Abstract
Reviewed by: Kathy Davis, VU University, the Netherlands
Several years ago, I had a conversation with a colleague about her experiences teaching “classic” feminist texts to students who are often resistant to feminism. She explained that much to her surprise, the text which evoked the most enthusiasm among her students and with which they could identify most easily was the outrageously angry, militantly anti-male SCUM (Society for Cutting up Men) manifesto, written by Valerie Solanas in 1967. I, too, was intrigued at why this particular text with its man-hating rant, its vitriolic diatribe against feminists as ineffectual “Daddy’s girls,” and its bizarrely surrealist vision of the future involving the elimination of all men, test tube babies, and violent overthrowing of society as we know it, would appeal to contemporary students. I must admit that I never really figured out the students’ passion for SCUM, and it was, not least, in the interest of satisfying my curiosity, albeit somewhat belatedly, that I agreed to review Breanne Fahs’ biography of Valerie Solanas.
A professor in gender studies and a practicing clinical psychologist, Breanne Fahs is an expert on second wave feminism, sexuality, women and madness, all of which make her well-placed to write this particular biography. As a scholar, she is committed to engaged scholarship and opposed to disembodied theory and has written about the relevance of radical feminism for contemporary gender studies (Fahs, 2015a) and, more specifically, about the relevance that the SCUM manifesto may have for feminist activism today (Fahs, 2015b). As a clinician, she can make sense of the complicated character and tragic life history of Solanas who, even more than for the notorious SCUM manifesto, is, generally, known for having shot the famous pop artist, Andy Warhol, in 1968.
At the time of the famous shooting, Valerie Solanas was living on the streets of New York, engaging in prostitution, eating out of dumpsters, writing, and hustling her manifesto to all and sundry. She hung out on the fringes of the New York countercultural scene and managed to find her way into Warhol’s Factory, which was a hip hangout for avant garde artists, drug users, and celebrities. Solanas was convinced that Warhol would help her produce her play Up Your Ass, which was an eccentric, gender-bending romp involving a wise-cracking, street-smart lesbian hustler, and a cast of funky characters. Although the play was written in 1965 and has yet to be published, “the boundary-smashing glee of Solanas’ dystopia, where the two-sex system is packed off to the junkyard” has such a decidedly postmodern flavor that “queer theory has nothing on it”. Solanas may well have expected Warhol, who was fascinated with gender nonconformity and specialized in making ironic, semi-pornographic films, to take an interest in her play. While Warhol appeared to like her as a person, he did little to help her, at some point even claiming that he had “lost” the manuscript of her play. As Solanas spiraled deeper into the paranoid psychosis which was to plague her for the rest of her life, she became convinced that Warhol and various other powerful men (whom she referred to as “The Mob”) were stealing her work, distorting her words, and destroying her as an artist. She got a gun and went to the Factory, shooting Warhol and one of his employees, wounding them critically, but not fatally. She was arrested and incarcerated for the next three years in some of the worst psychiatric hospitals in the country, only to be released in 1973. The rest of her life was spent in abject poverty as she descended into madness, ending dead and maggot-infested in a flop house in San Francisco at the age of 52.
During her entire life Solanas was obsessed with the SCUM manifesto or, as Fahs puts it, she was the manifesto. She revised it endlessly and hounded the underground publisher who, in her view, had not reproduced the text exactly as she had written it and had allowed “sabotaging typos” and corrections that she had not authorized. She was fanatically compulsive and devoted much of her time to sending angry letters (this was the pre-email era, and it boggles the mind to imagine the stream of emails she would have sent today) to various people (the publisher, the media), complaining about what was happening to the manifesto and insisting that they help her to get the correct version out into print. Solanas was not only querulous and paranoid in her dealings with the publishing world and the media, but extremely challenging for her friends as well. She was difficult and manipulative, often turning up on someone’s doorstep demanding money or a place to stay, only to turn on them violently if they did not help her (or help her enough). She became extremely belligerent when feminists took up her cause after she shot Warhol, expecting them to help her and yet attacking them for appropriating her ideas and insisting that her manifesto had nothing to do with feminism.
One of the strongest chapters in Fahs’ biography deals with how feminists took Solanas on, making her into a radical feminist heroine. Viewed as the victim of exploitation who fought back, she dared to not only express but also act on the anger that many women were feeling at the time. At the same time, the manifesto proved highly divisive within the women’s movement. NOW (the National Organization of Women) fractured around whether to support Solanas and many members felt that she gave feminism a bad name. “Valerie posed a triple threat: she looked like a dyke and she was crazy and she was violent. She was NOW’s worst nightmare” (Fahs, 2014, p. 184). While many feminists had reservations about Valerie’s behavior and Solanas herself had nothing positive to say about feminists, who she felt had appropriated her work, others felt that there was a place for the kind of radicalism she stood for and that the SCUM manifesto should be required reading. In a sense, Solanas allowed feminism to become more radical, to break “rules, norms, barriers, the rhetoric of politeness, academic modalities, reverence for those who came before” (Fahs, 2014, p. 61).
Fahs’ biography has much to recommend it. For those readers who appreciate biographies, this is a vivid account of an arresting and complex woman who, despite or perhaps because of her madness, was often surprisingly postmodern in her take on gender politics and queer sexuality. Her story provides insight into the frustrations and struggles many women have had in getting their voices heard and their words acknowledged. And, finally, it provides an interesting snapshot of 1960s counterculture and the early days of radical feminism in the US.
What the biography does not do, however, is to provide an answer to the question I raised at the outset of this review. Valerie Solanas. The Defiant Life of the Woman who Wrote SCUM (and shot Andy Warhol) is not an intellectual biography and, while Fahs continually expresses admiration for how intelligent, witty, and radical Solanas was, she does not actually show what it was about her thinking that might make it intriguing for students of gender studies today. I would have liked to see more actual excerpts from the SCUM manifesto, replete with some analysis to show how and why this specific text could fire the imagination of feminists in the 1960s and 1970s as well as why it might be of relevance for queer theorists and feminist scholars today. Perhaps this is too much to demand of a biography and, obviously, we shouldn’t expect one book to do it all. However, given Fahs’ subsequent work, I think this was a missed opportunity. Be this as it may, she has, nevertheless, with her biography of Valerie Solanas made a notable and eminently readable contribution to fleshing out feminist historiography of a past but not forgotten era.