'Shooting From the Hip': Valerie Solanas, SCUM

and the Apocalyptic Politics of Radical Feminism

I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed.

I should have done target practice.'
— Valerie Solanas commenting on her near-fatal shooting of
Andy Warhol in 1968

Valerie Solanas took the elevator and got off at the fourth fioor
She pointed the gun at Andy saying you can't control me anymore . . .
Valerie Solanas waved her gun pointing at the fioor
From inside her idiot madness spoke and bang
Andy fell to the floor
And I believe life's serious enough for some retribution
I believe being sick is no excuse
And I believe I would've pulled the switch on her myself
— John Cale and Lou Reed, 'I Believe'

Introduction
In the early afternoon of June 3rd, 1968, the summer of the student
uprisings across the US, Valerie Solanas waited, clutching a paper
bag, outside Andy Warhol's new gallery and office space, the Factory,
at 33 Union Square, New York. It was a warm summer day but
Solanas was heavily dressed and she had even applied a little makeup
—fi^omall accounts something she reserved for special occasions.
When Warhol and his assistant arrived in a taxi, Solanas rode with
them in the elevator up to the gallery. After exchanging a few words
with Solanas, Warhol and his entourage went about their business,
ignoring her presence. A few minutes later, Solanas pulled a .32
calibre automatic pistol from the paper bag and fired three times at
Warhol. Only one bullet hit her target, but it seriously wounded
Warhol, 'entering through the left lung and hitting the spleen,
stomach, liver and oesophagus before penetrating the right lung and
exiting from the side.'^ She then fired at a visiting art dealer, hitting
him in the left buttock, before catching the elevator down to the
ground fioor. Later that evening, having surrendered herself and the
gun to a traffic policeman in Times Square, Solanas was taken to the
13* Precinct Booking Room where she openly confessed to the
shooting of Warhol.

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 It is this incident for which most people remember Solanas, if they
remember her at all. In popular accounts of the shooting, her
guerrilla action was always already mediated by her victim's celebrity
status as representative of the disreputable world of the 1960s New
York avantgarde. As Germaine Greer writes, Solanas 'was too easily
characterised as a neurotic, perverted exhibitionist, and the incident
was too much a part of Warhol's three-ring circus of nuts for her
message to come across unperverted.'s Overshadowed by Warhol's
seductive public persona then, the unanimous conclusion of the
media was that Solanas was mad,4 and it is this one-dimensional
image of the crazed Solanas that has left its (albeit faint) mark on
modern American history. As a consequence, within the spaces of
popular culture, it is rarely acknowledged that, in addition to having
shot a pop-art icon, Solanas was also the author of one of the most
incendiary texts of modern feminism. The SCUM Manifesto.
Self-published by Solanas in 1967, the SCUM Manifesto is one of
the few remaining concrete legacies of Solanas' existence. In the
opening paragraph she wrote:
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.s
And later in the manifesto, she describes SCUM's activities as
follows:
SCUM will always operate on a criminal as opposed to a civil-
disobedience basis, that is, as opposed to openly violating the law
and going to jail in order to draw attention to an injustice . . .
SCUM — always selfish, always cool — will always aim to avoid
detection and punishment. SCUM will always be furtive, sneaky,
underhanded . . . SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and
quietly move in for the kill.^
An iconoclastic text, the Manifesto advocates a violent and
clandestine politics that renders the extermination of the male
species as the only plausible solution to the age-old problem of
women's subordination. The basic premise of Solanas' manifesto is
straightforward. In parodic style, she deploys the modern discourse
of eugenics to argue that 'the male is a biological accident'7 whose
continued existence is no longer justified, not even for 'the dubious
purpose of reproduction.'^ Solanas' feminist Utopia thus comprises a
world from which the possibility of sexual difference and, hence, the
gendered structure of power relations legitimised by claims of sexual
difference, has been erased.

