a series of non-john boyfriends with whom she physically fought. She did not think of herself as a “lesbian” although the only person she was able to live with for 4 1/2 years was a very butch gay woman, one whom she said she “loved.” Tyria, who took the stand against her, also said that Wuornos was not really a “lesbian.” As you’ve shown in your excellent biography of Solanas, she, too, had boyfriends — and, at the same time, in blazing prose, told us that we had to eliminate the male sex. If you read enough about who the real serial killers are (men) and if you understand the nature of battering, and prostitution (mainly driven by men for money and “pleasure,”) it is not hard to understand Solanas’s point.
BF: Both Wuornos and Solanas are figures of anger but also of tragedy, resilience, and victimization. You’ve written extensively about how, when anger turns inward toward the self, it appears as depression. Both Wuornos and Solanas managed to resist a deeply depressive way of relating to their conditions of abuse and degradation. Why is it so hard for many women to validate and nurture their own anger? What lessons should we learn from Wuornos and Solanas?
PC: Women who act as if they are men — who act out their anger — were once diagnosed as “crazy” and punished as criminals. They have not been forgiven as many men are. I am not sure that anger turned outward is a way of expressing or avoiding depression. It might not even be “anger.” Women who kill their rapists or batterers in self-defence are often given life sentences. Wuornos killed in self-defence, at least the first time. Women do or should have the right to kill in self-defence, regardless of whether they are working as prostitutes, perhaps especially if they are, because many are battered and raped by multitudes of men, not just by one man. Most women are not permitted to express anger and then to let it go. It would be better if we learn how to do so.
BF: What would you say, drawing on the experiences of Solanas and Wuornos, to those who claim that people can engage in sex work in a consensual manner? How do their stories complicate the notions of consent, sex work, and mental health?
PC: Perhaps one to two per cent of prostituted girls and women, working alone, without pimps or Madams, especially as dominatrixes, may view what is a forced (economic) choice as a free choice. Everyone else has been trafficked into hell, especially young women of colour. As I write in Requiem:
“As an abolitionist, I do not view prostituted women with distaste or disgust — but I do see them as human sacrifices. I understand all the forces that track 98 per cent of girls and women into the ‘working life’: Dangerously dysfunctional families; physical and sexual abuse; drug addicted, absent, or imprisoned parents; serious poverty; homelessness; being racially marginalized; tricked or kidnapped into prostitution by a trafficker; sold by one’s parents; having too little education and few marketable skills; and, having absolutely no other way to eat or to feed your children.”
However, I do not view prostitution as an act of feminist resistance any more than I view marriage as one. The proposed solutions (legalization, decriminalization, etc.) will not abolish sexism, racism, poverty, war, genocide, or rape. What will? Until we find that magic bullet, starving and homeless girls and women will do whatever they can in order to afford their anesthetizing drugs so they can endure their work and put food on the table. And, as Wuornos said, men will keep taking their penises out of their pants and their money out of their pockets.
BF: Perhaps what you’re saying most clearly here is that options are limited for how oppressed people regain power, dignity, and autonomy, and that sex work cannot serve as a panacea for taking back power and dignity. One thing that sets these two women apart is their relationship to violence, and their use of violence as a way to regain dignity and power. Aileen Wuornos and Valerie Solanas exist on the margins of feminist consciousness as women who embraced violence as a form of fighting back against patriarchal oppression. Frantz Fanon wrote, in Wretched of the Earth, of the necessity of violence for oppressed people:
“From birth it is clear to him that this narrow world, strewn with prohibitions, can only be called in question by absolute violence… And it is clear that in the colonial countries the peasants alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no possible coming to terms; colonization and decolonization is simply a question of relative strength.”
I wonder if we can also read Wuornos and Solanas in this way, as the question of violence as useful must be seen through the lens of both class and gender simultaneously. Do people engage in violence if they have other options? Is there a place for violence in feminism? How can we make sense of women’s violence toward men outside of the framework of crimes of passion?
PC: I used to teach Fanon and Freire — Memmi too — in Women’s Studies but I’m not sure I’d do so today. Women’s position is a caste position, one that class, race, geography, education, luck, etc. does not seem to change. A girl or a woman cannot say: “No FGM for me, I believe that I’m really a boy;” “No sexual harassment my way, I’m an important scientist who is about to solve the three-body problem;” “You can’t rape me, my father is a wealthy and important man;” etc. Class and anti-colonial/anti-racism struggles have required a violent overthrow of kings and masters but have focused far less on incest, rape, woman-battering, trafficking, FGM, honour killing, femicide, etc. Legislation against sex slavery hasn’t done so, nor have conferences, brilliant books, or individual acts of sacrifice and heroism. Even vibrant feminist movements, which have named and analyzed violence against women, have failed to do so. What will? Solanas’s shot landed her in a psychiatric facility. Wuornos’s shot landed her on death row and in an execution chamber. True, if there were millions of women out there, targeting known and specific pimps, sexual harassers, pedophiles, and rapists, that would eliminate those particular fiends. But would that eliminate such practices among others and among future generations? And do we really favour vigilantism? Or mob rule?
BF: I know our job is not to provide answers to the provocative questions you raise, because in part your work is so valuable because it highlights the way that we are trapped within these systems and there is no easy solution. We are not creating a feminist utopia here, but rather, trying to better understand the nature of the trappings we are in. What do you want readers of your book, and those interested in Wuornos and Solanas more broadly, to understand about the particular conditions women are living in today?
PC: Radical feminism has been neutralized and disappeared both in the academy and in the media. Had our early 1970s work (both academic and activist) on sexual harassment and rape been continuously taught and updated, we might have had a #MeToo movement much sooner.
BF: That’s why we need radical critiques of sexism and misogyny, a “going to the roots” approach to why oppression exists in the first place. When we work in solidarity with each other on radical critiques of the status quo, new worlds open up.
Phyllis Chesler is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies at the College of Staten Island (CUNY) and the author of twenty books, including Women and Madness, Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist. In 1969, she co-founded the Association for Women in Psychology, and in 1974, she co-founded the National Women’s Health Network. She continues to work on political activism and legal work on behalf of women seeking political asylum.
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Performing Sex, Valerie Solanas, Out for Blood, Women, Sex, and Madness, and Firebrand Feminism, and co-editor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality, Transforming Contagion, and the newly released Burn It Down! Feminist Manifestos for the Revolution. She is the founder and director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group and also works as a clinical psychologist in private practice.
Interview:
Phyllis Chesler on Aileen Wuornos and Valerie Solanas, icons of female violence
against men. By Breanne Fahs. Feminist Current, October 9, 2020.
Overlooked
is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in
1851, went unreported in The Times. This month we’re adding the stories of
important L.G.B.T.Q. figures.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, with a gun and a plan to enact vengeance. What happened next came to define her life and legacy: She fired at Warhol, nearly killing him. The incident reduced her to a tabloid headline, but also drew attention to her writing, which is still read in some women’s and gender studies courses today.
Solanas was a radical feminist (though she would say she loathed most feminists), a pioneering queer theorist (at least according to some) and the author of “SCUM Manifesto,” in which she argued for the wholesale extermination of men.
The manifesto, self-published in 1967, reads as satire, though Solanas defended it as serious. Its opening line is at once absurd and a call to arms for the coalition she was forming, the Society for Cutting Up Men:
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
On the subject of reproduction, she wrote: “We should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects or deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness.”
She sold copies in leftist bookstores and on the streets of Greenwich Village for $1 ($2 if the buyer was a man).
The text distilled the anger and yearning that Solanas had exhibited throughout her life. In college, as a recently-out lesbian, she rallied against the idea that educated women should be defined as wives and mothers, even as she acknowledged that, in a society ruled by men, such fates were probably inevitable. Her ideas about gender and power calcified in the early 1960s, when she hitchhiked across the country and back again. She arrived in New York City in 1962 with the start of a play she was writing and several versions of “SCUM Manifesto.”
Then, as now, Warhol was one of the most famous artists in America, and Solanas found her way onto the fringes of his social circle. She shared with him a copy of her play, “Up Your Ass” (1965), with the hope that he would produce it. Its central character is Bongi Perez, a bantering, panhandling prostitute who is frequently homeless — much like Solanas was herself. Auditions and rehearsals took place in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel, the bohemian enclave from which Solanas was evicted on several occasions. Warhol found the manuscript objectionable and eventually misplaced it, but he did cast her in his erotic film “I, a Man” (1967). (“Up Your Ass” wouldn’t be staged until long after her death, in 2000 in San Francisco.)
