A World without Men: Valerie Solanas and the Feminist Uses of Violence

Abstract

Turning to Valerie Solanas, the second wave writer famous for shooting Andy Warhol, this paper reconstructs a forgotten argument for the feminist use of violence. In the SCUM Manifesto, Solanas calls for women to commit gendercide against men to build a feminist utopia. Solanas rejects separatism because it cedes the world to men, instead arguing that women must use violence to reclaim and change the world. Solanas thus sees violence as a world-making project. During the second wave, Solanas’ shooting of Warhol fractured feminism into liberal and radical camps: liberals rejected Solanas, and radicals embraced her. Both sides of the feminist divide, however, turned away from violence as a political tactic. Even sympathetic radicals adopted separatist agendas that sanctioned violence only for the purpose of self-defense. I argue that the reaction to Solanas by her contemporaries, and the erasure of her from history, is symptomatic of a feminist allergy to violence. Returning to Solanas’ work and life raises once again the question that remains suppressed in feminist thought: is violence a justifiable means to achieve feminist ends?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Linda Zerilli, Demetra Kasimis, Verónica Zabadúa-Yáñez, Silvia Fedi, Aylon Cohen, Lawrence Svabek, and Alex Diones for their engagement with earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks to Kevin Duong and two anonymous readers for their thoughtful and generative comments during the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Valerie Solanas, Up Your Ass (Milan: VandA.epublishing, 2014), 28.

2 For biographical information on Solanas, see: Breanne Fahs, Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman who Wrote SCUM (and Shot Andy Warhol) (New York: CUNY Feminist Press, 2014); Bonnie Wertheim, “Overlooked No More: Valerie Solanas, Radical Feminist Who Shot Andy Warhol” The New York Times, June 26, 2020.

3 Avital Ronell, “Deviant Payback: The Aims of Valerie Solanas,” in SCUM Manifesto (London: Verso, 2004), 26.

4 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 96.

5 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 107.

6 Ronell, “Deviant Payback,” 28.

7 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 136.

8 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 168.

9 Mary Harron, “Introduction” in I Shot Andy Warhol (New York: Grove Press, 1996), xxvii.

10 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

11 Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995); Jean Beth Elshtain, Women and War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

12 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (New York: Verso, 2020); Timothy Huzar and Clare Woodford, Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence: Adriana Cavarero, with Judith Butler, Bonnie Honig, and Other Voices (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021).

13 Jacqueline Rose, On Violence and Violence Against Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021); Verónica Gago, Feminist International: How to Change Everything (New York: Verso, 2020).

14 For example, Robyn Marasco offers a compelling critique of Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract on these grounds: Robyn Marasco, “Terms and Conditions” History of the Present 3, n. 2 (2013): 205–211.

15 Elizabeth Frazer and Kimberly Hutchings, Violence and Political Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 190.

16 Emma Goldman, The Psychology of Political Violence (New York: Mother Earth Publishing, 1917); Emmeline Pankhurst, Freedom or Death (Good Press, 2020); Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 2001).

17 Andrea Long Chu, Females (London: Verso, 2019), 18.

18 Mavis Haut, “A Salty Tongue: At the Margins of Satire, Comedy and Polemic in the Writing of Valerie Solanas,” Feminist Theory 8, n. 1 (2007): 39.

19 Fahs and Chu also note Solanas’ love of humor: Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 34–5; Chu, Females, 19.

20 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 172.

21 Lyon, Manifestoes, 173.

22 Desiree Rowe and Karma Chavez, “Valerie Solanas and the Queer Performativity of Madness,” Cultural Studies? Cultural Methodologies 11, n. 3 (2011): 274.

23 Solanas’ references to psychoanalysis are not surprising given her background in psychology. She earned a bachelors degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and pursued a master’s at the University of Minnesota, before leaving the program, in part due to gender-based discrimination.

24 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 24–5.

25 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 52.

26 Lauren Berlant, “Humorlessness (Three Monologues and a Hairpiece),” Critical Inquiry 43, n. 2 (2017): 305–340.

27 Berlant, “Humorlessness,” 308.

28 For discussion of the media’s coverage of Solanas, see Fahs’ Valerie Solanas and Chavez and Rowe’s “Valerie Solanas and the Queer Performativity of Madness.”

29 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (Chico: AK Press, 2013), 23.

30 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 23.

31 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 25.

32 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 26.

33 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 37.

34 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 34.

35 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 35.

36 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 27.

37 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 27.

38 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 57.

39 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 57.

40 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 53.

41 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 54.

42 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 54.

43 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 70.

44 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 66.

45 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 67.

46 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 62.

47 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 74.

48 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 59.

49 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 59.

50 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 60.

51 This resonates with Solanas’ later statement about shooting Warhol: “I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice.” Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 60 & Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 155.

52 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 27.

53 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 34.

54 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 46.

55 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 46.

56 Solanas’ utopian imaginary resonates with the final chapter of Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003 [1970]), where Firestone calls for the end of biological reproduction.

57 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 73.

58 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 69–70.

59 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 63.

60 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 63.

61 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 66.

62 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 69.

63 Although the vindication Arendt finds in the execution of Adolph Eichmann because he “supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people” resonates with Solanas’ concern that men refuse to share the world with women. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), 279; Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, 1969, 1970).

64 Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967–1975 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 105.

65 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 176.

66 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 139.

67 Solanas reportedly told several people, including Ti-Grace Atkinson, that she shot Warhol to make herself famous; Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 136 & 168; Amanda Third, “‘Shooting from the Hip’: Valerie Solanas, SCUM and the Apocalyptic Politics of Radical Feminism,” Hecate 32, n. 2 (2006): 107.

68 Laura Winkiel, “The ‘Sweet Assassin’ and the Performative Politics of the SCUM Manifesto,” in The Queer Sixties, ed. Patricia Juliana Smith (New York: Routledge, 1999), 63.

69 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 183.

70 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 184.

71 Third, “Shooting from the Hip,” 109.

72 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 173–4.

73 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 175.

74 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 181.

75 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 181.

76 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 168.

77 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2001), 465.

78 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 465.

79 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 472.

80 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 468–9.

81 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 186.

82 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 179.

83 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 169–70.

84 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 171.

85 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 173.

86 The Feminists, “The Feminists: A Political Organization to Annihilate Sex Roles,” in Notes from the Second Year, (New York, 1970), 114.

87 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 185.

88 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 183.

89 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 163.

90 Fahs, Valerie Solanas, 163.

91 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960–1975 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014), 135.

92 Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 131.

93 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Female Liberation as the Basis for Social Revolution,” No More Fun and Games 1 (1969): 112.

94 Echols, Daring to be Bad, 162.

95 Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 132.

96 Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman, 148.

97 Dunbar-Ortiz, “Female Liberation,” 111.

98 Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 23.

99 Vivian Gornick, “Introduction” in SCUM Manifesto (Paris: Olympia Press, 1971), xxxiv.

100 Sara Stridsberg, Valerie (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006).

101 Harron recognized the title from her work on a documentary about Andy Warhol.

102 Harron, “Introduction,” vii & xviii.

103 Clare Hemmings, Considering Emma Goldman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 33.