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 Whilst dominant culture's dismissal of Solanas is, if not excusable,
perhaps understandable, her almost complete erasure from the
annals of second wave feminist history is less so. As I demonstrate
below, in the late 1960s Solanas was considered a key inspirational
figure by the United States radical feminist vanguard. Despite this,
feminists have, on the whole, shown a marked reluctance either to
engage critically with Solanas' work, or to acknowledge her place in
the history of the US second wave feminist movement. If she is
remembered, she is remembered in passing, and alternately paid
homage for expanding the boundaries of the feminist debate —
making 'normal female anger seem reasonable in comparison'^ — and
dismissed as the woman who went 'too far' and gave feminism a 'bad
name'. Either way, Solanas is frequently pitted against what is
configured as 'legitimate' second wave feminism in the US. And yet,
constructed within dominant readings as the lunatic fringe of
feminism, Solanas' spectre looms. Manifesting as the stereotypical
figure of the man-hating, crazed lesbian, she is a figure all too easily
deployed by feminism's adversaries to discredit the feminist
movement as nothing but the ravings of irrational women. She is the
repressed that, in Freud's terms, always threatens to return and
unravel 'the feminist project'. So it seems, until feminists
acknowledge Solanas' contribution to the history of second wave
feminism, until they reconcile her violent brand of feminist activism
with the movement more broadly, she will continue to be
appropriated in this kind of way.
Historically, feminists have had a difficult task estabhshing the
legitimacy of their claims in a cultural context that has often
confiated feminist demands with the culturally prescribed markers of
insanity. Solanas perhaps blurs the boundaries feminists have sought
to enact between feminism and madness and this may well constitute
a reason for feminists to dissociate themselves from her. However,
this dismissal of Solanas as insane works against the feminist
tradition of questioning the processes by which the label of madness
is ascribed to women in Western culture.^" Further, privileging
understandings of Solanas as mad downplays the radical content of
the manifesto. If we are to understand in a comprehensive and
critical manner why feminists have tended to overlook Solanas, we
must look beyond broad assumptions about her mental condition and
instead turn our attention to her politics, for it is this that threatens
the feminist project and therefore explains why feminists have chosen
to forget her.
This article undertakes a critical reassessment of The SCUM
Manifesto in order to situate Solanas and her actions in relation to
the emergence of second wave feminism in the United States. The
programme for political change she outlined and enacted is, rather

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than antithetical to, consistent with — and, indeed, informed to a
large degree — an infiuential variety of second wave feminist praxis in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. Of course, second wave feminism was
never a monolithic movement with a unified political agenda.
However, in the earlier phase of second wave activism, a small
number of women's groups who identified either as 'politicos' or
'feminists','! those we have come to label 'radical feminists', came to
dominate the political scene of feminism. Ellen Willis writes that the
radical feminist 'movement took shape in 1968 and ended, for all
practical purposes five years later.''^ Similarly, Alice Echols claims
'radical feminism remained the hegemonic tendency within the
women's liberation movement until 1973.'^3 It is this particular brand
of second wave feminism that Solanas epitomises. Given the
prominence of radical feminism at this juncture in history, an
analysis of Solanas' violent brand of feminism can provide useful
insight into the formative years of second wave feminism in the US,
as well as the practice of writing feminist histories.

The terrorist tactics of radical feminism

Genet just reports, despite what Sartre and de Beauvoir, two
overrated windbags, say about the existential implications of his
work. I, on the other hand, am a social propagandist.'^
— Valerie Solanas from the locked ward at Bellevue Hospital in
1968
In a characteristically egotistical fashion, Warhol attempted to
subordinate Solanas' attack to his own agendas by framing it as a
hostile attempt to mobilise on his promise, made at his exhibition
opening in Stockholm earher that year, that 'in the future everybody
will be famous for fifteen minutes.''^ In this way, and undermining
the political nature of her actions, he constructed Solanas' shooting as
'a mere attempt to use him as a trampoline to fame.''^ However,
Solanas' own conceptualisation of the incident was radically different.
She clearly envisaged her 'fifteen minutes of fame' as a radical,
tactical intervention that would seize public attention and focus it on
her feminist politics. On the fi-ont steps of the police station, in the
immediate aftermath of her arrest and questioning, 'a mob of
journalists and photographers shouting questions greeted Solanas.''''
Rather than explaining her actions and motivations, she referred
them directly to her feminist manifesto: 'I have a lot of reasons. Read
my manifesto and it will tell you who I am.' '^ in so doing, Solanas
attempted to redirect popular attention to her political cause by
facilitating the linkage of her 'radical gesture' with the politics of
feminist revolution outlined in her manifesto. That is, for Solanas,
her attack on Warhol constituted a propaganda stunt that would