Solanas then met with Maurice Girodias, the iconoclastic French publisher of Olympia Press who printed the first editions of “Naked Lunch” (1959), “The Story of O” (1954) and “Lolita” (1955), about a deal for a new book.
Over time, Solanas became convinced that Warhol and Girodias were conspiring to suppress, censor or steal her voice.
On that day in June, when she walked into Warhol’s studio, newly located at 33 Union Square West, Warhol wasn’t there. Solanas left and returned several times, until she spotted him on the sidewalk. Together they rode the building’s elevator up to the sixth floor.
Soon, there were gunshots. Warhol was taken to Columbus Hospital. Solanas’s bullets had punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him dead. (He would live for 19 more years, wearing a surgical corset to support his abdomen.)
That evening, Solanas turned herself in to an officer in Times Square. “He had too much control over my life,” she told the officer, referring to Warhol.
Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9, 1936, in Ventnor City, N.J., just off the Atlantic City boardwalk, one of two girls to Louis Solanas, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, a dental assistant. Her parents separated when Valerie was 4 and divorced in 1947; both remarried. Her father, she would later say, had sexually abused her from a young age. Still, she retained a correspondence with him for most of her life.
Valerie was by some accounts a precocious child, but in middle school she began to show signs of disobedience, skipping class and even assaulting a teacher. By 15 she had given birth to two children: Linda, who was raised as her sister, and David, whom she placed for adoption. At the time, it was not unusual for pregnancies to be concealed by such means.
In 1954, she enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied psychology. She then pursued a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota but dropped out after two semesters because, she said, she felt that her ideas and research were not very likely to be funded as well as men’s.
She spent the next decade putting her ideas to paper. She moved frequently as a result of eviction, always with her typewriter in tow.
In 1966, her short story “A Young Girl’s Primer” appeared in Cavalier, a Playboy-style magazine that also published Ray Bradbury, Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King. The tale centers on a woman who sells sex and conversation for the freedom to be creative. The next year, she began selling mimeographed copies of “SCUM” around the city and seeking a producer for her play.
The shooting, in June of 1968, brought national attention to her name and work. The story of the incident was splashed across the front pages of papers like The Daily News in New York and The New York Times, which misspelled her name as Solanis. Copies of “SCUM” quickly sold out.
Her attack on Warhol fractured mainstream feminist groups, including the National Organization for Women, whose members were split on whether to defend or condemn her. Those who defended her, including the writer Ti-Grace Atkinson and the lawyer Flo Kennedy, formed the bedrock of radical feminism and presented Solanas as a symbol of female rage. The shooting became wrapped up in a larger narrative on gun violence when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot the next day.
Girodias published an edition of “SCUM Manifesto” after the shooting; Solanas had unwittingly sold him the rights for $500 the previous year. Later editions were printed by AK Press and Verso.
During her arraignment, Solanas was charged with attempted murder, assault and possession of a dangerous weapon.
She was deemed unable to stand trial and was sent for a psychiatric evaluation at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where she received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The evaluators also noted her intelligence-test scores, which placed her in the 98th percentile.
On June 13, Solanas was ruled insane by the Supreme Court of the State of New York and spent months in psychiatric hospitals. When she was released in December, she began calling Warhol, Girodias and others in a group that she referred to as “the mob” with threatening messages. They led to her arrest in January 1969.
Solanas was held at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, then at Bellevue Hospital, before being sentenced to three years in prison in June.
After her release, she worked for a year and a half as an editor for Majority Report: The Women’s Liberation Newsletter, a biweekly feminist publication, and began writing a book, her name as the title. She spent her final years destitute in Phoenix and living in welfare hotels in San Francisco.
Toward the end of 1987, Isabelle Collin Dufresne, the Factory “superstar” better known as Ultra Violet, called Solanas to talk about Warhol, who had died that February.
“I keep thinking what a shame it is that she’s mad, utterly mad,” Ultra Violet wrote in her 1988 memoir, “Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol.” “For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.”
On April 25, 1988, Solanas was found dead in her room at the Bristol Hotel, in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. She was 52. The police report, which also misspelled her name, described the room as clean, with papers neatly stacked on a desk. Solanas was kneeling next to the bed, covered in maggots, and had apparently been dead for five days. The cited cause was pneumonia.
On June 3, 1968, Valerie Solanas walked into Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory, with a gun and a plan to enact vengeance. What happened next came to define her life and legacy: She fired at Warhol, nearly killing him. The incident reduced her to a tabloid headline, but also drew attention to her writing, which is still read in some women’s and gender studies courses today.
Solanas was a radical feminist (though she would say she loathed most feminists), a pioneering queer theorist (at least according to some) and the author of “SCUM Manifesto,” in which she argued for the wholesale extermination of men.
The manifesto, self-published in 1967, reads as satire, though Solanas defended it as serious. Its opening line is at once absurd and a call to arms for the coalition she was forming, the Society for Cutting Up Men:
“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
On the subject of reproduction, she wrote: “We should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects or deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness.”
She sold copies in leftist bookstores and on the streets of Greenwich Village for $1 ($2 if the buyer was a man).
The text distilled the anger and yearning that Solanas had exhibited throughout her life. In college, as a recently-out lesbian, she rallied against the idea that educated women should be defined as wives and mothers, even as she acknowledged that, in a society ruled by men, such fates were probably inevitable. Her ideas about gender and power calcified in the early 1960s, when she hitchhiked across the country and back again. She arrived in New York City in 1962 with the start of a play she was writing and several versions of “SCUM Manifesto.”
Then, as now, Warhol was one of the most famous artists in America, and Solanas found her way onto the fringes of his social circle. She shared with him a copy of her play, “Up Your Ass” (1965), with the hope that he would produce it. Its central character is Bongi Perez, a bantering, panhandling prostitute who is frequently homeless — much like Solanas was herself. Auditions and rehearsals took place in the basement of the Chelsea Hotel, the bohemian enclave from which Solanas was evicted on several occasions. Warhol found the manuscript objectionable and eventually misplaced it, but he did cast her in his erotic film “I, a Man” (1967). (“Up Your Ass” wouldn’t be staged until long after her death, in 2000 in San Francisco.)
Solanas then met with Maurice Girodias, the iconoclastic French publisher of Olympia Press who printed the first editions of “Naked Lunch” (1959), “The Story of O” (1954) and “Lolita” (1955), about a deal for a new book.
Over time, Solanas became convinced that Warhol and Girodias were conspiring to suppress, censor or steal her voice.
On that day in June, when she walked into Warhol’s studio, newly located at 33 Union Square West, Warhol wasn’t there. Solanas left and returned several times, until she spotted him on the sidewalk. Together they rode the building’s elevator up to the sixth floor.
Soon, there were gunshots. Warhol was taken to Columbus Hospital. Solanas’s bullets had punctured his stomach, liver, spleen, esophagus and lungs. At one point, the doctors pronounced him dead. (He would live for 19 more years, wearing a surgical corset to support his abdomen.)
That evening, Solanas turned herself in to an officer in Times Square. “He had too much control over my life,” she told the officer, referring to Warhol.
Valerie Jean Solanas was born on April 9, 1936, in Ventnor City, N.J., just off the Atlantic City boardwalk, one of two girls to Louis Solanas, a bartender, and Dorothy Biondo, a dental assistant. Her parents separated when Valerie was 4 and divorced in 1947; both remarried. Her father, she would later say, had sexually abused her from a young age. Still, she retained a correspondence with him for most of her life.
Valerie was by some accounts a precocious child, but in middle school she began to show signs of disobedience, skipping class and even assaulting a teacher. By 15 she had given birth to two children: Linda, who was raised as her sister, and David, whom she placed for adoption. At the time, it was not unusual for pregnancies to be concealed by such means.
In 1954, she enrolled at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she studied psychology. She then pursued a master’s degree in psychology at the University of Minnesota but dropped out after two semesters because, she said, she felt that her ideas and research were not very likely to be funded as well as men’s.
She spent the next decade putting her ideas to paper. She moved frequently as a result of eviction, always with her typewriter in tow.
