Valerie Solanas Manifesto Summary

In the 1960s, there was a surge in the production of manifestoes by radical feminist organizations. These radical groups sought to appropriate the genre from the male-dominated, and increasingly sexist, New Left Movement in what Kimber Pearce describes as “rhetorical acts of mimicry that contested both the male domination of the New Left Movement of the 1960s and the traditional premises of the patriarchy” . One example of this is Valerie Solanas’ SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto, written in 1967. It is a startlingly antagonistic and militant piece of writing, a scathing attack launched upon the male body and male-dominated society as she perceived it to be. Since its publication, it has been both celebrated and criticized with

She sees complete coherence in gendered identity through the sexed body, and never attempts to unravel the accepted discourse surrounding that idea. Troublingly, she leaves no real room for individuality within the taxonomies she controls in the manifesto; she creates sub-categories, such as the “Daddy’s Girl” or the “Men’s Auxiliary”, but never ventures outside of the boundaries of the male and female as defined by their bodies. This focus on the physical body as the sole signifier of gender will always lead to a dead end in terms of possibility: women will always be women and men will always be men, as a direct consequence of their external bodies. There is no room on this for any grey areas or fluidity between the two polarized statuses. With this Solanas fails to take into account Simone de Beauvoir’s statement, pre-dating SCUM by 19 years, that “one is not born a woman but becomes one” . She makes no consideration to the possibility that gender is not pre-written on our biology, but produced and maintained by the cultural discourse.

These are the cruxes of the limitations Solanas imposes on her manifesto by failing to produce any rhetoric outside of the rigid hierarchical gendered binary: she adding to the discursive framework which oppresses her, and fails to consider constructions of gender identity outside biology. We must now as the question of why Solanas fails to disrupt this binary within SCUM, and what possibilities does it open