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operate in the violent, spectacular and publicity-centred terms of
terrorism to foreground a political agenda. As such, her shooting of
Warhol must be recognised as 'a carefully orchestrated and radically
disturbing aesthetic performance'^^ that can be located within a
twentieth century paradigm of spectacular political intervention
which encompasses the rise of terrorism as one weapon in the arsenal
of resistance.
Solanas' terroristic politics of spectacle are representative of the
emergent radical feminist activist paradigm. Throughout the late
1960s and early 1970s, radical feminists advocated a variety of
activism that paralleled 'revolutionary' terrorist tactics ofthe era. Not
only did terrorists and feminists embrace a similar utopian-inspired
notion of revolution, they also tended to deploy similar tactics. Like
the 'revolutionary terrorism' of the time — for example, the kind of
tactics favoured by groups such as the Weathermen and the Black
Panthers — radical feminism frequently deployed tactics of shock and
disruption vnth the ultimate aim of destabilising and eventually
overthrowing dominant order. Radical feminism's transformative
politics rested on a programme, albeit largely uncoordinated and
random in its manifestations, of what Michel de Certeau would
describe as tactical intervention.^o Drawing upon the political tactics
ofthe New Left, they privileged the 'action' as a key mechanism in the
fight for gender equality. As Marianne DeKoven explains, within the
New Left:
An 'action' could range from the familiar modes of march, rally,
sit-in, leafleting, petition and protest, to various forms of street
or guerrilla theatre, to a bombing or a bank robbery, in the final
violence [sic] years ofthe movement.^^
DeKoven notes that radical feminism adopted the New Left's
commitment 'to spontaneity, creativity and diversity in its
expression.'22 Of the various forms of actions popularised by the New
Left, radical feminism often opted for 'guerrilla theatre' to draw
attention to their political message, or what the Yippies called the
'theatre of the apocalypse'.^s Radical feminism operated
opportunistically, 'extend[ing] the domain of the political... so that
"actions" could be almost anything and appear almost anywhere.'^^ In
certain contexts, this imbued feminism's political action with a
terrorist quality. For example, according to Sara Evans:
The new feminist movement made its explosive debut in the Miss
America demonstration of August 1968. With a sharp eye for
guerrilla theatre, young women crowned a live sheep to
symbolise the beauty pageant's objectification of female bodies,
and filled a 'freedom trashcan' with objects of female torture —

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 girdles, bras, curlers, issues of Ladies Home Journal [my
h i ]
Events such as these had a powerful impact on the popular
imagination. Like their terrorist counterparts, through their staging
of spectacle, radical feminists seized public attention. As Echols
notes, the Miss America Beauty Pageant protest 'marked the end of
the movement's obscurity because the protest — the movement's first
national action — received extensive press coverage.'^^
Further, in the autumn of 1968, a group of New York-based radical
feminists including Robin Morgan, formed a feminist activist group
called WITCH. WITCH staged an impressive publicity campaign for
the radical feminist cause in the late 1960s by performing — 'dressed
as witches and bearing broomsticks'^^ _ a series of spectacular public
'hexings', most notably on the stock exchange on Wall Street and on
the annual Bride Fair at Madison Square Garden.^s WITCH style
radical feminism sought to create a spectacle in order to expose the
inadequacy of 'the system'. Aiming to disrupt the spaces of popular
culture and force a space for radical critique, shock, surprise and
publicity were key elements of WITCH's political activism. They
sought to create 'actions' that would capture the attention of the
mainstream mass media in order to promote their political position.29
In deploying methods of spectacular tactical intervention, WITCH
self-consciously mobilised the spectre of terrorism — they
constructed themselves in the mould of (metaphorical) terrorists.
Indeed, the acronym WITCH stood for the 'Women's International
Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell'. In this kind of context, not just
Solanas' attack on Warhol, but the interventions of radical feminism
more generally, looked like forms of terrorism.so
Precisely because it operated within this terrorist register then,
Solanas' attack on Warhol resonated for radical feminists. When, on
13 June 1968, Solanas appeared in the State Supreme Court, she was
represented by radical feminist lawyer, Florynce 'Flo' Kennedy. One
of the few black women involved in the US women's liberation
movement in its embryonic stages, Kennedy hailed Solanas as 'one of
the most important spokeswomen of the feminist movement.'s^ And
Ti-Grace Atkinson, then a member of the New York chapter of the
National Organisation of Women (NOW), and being groomed for a
future of feminist leadership by Betty Friedan, made a 'very public
show of support for Valerie Solanas in the aftermath of the Warhol
shooting.'32 Atkinson, along with several other feminist colleagues,
made a point of attending Solanas' trial, heralding her as 'the first
outstanding champion of women's rights'.33
However, it was not just Solanas' actions but her angry and
incendiary manifesto that constituted her as an important reference
point for these women. As I demonstrate below, Solanas' feminist