In 1966, her short story “A Young Girl’s Primer” appeared in Cavalier, a Playboy-style magazine that also published Ray Bradbury, Thomas Pynchon and Stephen King. The tale centers on a woman who sells sex and conversation for the freedom to be creative. The next year, she began selling mimeographed copies of “SCUM” around the city and seeking a producer for her play.
The shooting, in June of 1968, brought national attention to her name and work. The story of the incident was splashed across the front pages of papers like The Daily News in New York and The New York Times, which misspelled her name as Solanis. Copies of “SCUM” quickly sold out.
Her attack on Warhol fractured mainstream feminist groups, including the National Organization for Women, whose members were split on whether to defend or condemn her. Those who defended her, including the writer Ti-Grace Atkinson and the lawyer Flo Kennedy, formed the bedrock of radical feminism and presented Solanas as a symbol of female rage. The shooting became wrapped up in a larger narrative on gun violence when Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot the next day.
Girodias published an edition of “SCUM Manifesto” after the shooting; Solanas had unwittingly sold him the rights for $500 the previous year. Later editions were printed by AK Press and Verso.
During her arraignment, Solanas was charged with attempted murder, assault and possession of a dangerous weapon.
She was deemed unable to stand trial and was sent for a psychiatric evaluation at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, where she received a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. The evaluators also noted her intelligence-test scores, which placed her in the 98th percentile.
On June 13, Solanas was ruled insane by the Supreme Court of the State of New York and spent months in psychiatric hospitals. When she was released in December, she began calling Warhol, Girodias and others in a group that she referred to as “the mob” with threatening messages. They led to her arrest in January 1969.
Solanas was held at the Women’s House of Detention in Manhattan, then at Bellevue Hospital, before being sentenced to three years in prison in June.
After her release, she worked for a year and a half as an editor for Majority Report: The Women’s Liberation Newsletter, a biweekly feminist publication, and began writing a book, her name as the title. She spent her final years destitute in Phoenix and living in welfare hotels in San Francisco.
Toward the end of 1987, Isabelle Collin Dufresne, the Factory “superstar” better known as Ultra Violet, called Solanas to talk about Warhol, who had died that February.
“I keep thinking what a shame it is that she’s mad, utterly mad,” Ultra Violet wrote in her 1988 memoir, “Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol.” “For in the beginning, beyond her overheated rhetoric, she had a truly revolutionary vision of a better world run by and for the benefit of women.”
On April 25, 1988, Solanas was found dead in her room at the Bristol Hotel, in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. She was 52. The police report, which also misspelled her name, described the room as clean, with papers neatly stacked on a desk. Solanas was kneeling next to the bed, covered in maggots, and had apparently been dead for five days. The cited cause was pneumonia.
In 1996, her story was theatrically depicted in Mary Harron’s film “I Shot Andy Warhol.” Lili Taylor was widely praised for her leading role.
Solanas inspired fictional works, including an episode of “American Horror Story: Cult,” where she is played by Lena Dunham, and a 2019 novel by the Swedish author Sara Stridsberg, “Valerie,” which won the Nordic Council Literature Prize and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. By Stridsberg’s account, Solanas was not erratic but measured, not murderous but tender, not insane but idealistic, even admirably so.
But it was with the 2014 biography “Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol)” that a fuller picture of her life came to light.
In it, the author, Breanne Fahs, writes about an exchange between Solanas and her friend Jeremiah Newton. Newton asked Solanas if her manifesto was to be taken literally. “I don’t want to kill all men,” she replied. But, using an expletive, she added: “I think males should be neutered or castrated so they can’t mess up any more women’s lives.”
Overlooked No More: Valerie Solanas, Radical Feminist Who Shot Andy Warhol. By Bonnie Wertheim. The New York Times, June 26, 2020.
Breanne
Fah’s remarkable collection of manifestos, Burn It Down, chronicles 250 years
of feminist “rage and dreams.” It includes more than 75 vivid treatises from
around the world, each a “bleeding edge of rage and defiance” where a visionary
future was born. We talked, in a series of email exchanges, about these
manifestos and the enduring radical promise of feminism.
Soraya Chemaly: Who do you think will read this book? Who do you think should read this book?
Breanne Fahs: Like all of my books, I like to think about writing and editing books that I personally want to read and that I wish existed. This is a book designed to tap into not only the cultural zeitgeist moment that we are in, particularly in terms of the painful betrayal of women happening in such a blatant way in the US, but also to recognize the transformative power of anger more broadly. So much of the academic work I read—especially outside of feminist circles—is stripped of its emotional resonance and made it to comply with “standards” that do not serve the needs of broader audiences, nor the needs of those who feel precarious or in imminent danger. In essence, this book is for those who feel enraged, fed up, overwhelmed, lonely, marginalized, betrayed, without voice, uneasy, and feral. One need not even know what a manifesto is to appreciate this particular collection. This work is about the emotional experience of transformative anger as communicated through feminist manifestoes throughout the last 150 years.
One of my favorite lines by Valerie Solanas is when she straight up says that her writing is for “whores, dykes, criminals, and homicidal maniacs.” I think there is absolutely value in making books that are for the marginalized without trying to make everyone else feel comfortable about that. I want this book to tell women that they are not alone, and more importantly, that they have never been alone in their sense of rage against patriarchy. I also think this book shows that we can feel intense solidarity with people who are raging out about issues different from our own. It is the anger itself that unites us.
And what a dream it would be, to answer your second question, if people read this book in order to better understand women’s anger, or to understand their own role in producing women’s anger. It is so difficult to talk about and within the language of anger without trying to make people feel more comfortable or at ease with it. Your work is of such immense value in how you take anger seriously without reducing its complexity.
This book is definitely also a book that does not want to put people at ease, as comfort and safety are not part of this project. (I personally think that James Baldwin was correct in describing the clinging to the value of safety as a losing proposition.) But to me, when I hear or read people telling the truth in a radical way, I feel like I can deal with reality differently and better, even if it’s painful to hear. Even as a therapist I see this. We have to know what’s real in order to really understand the depths of a problem. I believe that the more that we, as a nation, culture, and world, continue to neglect taking seriously the anger of women, the more heavy of a price we will pay for that. It may not be now or imminently in the future, but we will pay for ignoring women’s anger.
SC: What do you feel is missing in conversations about anger, women, and feminism today?
BF: It seems that there has been an unfortunate push for feminism to present itself as likable, “for everybody,” anemic, capitalistic, and smiling. This has in part happened for understandable reasons, because it’s difficult to delineate boundaries and margins with something as complex as feminism. It’s difficult and provocative to draw lines in the sand or form coalitions around specific goals. There is a role within feminism for inclusion and humor and individual transformations. But there has also been a very intense and tragic gutting of feminism’s radical history and its radical politics.
By this, I mean the goal of seeking out the root structures of patriarchy and fighting against those within broad, angry coalitions. This gutting has happened both within and outside of academia. This has resulted, among other things, in the smoothing out of feminism’s edges, the disregard for those on the margins, the flattening of the emotional range of feminism, and amnesia about the origins and roots of feminism both within this country and throughout the world. Without a return to both the anger within feminism, and the radical roots, activisms, and fury of the less “polite” feminisms, we are in trouble.
SC: I loved that you included manifestos from around the globe. As you collected these manifestos did you find central themes that united them or that were persistent and recurring? Was there an underlying ethos?
BF: I was really struck by how many of the manifestoes deeply connected to worries and concerns about economic vulnerability as connected to violence (or the potential for violence). In the same way that global warming will far more severely impact the countries around the world that are more vulnerable, women also bear a different, and often more severe, burden around the world than do men. Decisions made about reproductive rights, for example, are felt most keenly by women.
Queer and trans people bear the weight of a culture’s hatred and violence in different ways than those with more privilege. All of these manifestoes in this collection are connected by a recognition of the ways in which certain bodies and identities—especially women, people of color, poor people, and queer people—pay a heavier price than others. You can feel the anguish of that in their words. And so much of the time this anguish is forgotten, ignored, and disregarded. We as feminists sometimes forget how little most people care about the suffering of women, especially when we are looking at our own limitations.
I also think there is a general ethos in this book of the value of the fight itself. I included a lot of voices in this collection who don’t have much power in their daily lives. They aren’t famous. Many are not formally educated. Some were considered criminals or “deviant” during their time. Many, in fact, endured hard deaths. Some wrote as collectives in order to obscure their individual identities. They are all, however, connected through the notion that the fight itself matters, and that angry words matter. The impulse to fight for one’s freedom and dignity is within all of us, even if more or less dormant in some of us. Maybe these manifestoes can wake us up.
For me, the collection also points to that teetering edge between sanity and madness, and it shows what happens when we are driven to the edge. I like to see these pieces as testament that madness is also a great truth-teller. It shows us things that we can’t otherwise see, or that we won’t otherwise see. Maybe in some ways this text is a call for us to stop running away from madness, and to stop diminishing its transformative power.
SC: Has the topic of anger, which seems intrinsic to manifestos, always been of interest to you? (If you’d asked me twenty years ago, I would have never imagined that I’d write a book about this.) What made you want to publish this book and now?
BF: There are many levels within which I am interested in thinking deeply about anger. I’m sure my interest in women’s anger pre-dates my interest in manifestoes and radical writings more broadly, but they do seem deeply connected to each other in my own personal and scholarly history. It’s not just that I believe in the notion of an emotional language of resistance, but I also see the ways in which patriarchy exerts itself onto women through a tight control over how they express all of their emotions, particularly discontentment, anger, and rage. In the same way that people throughout the ages have conceptualized freedom struggles, I also believe that the ability to express anger for oppressed people, both individually and collectively, is one of the only things that will lead to transformative social change.
More and more, anger seems like a supremely important and necessary subject of inquiry. The fact that this book coincides with one of the more painful recent periods of US political history will hopefully make reading angry writing more enjoyable and urgent than it might’ve been before.
I was recently in South Africa and I saw a poster there made for South African women’s day over 50 years ago. It read: “Now you have touched the women. You have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder; you will be crushed.“ I found that very moving and inspiring. The more I have learned about the various roles that women have played in using anger for political change, the more I recognize women’s anger as a largely under-documented entity. It is there, and has been there, but often is left out of the official historical record.
SC: I recently saw Manifesto: Art x Agency, a group exhibition examining the impact of 20th-century artist manifestos. It was a fascinating way to interpret the words, but, in fact, the words ended up seeming almost meaningless. As you worked, did you think about art or images that would be ideal pairings for these texts? As you worked, did you think about art or images that would be ideal pairings for these texts?
BF: You’re absolutely correct that the history of manifestoes is largely connected to the history of art. I don’t think that’s an accident! Art is typically on the absolute cutting edge, and often is first in line to see the kinds of changes that are necessary in any particular time period. That said, I think the dominance of scholarly work on manifestoes connected to art have falsely presented manifestoes as only connected to the art world. There is a very rich history in these manifestoes that exists without visual representation. This is not to say that there aren’t a number of very interesting visuals that go with these manifestoes.
I love the manifestoes that are hand-written, furiously scribbled onto something, typed up with intentional typos or strange spacing, or presented with stencils of bombs on them. I have included some of these more visually interesting manifestoes in their original forms here. Ideally, though, I hope that these manifestoes inspire readers to think about art, imagery, and the whole language of resistance that is possible through the the act of creation.
SC: Do you have a favorite piece or a particular expression or sentiment from the book?
BF: I spent about ten years working on the biography of Valerie Solanas, in large part because I find her endlessly fascinating and provocative. She is such a difficult character, and such an important one to the history of feminism. One could also argue that she is crucial to the history of women’s anger. I absolutely adore the SCUM Manifesto for its provocations, unresolved complexities, laugh-out-loud humor, truth-tellings, freshness, fury, and unsettling imaginations about the world. But I also love the way that she imagines a world where women are free to prioritize friendship, art, brashness, and laughter on their own terms. This manifesto gets to the bottom of what this collection is trying to show: when we feel more free, so much more is possible for us.
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Performing Sex, Valerie Solanas, Out for Blood, and Firebrand Feminism, and co-editor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality and Transforming Contagion. She is the Founder and Director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a Clinical Psychologist.
Soraya Chemaly: Who do you think will read this book? Who do you think should read this book?
Breanne Fahs: Like all of my books, I like to think about writing and editing books that I personally want to read and that I wish existed. This is a book designed to tap into not only the cultural zeitgeist moment that we are in, particularly in terms of the painful betrayal of women happening in such a blatant way in the US, but also to recognize the transformative power of anger more broadly. So much of the academic work I read—especially outside of feminist circles—is stripped of its emotional resonance and made it to comply with “standards” that do not serve the needs of broader audiences, nor the needs of those who feel precarious or in imminent danger. In essence, this book is for those who feel enraged, fed up, overwhelmed, lonely, marginalized, betrayed, without voice, uneasy, and feral. One need not even know what a manifesto is to appreciate this particular collection. This work is about the emotional experience of transformative anger as communicated through feminist manifestoes throughout the last 150 years.
One of my favorite lines by Valerie Solanas is when she straight up says that her writing is for “whores, dykes, criminals, and homicidal maniacs.” I think there is absolutely value in making books that are for the marginalized without trying to make everyone else feel comfortable about that. I want this book to tell women that they are not alone, and more importantly, that they have never been alone in their sense of rage against patriarchy. I also think this book shows that we can feel intense solidarity with people who are raging out about issues different from our own. It is the anger itself that unites us.
And what a dream it would be, to answer your second question, if people read this book in order to better understand women’s anger, or to understand their own role in producing women’s anger. It is so difficult to talk about and within the language of anger without trying to make people feel more comfortable or at ease with it. Your work is of such immense value in how you take anger seriously without reducing its complexity.
This book is definitely also a book that does not want to put people at ease, as comfort and safety are not part of this project. (I personally think that James Baldwin was correct in describing the clinging to the value of safety as a losing proposition.) But to me, when I hear or read people telling the truth in a radical way, I feel like I can deal with reality differently and better, even if it’s painful to hear. Even as a therapist I see this. We have to know what’s real in order to really understand the depths of a problem. I believe that the more that we, as a nation, culture, and world, continue to neglect taking seriously the anger of women, the more heavy of a price we will pay for that. It may not be now or imminently in the future, but we will pay for ignoring women’s anger.
SC: What do you feel is missing in conversations about anger, women, and feminism today?
BF: It seems that there has been an unfortunate push for feminism to present itself as likable, “for everybody,” anemic, capitalistic, and smiling. This has in part happened for understandable reasons, because it’s difficult to delineate boundaries and margins with something as complex as feminism. It’s difficult and provocative to draw lines in the sand or form coalitions around specific goals. There is a role within feminism for inclusion and humor and individual transformations. But there has also been a very intense and tragic gutting of feminism’s radical history and its radical politics.
By this, I mean the goal of seeking out the root structures of patriarchy and fighting against those within broad, angry coalitions. This gutting has happened both within and outside of academia. This has resulted, among other things, in the smoothing out of feminism’s edges, the disregard for those on the margins, the flattening of the emotional range of feminism, and amnesia about the origins and roots of feminism both within this country and throughout the world. Without a return to both the anger within feminism, and the radical roots, activisms, and fury of the less “polite” feminisms, we are in trouble.
SC: I loved that you included manifestos from around the globe. As you collected these manifestos did you find central themes that united them or that were persistent and recurring? Was there an underlying ethos?
BF: I was really struck by how many of the manifestoes deeply connected to worries and concerns about economic vulnerability as connected to violence (or the potential for violence). In the same way that global warming will far more severely impact the countries around the world that are more vulnerable, women also bear a different, and often more severe, burden around the world than do men. Decisions made about reproductive rights, for example, are felt most keenly by women.
Queer and trans people bear the weight of a culture’s hatred and violence in different ways than those with more privilege. All of these manifestoes in this collection are connected by a recognition of the ways in which certain bodies and identities—especially women, people of color, poor people, and queer people—pay a heavier price than others. You can feel the anguish of that in their words. And so much of the time this anguish is forgotten, ignored, and disregarded. We as feminists sometimes forget how little most people care about the suffering of women, especially when we are looking at our own limitations.
I also think there is a general ethos in this book of the value of the fight itself. I included a lot of voices in this collection who don’t have much power in their daily lives. They aren’t famous. Many are not formally educated. Some were considered criminals or “deviant” during their time. Many, in fact, endured hard deaths. Some wrote as collectives in order to obscure their individual identities. They are all, however, connected through the notion that the fight itself matters, and that angry words matter. The impulse to fight for one’s freedom and dignity is within all of us, even if more or less dormant in some of us. Maybe these manifestoes can wake us up.
For me, the collection also points to that teetering edge between sanity and madness, and it shows what happens when we are driven to the edge. I like to see these pieces as testament that madness is also a great truth-teller. It shows us things that we can’t otherwise see, or that we won’t otherwise see. Maybe in some ways this text is a call for us to stop running away from madness, and to stop diminishing its transformative power.
SC: Has the topic of anger, which seems intrinsic to manifestos, always been of interest to you? (If you’d asked me twenty years ago, I would have never imagined that I’d write a book about this.) What made you want to publish this book and now?
BF: There are many levels within which I am interested in thinking deeply about anger. I’m sure my interest in women’s anger pre-dates my interest in manifestoes and radical writings more broadly, but they do seem deeply connected to each other in my own personal and scholarly history. It’s not just that I believe in the notion of an emotional language of resistance, but I also see the ways in which patriarchy exerts itself onto women through a tight control over how they express all of their emotions, particularly discontentment, anger, and rage. In the same way that people throughout the ages have conceptualized freedom struggles, I also believe that the ability to express anger for oppressed people, both individually and collectively, is one of the only things that will lead to transformative social change.
More and more, anger seems like a supremely important and necessary subject of inquiry. The fact that this book coincides with one of the more painful recent periods of US political history will hopefully make reading angry writing more enjoyable and urgent than it might’ve been before.
I was recently in South Africa and I saw a poster there made for South African women’s day over 50 years ago. It read: “Now you have touched the women. You have struck a rock; you have dislodged a boulder; you will be crushed.“ I found that very moving and inspiring. The more I have learned about the various roles that women have played in using anger for political change, the more I recognize women’s anger as a largely under-documented entity. It is there, and has been there, but often is left out of the official historical record.
SC: I recently saw Manifesto: Art x Agency, a group exhibition examining the impact of 20th-century artist manifestos. It was a fascinating way to interpret the words, but, in fact, the words ended up seeming almost meaningless. As you worked, did you think about art or images that would be ideal pairings for these texts? As you worked, did you think about art or images that would be ideal pairings for these texts?
BF: You’re absolutely correct that the history of manifestoes is largely connected to the history of art. I don’t think that’s an accident! Art is typically on the absolute cutting edge, and often is first in line to see the kinds of changes that are necessary in any particular time period. That said, I think the dominance of scholarly work on manifestoes connected to art have falsely presented manifestoes as only connected to the art world. There is a very rich history in these manifestoes that exists without visual representation. This is not to say that there aren’t a number of very interesting visuals that go with these manifestoes.
I love the manifestoes that are hand-written, furiously scribbled onto something, typed up with intentional typos or strange spacing, or presented with stencils of bombs on them. I have included some of these more visually interesting manifestoes in their original forms here. Ideally, though, I hope that these manifestoes inspire readers to think about art, imagery, and the whole language of resistance that is possible through the the act of creation.
SC: Do you have a favorite piece or a particular expression or sentiment from the book?
BF: I spent about ten years working on the biography of Valerie Solanas, in large part because I find her endlessly fascinating and provocative. She is such a difficult character, and such an important one to the history of feminism. One could also argue that she is crucial to the history of women’s anger. I absolutely adore the SCUM Manifesto for its provocations, unresolved complexities, laugh-out-loud humor, truth-tellings, freshness, fury, and unsettling imaginations about the world. But I also love the way that she imagines a world where women are free to prioritize friendship, art, brashness, and laughter on their own terms. This manifesto gets to the bottom of what this collection is trying to show: when we feel more free, so much more is possible for us.
Breanne Fahs is Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is the author of Performing Sex, Valerie Solanas, Out for Blood, and Firebrand Feminism, and co-editor of The Moral Panics of Sexuality and Transforming Contagion. She is the Founder and Director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a Clinical Psychologist.
Can
Feminist Manifestoes of the Past Wake Us Up Today? Breanne Fahs on the Lasting
Lessons of Women's Anger. By Soraya Chemaly. LitHub , March 24, 2020.
Best
known for attempting to shoot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas’ SCUM manifesto
became a rallying cry for a generation of feminist thinkers. Valerie was a
vagrant working as a panhandler, full service sex worker and provocateur. From
this position of presumed powerlessness, Solonas saw through the thin veil of
civility in society and called bullshit on patriarchal power. An old pro with
nothing to lose and no fucks to give.
Ceyenne Doroshow joins host Kaytlin Bailey in this week’s episode about addiction, desperation, and radical feminism. After deconstructing their attraction to people with substance use disorders, both women take a deep dive into the life and work of an unrepentant hustler, author and attempted murderer Valerie Solanas.
Valerie Solanas, The Oldest Profession Podcast, May 2018
Ceyenne Doroshow joins host Kaytlin Bailey in this week’s episode about addiction, desperation, and radical feminism. After deconstructing their attraction to people with substance use disorders, both women take a deep dive into the life and work of an unrepentant hustler, author and attempted murderer Valerie Solanas.
Valerie Solanas, The Oldest Profession Podcast, May 2018
“Life in
this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at
all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible,
thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money
system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”
These are the famous opening words of 1968’s SCUM Manifesto, issued from a brilliant, damaged mind. Over the years, the document and its author, Valerie Solanas, have been celebrated and debated, discovered and disowned. Both have been variously described as satirical, scatalogical, disturbing, prescient, gender-essentialist, hateful, radical, and transphobic — and indeed, they are all that and more. Breanne Fahs’s The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) is the first biography of Solanas, an attempt to piece together her controversial life in the context of the radical 1960s and ’70s, when the women’s liberation movement was splintering as quickly as it was flowering.
It becomes apparent throughout the book how dogged Fahs was in her quest to put all the pieces of her subject’s itinerant life in some kind of order. “Isolation followed Valerie,” she writes. This became a research problem, as many of Solanas’s contemporaries refused to be interviewed. Some said that recalling memories of her would unsettle their lives; others, like longtime radical feminist Jo Freeman, simply argued that “Valerie should be forgotten.” A few seem downright haunted by her memory. Among those is her son, David Blackwell, one of two children Solanas had and gave up as a teenager. Blackwell is the only one of the book’s interviewees who wants desperately to remain associated with Solanas, appealing to Fahs to recognize his mother’s intensity in him (“Listen, let me tell you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Valerie”) — it’s both touching and troubling. Luckily, some of her more reasonable associates show up. Second-wave feminist thinkers like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Vivian Gornick, street comrades like Ben Morea of the anarchist gang Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and Solanas’s longtime boyfriend Louis Zwiren bring nuance and dimension to a public image that has long verged on caricature.
The book does a solid job of setting the stage for Solanas’s troubled life, with cobbled-together descriptions of a childhood marked by divorce, a heavy-drinking father who may or may not have sexually abused her, and a personality that simply did not mesh with what was expected of young ladies in the 1940s and ’50s. But the centerpiece of Fahs’s tale is the protagonist’s life in New York City’s East Village — the panhandling, trick-turning days that honed the needling dialogue in her first play, Up Your Ass; the start of her uncompromising attempts to get her work published; and the dark blooming of her fixation on Andy Warhol.
Mary Harron’s 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol offered some backstory to Solanas’s gripe with — and eventual assassination attempt on — the celebrated artist, but Fahs goes deeper, by explaining how much influence Warhol’s Factory and its superstars (or, as Solanas called them, “stupidstars”) wielded in New York’s art scene at the time. “Andy created women as offshoots of the male imagination, something Valerie could never (and would never want to) live up to. She was a dangerously real product of a world hell-bent on treating women as mirrored distortions of the male ego,” writes Fahs, and indeed, within the Factory’s silver-lined walls Solanas was given about as much consideration as a stray wad of chewed gum. And yet, marginality was everything to Solanas. Why was she attracted to Warhol and the Factory scene in the first place? Fahs attempts to puzzle that out, surmising that Andy, who hardly treated Solanas well, nevertheless “stood in for a variety of emotionally charged, missing, or distorted figures” in her life. But, though Warhol may or may not have agreed to turn Up Your Ass and the SCUM Manifesto into movies (as Solanas believed he did), his interest in status and surface glamour was fundamentally at odds with both her voice and her goals. As Harron puts it, “She was a revolutionary, whereas Warhol had no desire to change the status quo.”
The book’s most interesting parts come with Fahs’s exploration of the conundrum Solanas posed to the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. In the wake of her attempt on Warhol’s life, Solanas became the catalyst for seismic fractures within the National Organization for Women. New York chapter president Ti-Grace Atkinson and powerhouse lawyer Florynce Kennedy acted as her advisors and pro bono counsel; as part of NOW’s radical faction, they believed that every woman deserved their support, and that Solanas was a symbol of the victimization of women everywhere. As Atkinson wrote her recollection: “finally some woman had done something that was appropriate to the feelings we were having.”
But Betty Friedan, president of NOW, along with her fellow liberal feminists, argued that supporting a would-be assasin with clear mental health issues — not to mention a lesbian — would harm the women’s liberation movement’s legitimacy, and subsequently blocked all efforts to help her. For the frustrated radicals of NOW, this underscored that the organization’s reactive, classist leanings were ossifying into irrelevance. Within a short time, both Atkinson and Kennedy would leave to form new orgnizations (the October 17th Movement and the Feminist Party, respectively).
Not that any of this really mattered to the woman who accelerated this dissatisfaction: Solanas herself had as many issues with organized feminism as she did with any other institution. In the years following the shooting, as she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and shuttled between various mental hospitals and correctional facilities, Solanas regularly lashed out and threatened feminists she believed had appropriated her work, sending barbed missives accusing Atkinson, Kennedy, and others who advocated on her behalf of being “professional parasites” who had committed the sin of “interpreting me & explaining me & expounding on my motives to the public.” It’s this section of the book that had me wondering what Solanas, had she lived, would make of the vast, varied, and very often contentious landscape of feminism that exists now. Despite her uncompromising stance on women's liberation and her scorn for the “daddy’s girls” who populated liberal feminism, Solanas is actually a perfect example of what these days is known as “choice” feminism. Simply put, she believed that her behavior was liberation because she had chosen it. She was a lesbian who slept with men both companionably and vocationally; she was an anticapitalist who plied the world’s oldest profession; she was an antiauthoritarian who sought out big names to legitimize her work. To her, these weren’t compromises, but markers of freedom.
Certainly, current feminism has little interest in Solanas’s politics. In the context of today’s big-tent approach, her essentalist beliefs in the superiority of women and the uselessness of anyone with a Y chromosome comes across as transphobic bigotry. (In fact, a vocal group of transgender activists and allies protested a 2013 San Francisco event planned to mark the 25th anniversary of Solanas’s death; the event was ultimately canceled.) Solanas’s writing in both Up Your Ass and the SCUM Manifesto was so prescient that there’s no doubt that she would want at least partial credit for everything from the rise of Queer Studies to the wry lampooning of handwringing articles about whether women can really have it all. But everything she hated about organized feminism is still in evidence today — its insufficient radicalism, its co-optation by capitalism, and especially its habit of anointing its own superstars to speak for the whole of the movement. And yet, her belief in her own exceptionalism mirrors much of contemporary culture, in which everyone from tech company founders to megachurch pastors believes that they alone have the calling and the power to change the world.
Ultimately, Solanas’s belief in a one-woman revolution was untenable, in no small part because full-blown mental illness had convinced her that a nefarious entity called The Mob (“money men” who called the shots in publishing) was monitoring and conspiring to destroy her. It’s interesting that Fahs’s account of those final years—self-mutilating on the street in Phoenix and dying a lonely death in a San Francisco welfare hotel—are so viscerally presented, given the spotty biographical information available. There’s no question that Solanas’s belief in the necessaity of theorizing “from the gutter” would have her denouncing today’s inclusive, increasingly professional landscape of feminism. But perhaps she can rest easier (if not in peace) knowing that Fahs has painted a sympathetic portrait of her uncompromising life that — for better and worse — wears its powerful ugliness on its sleeve.
A One Woman Army. By Andi Zeisler. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12, 2014.
These are the famous opening words of 1968’s SCUM Manifesto, issued from a brilliant, damaged mind. Over the years, the document and its author, Valerie Solanas, have been celebrated and debated, discovered and disowned. Both have been variously described as satirical, scatalogical, disturbing, prescient, gender-essentialist, hateful, radical, and transphobic — and indeed, they are all that and more. Breanne Fahs’s The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) is the first biography of Solanas, an attempt to piece together her controversial life in the context of the radical 1960s and ’70s, when the women’s liberation movement was splintering as quickly as it was flowering.
It becomes apparent throughout the book how dogged Fahs was in her quest to put all the pieces of her subject’s itinerant life in some kind of order. “Isolation followed Valerie,” she writes. This became a research problem, as many of Solanas’s contemporaries refused to be interviewed. Some said that recalling memories of her would unsettle their lives; others, like longtime radical feminist Jo Freeman, simply argued that “Valerie should be forgotten.” A few seem downright haunted by her memory. Among those is her son, David Blackwell, one of two children Solanas had and gave up as a teenager. Blackwell is the only one of the book’s interviewees who wants desperately to remain associated with Solanas, appealing to Fahs to recognize his mother’s intensity in him (“Listen, let me tell you, when you’re talking to me, you’re talking to Valerie”) — it’s both touching and troubling. Luckily, some of her more reasonable associates show up. Second-wave feminist thinkers like Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Vivian Gornick, street comrades like Ben Morea of the anarchist gang Up Against the Wall, Motherfuckers, and Solanas’s longtime boyfriend Louis Zwiren bring nuance and dimension to a public image that has long verged on caricature.
The book does a solid job of setting the stage for Solanas’s troubled life, with cobbled-together descriptions of a childhood marked by divorce, a heavy-drinking father who may or may not have sexually abused her, and a personality that simply did not mesh with what was expected of young ladies in the 1940s and ’50s. But the centerpiece of Fahs’s tale is the protagonist’s life in New York City’s East Village — the panhandling, trick-turning days that honed the needling dialogue in her first play, Up Your Ass; the start of her uncompromising attempts to get her work published; and the dark blooming of her fixation on Andy Warhol.
Mary Harron’s 1996 film I Shot Andy Warhol offered some backstory to Solanas’s gripe with — and eventual assassination attempt on — the celebrated artist, but Fahs goes deeper, by explaining how much influence Warhol’s Factory and its superstars (or, as Solanas called them, “stupidstars”) wielded in New York’s art scene at the time. “Andy created women as offshoots of the male imagination, something Valerie could never (and would never want to) live up to. She was a dangerously real product of a world hell-bent on treating women as mirrored distortions of the male ego,” writes Fahs, and indeed, within the Factory’s silver-lined walls Solanas was given about as much consideration as a stray wad of chewed gum. And yet, marginality was everything to Solanas. Why was she attracted to Warhol and the Factory scene in the first place? Fahs attempts to puzzle that out, surmising that Andy, who hardly treated Solanas well, nevertheless “stood in for a variety of emotionally charged, missing, or distorted figures” in her life. But, though Warhol may or may not have agreed to turn Up Your Ass and the SCUM Manifesto into movies (as Solanas believed he did), his interest in status and surface glamour was fundamentally at odds with both her voice and her goals. As Harron puts it, “She was a revolutionary, whereas Warhol had no desire to change the status quo.”
The book’s most interesting parts come with Fahs’s exploration of the conundrum Solanas posed to the burgeoning women’s liberation movement. In the wake of her attempt on Warhol’s life, Solanas became the catalyst for seismic fractures within the National Organization for Women. New York chapter president Ti-Grace Atkinson and powerhouse lawyer Florynce Kennedy acted as her advisors and pro bono counsel; as part of NOW’s radical faction, they believed that every woman deserved their support, and that Solanas was a symbol of the victimization of women everywhere. As Atkinson wrote her recollection: “finally some woman had done something that was appropriate to the feelings we were having.”
But Betty Friedan, president of NOW, along with her fellow liberal feminists, argued that supporting a would-be assasin with clear mental health issues — not to mention a lesbian — would harm the women’s liberation movement’s legitimacy, and subsequently blocked all efforts to help her. For the frustrated radicals of NOW, this underscored that the organization’s reactive, classist leanings were ossifying into irrelevance. Within a short time, both Atkinson and Kennedy would leave to form new orgnizations (the October 17th Movement and the Feminist Party, respectively).
Not that any of this really mattered to the woman who accelerated this dissatisfaction: Solanas herself had as many issues with organized feminism as she did with any other institution. In the years following the shooting, as she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and shuttled between various mental hospitals and correctional facilities, Solanas regularly lashed out and threatened feminists she believed had appropriated her work, sending barbed missives accusing Atkinson, Kennedy, and others who advocated on her behalf of being “professional parasites” who had committed the sin of “interpreting me & explaining me & expounding on my motives to the public.” It’s this section of the book that had me wondering what Solanas, had she lived, would make of the vast, varied, and very often contentious landscape of feminism that exists now. Despite her uncompromising stance on women's liberation and her scorn for the “daddy’s girls” who populated liberal feminism, Solanas is actually a perfect example of what these days is known as “choice” feminism. Simply put, she believed that her behavior was liberation because she had chosen it. She was a lesbian who slept with men both companionably and vocationally; she was an anticapitalist who plied the world’s oldest profession; she was an antiauthoritarian who sought out big names to legitimize her work. To her, these weren’t compromises, but markers of freedom.
Certainly, current feminism has little interest in Solanas’s politics. In the context of today’s big-tent approach, her essentalist beliefs in the superiority of women and the uselessness of anyone with a Y chromosome comes across as transphobic bigotry. (In fact, a vocal group of transgender activists and allies protested a 2013 San Francisco event planned to mark the 25th anniversary of Solanas’s death; the event was ultimately canceled.) Solanas’s writing in both Up Your Ass and the SCUM Manifesto was so prescient that there’s no doubt that she would want at least partial credit for everything from the rise of Queer Studies to the wry lampooning of handwringing articles about whether women can really have it all. But everything she hated about organized feminism is still in evidence today — its insufficient radicalism, its co-optation by capitalism, and especially its habit of anointing its own superstars to speak for the whole of the movement. And yet, her belief in her own exceptionalism mirrors much of contemporary culture, in which everyone from tech company founders to megachurch pastors believes that they alone have the calling and the power to change the world.
Ultimately, Solanas’s belief in a one-woman revolution was untenable, in no small part because full-blown mental illness had convinced her that a nefarious entity called The Mob (“money men” who called the shots in publishing) was monitoring and conspiring to destroy her. It’s interesting that Fahs’s account of those final years—self-mutilating on the street in Phoenix and dying a lonely death in a San Francisco welfare hotel—are so viscerally presented, given the spotty biographical information available. There’s no question that Solanas’s belief in the necessaity of theorizing “from the gutter” would have her denouncing today’s inclusive, increasingly professional landscape of feminism. But perhaps she can rest easier (if not in peace) knowing that Fahs has painted a sympathetic portrait of her uncompromising life that — for better and worse — wears its powerful ugliness on its sleeve.
A One Woman Army. By Andi Zeisler. Los Angeles Review of Books, April 12, 2014.
The
counterculture revolution of the 1960s received Valerie Solanas as a radical
feminist icon, a trailblazing queer figure, and a great writer—minus the
complimentary spin. Some of the less complimentary descriptions of Solanas
included “the Robespierre of feminism,” “a glitch,” “a woman who looked as
though she had walked through a tear in space and time.” Valerie identified
herself as a writer, and she left two masterpieces—the gender-bending play Up
Your Ass, still as enigmatically ahead of its time in performances today, and
the polarizing, poisonous, wickedly funny SCUM Manifesto (never S.C.U.M.),
which Valerie obsessively revised throughout her life. It proposes the
obliteration of men while deploring women who pander for “Daddy’s” approval
instead of having a SCUM mindset: “Unhampered by propriety, niceness,
discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of assholes, always funky…
SCUM’s still in the gutter of our ‘society.”‘ Valerie’s biggest regret after
shooting Andy Warhol in 1968 came from the realization that her persona would
remain permanently stunted, forever boxed into this mythical would-be assassin
of the outrageously famous Pop artist. On the other hand, Valerie’s extreme
social agenda gained national attention after this same assassination attempt,
and the feminists of the liberally-leaning National Organization for Women
[NOW] broke apart over the question of supporting Valerie, sending a shockwave
through feminist history that is still felt today.
In the
grip of schizophrenia-induced paranoia at the end of her life, Valerie vowed
that she would write her own definitive, self-titled autobiography, which she
predicted would sell at least 20 million copies. This autobiography would never
be written (though some of Valerie’s predictions, including a Viagra-like pill
and in vitro fertilization, did come true). Instead, sex researcher, therapist,
and associate professor of Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State
University, Dr. Breanne Fahs, spent a decade researching, interviewing,
traveling, and collecting leftover zines like Holy Titclamps and DWAN, news
clippings, DIY art mags, blurred photos, and half-recorded answering machine
messages to write the biography Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman
Who Wrote SCUM (And Shot Andy Warhol).
Solanas
was a knot of contradictions. She referred to men as “walking dildos,” despised
patriarchal oppression, prided herself on her lesbian identity, and
proselytized about locking men away in pens. When she found herself homeless,
she often would asked male passerby for a dollar in exchange for a dirty word,
which was always, gleefully, “Men.” Yet she engaged in hetero sex and
relationships, was quite fond of several male friends, and maintained a
sporadic but affectionate epistolary relationship with her father, who sexually
abused her as a child. Her friendships were similarly hopeless. She rejected
everyone close to her, lashing out angrily with threats of violence. In spite
of this, she would continue to ask for generous favors. “I think it’s a really
lonely place to be generally when you’re trying to break free of social
traditions and norms and trying to do something new. Really, when you’re trying
to live outside of your time, that’s lonely in and of itself,” Dr. Fahs says.
“For Valerie, it was worse than even most radicals because she constantly
rejected people who wanted to support her or wanted to align with her. And she
identified as a writer. People who identify as writers are haunted by
loneliness in lots of ways.”
Until
she drifted off to the West Coast later in life, Valerie’s unshakeable, brazen
confidence remained her most formidable asset, one that fueled her experience
of life from the offensive side. Valerie Solnas: The Defiant Life of the Woman
Who Wrote SCUM (And Shot Andy Warhol) quotes Valerie’s close male friend,
Jeremiah Newton, who says, “She was so sure one day the world would discover
her and she would have the fame she so richly deserved.” Incidentally, Solanas
wrote a version of the preface to Up Your Ass—the play for which Warhol took a
bullet by refusing to produce—in an almost 21st century-style affirmation: “I
dedicate this play to ME, a continuous source of strength and guidance, and
without whose unflinching loyalty, devotion, and faith this play would never
have been written.”
Over the
phone, we spoke to Dr. Fahs about Valerie’s endlessly fascinating story,
touching on radical feminist grannies, the scent of trauma, unexplained prison
breaks, and inevitably, Andy Warhol.
HANNAH
GHORASHI: What was your first experience of Valerie, and what was your reaction
when you first read the SCUM Manifesto?
BREANNE
FAHS: I remember really vividly the first time I read the SCUM Manifesto
because I felt these incredibly deep, deep levels of humor in it, and I
remember just laughing to myself really, really loudly, almost in this
inappropriate way. I thought, “This isn’t a laughter of pure comedy, or the kind
of laughter you have at comedy. It’s a laughter of that weird line that
straddles between the absurd and the truth coming out.” Even at the time, I had
never read anything like it, and I had never heard a voice that spoke like that
and it really, really had a huge impression on me. I also think most women
are—I still am, of course—still grappling with what you do with their own
anger, or what you do with your anger at the way women are treated. I was a
Women’s Studies major in college, so at the time I was really struck with
trying to grapple with that too.
GHORASHI:
Was that the first time you had heard of her?
FAHS: I
had definitely never heard of her before; my first introduction to her was just
diving straight into the SCUM Manifesto, so I had no other context. I think
that actually shows in the way I approached this biography: I really think the
SCUM Manifesto comes first, and Andy Warhol and all of the things that happened
with Andy Warhol are secondary.
GHORASHI:
You managed to track down a lot of people that she interacted with in her
life—how was that whole process, and were people generally more hostile or
receptive to the idea of you writing her biography?
FAHS:
Valerie brings the most interesting, eccentric, hostile, and sometimes frankly
crazy people into her orbit. I suppose one could even imagine a book about
writing the book, because it was so absurd at times, and I had so many
experiences that were just bizarre and full of anger. I encountered levels of
anger that I’ve never encountered, ever. People screaming at me on the phone
would be a common occurrence. And, of course, I interviewed a lot of radical
feminists, and they were just amazingly inspiring and interesting. Here you are
talking to all these women in their 70s and 80s, in the grandparent cohort, yet
they are as radical as anyone I’ve ever met. These women are 80 years old with
their cats and their soup, telling you, “I’m going to break it down for you
here.” I don’t think I interviewed a
single person who I would honestly consider mainstream or normal in any way.
GHORASHI:
It seems as though she just wanted the world to give her the respect she had
for herself as a woman, as a queer person, as a writer, etc.
FAHS:
Yeah, her identities are just an endlessly fascinating conversation, generally.
I really like thinking of Valerie as a destroyer, and how destroyers have a
place too.
GHORASHI:
They create things.
FAHS:
Right, even certain religions worship destroying figures and destruction.
GHORASHI:
Like Shiva.
FAHS:
Right, because they have a transformative potential. We just don’t do that very
much in our culture—we don’t appreciate or value destruction.
GHORASHI:
I want to ask about Valerie’s sexuality—you never identify her as bisexual in
the book, though her sexual history and relationships technically could be
considered in that way.
FAHS:
Valerie’s sexual identity is still so bizarre—it’s unable to be categorized
according to the ways that we understand sexual identity today. We don’t have
the lens, yet—I want to say the word yet, because that’s important. I don’t
want to put words in her mouth, but I kind of feel like she would have hated
people calling her bisexual in the way that we define bisexuality today. I
think the politics of sexual identity have the potential to become a lot better
than they are now.
GHORASHI:
Yeah, there really isn’t a way for people to identify as gay or lesbian and
also want to have hetero sex.
FAHS:
Yeah, yet of course people do this all the time. I’m a sex researcher also, and
I study a lot of behavior inconsistent with identity. Our identity categories
aren’t as advanced as what we understand to be true behaviorally, so I love the
reviews of Up Your Ass from 10 years ago, because they’re still saying things
like, “Queer theory has nothing on Valerie.” The characters have these sexual
identities that we literally don’t have the framework to understand yet.
GHORASHI:
It’s like a preview of what culture will be in the future, too.
FAHS:
Yeah!
GHORASHI:
At the beginning of the book, you write about how Valerie was sexually abused
by her father and potentially her stepfather, which seems to explain her
misandry later. But she also wrote letters to her father as an adult and seemed
to feel affectionate towards him. Is this contradictory?
FAHS:
I’m curious about it. Trauma and violence do not equal these neat and tidy
stories that I think people will want to have be true. The story I think people
want to be true about Valerie is that she was sexually abused by her father,
she then goes to hate all men, she then writes the SCUM Manifesto, shoots Andy
Warhol, and dies lonely and suffering. I think, certainly, her spirited
attention to issues of gender and equity far predate anything that happens with
her father—I mean, it’s all messy, it’s really messy. I think the bigger story in there is the
story about how trauma imprints on people in these particular ways that come
out differently than we think. It’s always interesting to me that people seem a
lot more obsessed with the notion of her sexual abuse than of stuff like the
trauma of having her uterus tampered with when she was in a mental hospital, or
the trauma of not being able to parent her children, or the trauma of not
having enough food or not having shelter on a daily basis for most of her adult
life.
GHORASHI:
It reminds me of how towards the end, someone said that she had a very distinct
smell all the time. It wasn’t a bad smell, but it was hers and it was very
strong, like these traumas she always carried around.
FAHS:
Yeah, that was Margo Feiden who said that. People talk about Valerie in those
sensory ways. A lot of people talked about the quality of her eyes, and how her
eyes were fiery, determined, fierce. I think one of the women described her as
a hot wire, like a wire that popped off of a pole and is flying around.
[laughs] And I think Valerie was smarter than people give her credit for
sometimes, too. I mean, literally, we know that her IQ was in the 98th
percentile. I was super excited when I found that, because I was thought, “Ok,
now we’re not just talking in some vague sense.”
GHORASHI:
Now there are facts.
FAHS:
Yeah, like madness and genius going together—it’s actually true in Valerie’s
case. I think that also means we have to imagine that she understands her work
in more complicated ways than someone who is simply angry. At one point she
says, “No, the SCUM Manifesto is a literary device and it’s more of a
mentality.” At times I think that was true for her, and at other times I think
it wasn’t.
GHORASHI:
Why do you think Andy Warhol was interested in her?
FAHS: I
love the odd relationship that they had. I think they are such polar opposites
in certain ways, and almost identical matches in other ways. You have Andy
Warhol operating in this mode of “I will be distant and detached, and coolly
observant of everything.” Then Valerie, like I said, is this live wire. She is
total passion, earnestness, hotness, like heat. I think both she and Andy had a
lot of similarities—they both come from this working-class background, they are
running away from a certain kind of life that they grew up in. Certainly they
share some kind of queer identity, somehow. There are all these things that
seem like they should have felt more aligned than they did, but temperamentally
they were just so different. This
creates this, I think, one of history’s most absurd and bizarre pairings.
After
the shooting, Andy acts like Valerie shooting him was in her nature, and
therefore she can’t be blamed for it, and therefore he can’t be all that angry
at her. Valerie was kind of apologetic and sheepish about the shooting, but at
the same time she said things like, “You’re just trying to get publicity for
yourself by pretending to be kind to me,” and other blasphemous statements
like, “I should have done target practice.” She also realizes the cost of
shooting him and how it kind of derailed her bigger purpose as a writer. It
placed her in history as the woman who shot Andy Warhol.
GHORASHI:
Even though they were both queer, how much male privilege do you think Andy
Warhol exercised in the creation of this story? She’s still defined by him, to
most people.
FAHS:
He’s a fascinating example of someone who didn’t identify this really macho,
stereotyped masculinity, but nonetheless, that sort of cool, distant, detached
sort of framework that he brings to everything gets so much more rewarded. In
part because he’s a man, but also in part because that position is just so much
more rewarded than people who are more like live wires, who are hot and
passionate and upfront. And then, of course, the Factory was filled with
wealthy, women socialites, while the men were allowed to be from all sorts of
backgrounds. Those women were like zoo creatures, I’m sure, to Valerie. Exotic,
feathered animals. There were not working-class women in the Factory, or women
of any sort like Valerie. In the debates I had with my publisher about the
title of the book, I did not want Andy Warhol in the title, and they said, “We
need to have that in there, because it locates the story for people.” So we
ended up compromising and created this parentheses, but I was really conscious
and purposeful on my part because I really did not want Valerie’s life designed
according to her relationship with Andy Warhol or the moment of the shooting.
GHORASHI:
What do you think Valerie’s general effect on the evolution of feminism was?
FAHS:
The fact that the debate about Valerie fractured the National Organization for
Women [NOW] seems incredibly important. The liberal wing of NOW position is
saying, “Get away from Valerie,” and then the radical wing of NOW is saying,
“No. She’s a woman, she needs our help. She’s finally done something about the
rage we all feel, why shouldn’t we consider this a feminist act?” That creates
such a rift in the National Organization for Women in 1968 that it splits them
in two. All of these women leave and form radical feminist groups, and that
happens because of the fight over Valerie. Radical feminism is sort of born in
the shadow of Valerie’s actions and writings.
GHORASHI:
I’m really curious about this last question: You mention in the book that
Valerie escaped from prison and, I think, a mental institution. Do you know how
she did that?
FAHS: No
one knows this. This is one of our big mysteries. There is no document that
I’ve been able to find that details in any way how she got out, or whether she
did it as a group. And these are not easy places to escape from.
GHORASHI:
Yeah! That’s what I was thinking. I couldn’t even imagine.
FAHS:
I’m glad you brought that up because in the last couple weeks I thought, “I
should have maybe hit that point a little harder in the book.” It’s super
interesting, how she escapes from some of the places that are the most
difficult places to escape from. And multiple times. Even when you try to know
everything about Valerie, there are still these big questions, and these myths
that can be created. I think that’s why there are novels and plays being
written using Valerie as inspiration. There is hardly anything that I have ever
worked on that I’ve found more interesting than Valerie’s story, and it’s kept
me interested for a decade. I have no idea, is the answer to that.
Layers
of SCUM: Uncovering Valerie Solanas. By Hannah Ghorashi. Interview. April 1,
2014.
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