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vision operates at the discursive nexus of feminism and terrorism.
The manifesto mobilises the dual threat of feminism and terrorism,
indeed of terrorist feminism. It represents the most extreme
manifestation of the feminist political struggle — the willingness to
take the fight for women's liberation to its most terrifying and
confronting limit. I further suggest that the manifesto articulates an
apocalyptic vision of revolution characteristic of the radical feminist
vision. It is the manifesto's terrorist politics of apocalypse that
ultimately means Solanas is excluded from second wave feminist
history.
Reading the SCUM Manifesto: Terrorism and the apocalypse
Our 'society', if it's not deflected from its current course and ifthe
Bomb doesn't drop on it, will hump itself to death.34
- Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto

Solanas' manifesto resonates as a form of feminist terrorism in

several key ways. First, and perhaps most obviously, Solanas'
revolutionary project is configured in terms of a clandestine
movement that deploys violence to political ends — it is based on
terrorist tactics. Claiming that forms of feminist resistance that entail
marching, demonstrating and picketing — forms of resistance
associated with liberal and/or institutional feminist groups such as
NOW — 'are for nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take only such
action as is guaranteed to be ineffective', Solanas asserts that, 'if
SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.'ss The
manifesto's promotion of violent and clandestine methods meant that
its programme for action resonated within the spaces of popular
culture as a form of terrorism.
Second, in the discourses of Western culture, terrorism is
frequently configured as an attack on the (democratic) state.3^ In the
Western imagination, terrorism circulates as a practice that seeks to
overturn control of, or destroy the institutions of governance.
Solanas' manifesto may be understood as a critique of the exercise of
male power and its relation to women's subaltern position in the
modern state. The blueprint for violent feminist revolution, as
outlined in the manifesto, aims to dismantle the (patriarchal) state,
and in this sense, resonates as a form of (feminist) terrorism 'from
below'. In order to make this argument, it is first necessary to
consider how the modern state is narrated within Western thought.
The mythic, political origin of the modern state is traditionally
conceptualised in terms of the social contract.37 There are two points
in traditional social contract theory accounts of the state that are of

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 interest here. First, the state is understood to comprise rational
individuals.3S That is, the state in social contract theory is constituted
according to a principle of exclusion that differentiates between
rational individuals and their ('irrational') oppositional Other.
Second, social contract theory posits the importance of the state in
the protection of the individuals it governs from the threat posed by
the Other. Together these criteria define the boundaries of civil
society. Importantly, social contract theory characterises those who
are excluded as irrational and constructs them as a threat to the
rational foundations of modern society — a threat from which the
state and civil society must be protected.39
In The Sexual Contract, Pateman uses this notion of the state as
fundamentally exclusionary to contend that the original social
contract established not only political right but also patriarchal right.
This 'sexual contract' has operated to exclude women from
membership ofthe modern state — something that is most obvious in
women's historical lack of political enfranchisement in the modern
state.4o Further, the civil society created through the original contract
comprised a patriarchal social order that, in drawing the distinction
between the public and private spheres as a necessary prerequisite for
the existence of civil society, required the exclusion of women from
the public realm.
Along with Pateman, Genevieve Lloyd argues that, within Western
culture, women's exclusion has been justified by recourse to a long
cultural and scientific tradition that constitutes women as
fundamentally irrational and morally inferior. These theories
commonly locate women's inherent irrationality and inferiority in
their 'imperfect' biology,4i and have achieved cultural dominance by
appearing to be universally applicable and scientifically objective.
Conversely, in an inflammatory appropriation of male generated
theories that attest to women's inferiority, Solanas' manifesto claims
that it is men's biology which is deficient, and consequently, that the
'natural' order of things entails the subordination of men to female
control. She writes, 'the Y (male) gene is an incomplete X (female)
gene, that is, has an incomplete set of chromosomes. In other words,
the male is an incomplete female, a walking abortion, aborted at the
gene stage.42 Solanas' use of these theories to justify the termination
of the male species marks a confronting inversion of Western
thought, and a source of discomfort for the modern reader.
Deploying the language of biological determinism, the manifesto
argues that men are completely selfish, devoid of emotion, unable to
think creatively, and incapable of engaging in any activity that doesn't
pivot on their physical drives and needs:
The male is completely egocentric, trapped inside himself,
incapable of empathising or identifying with others, of love,

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 friendship, affection or tenderness .. . His responses are entirely
visceral, not cerebral; his intelligence is a mere tool in the service
of his drives and needs;... he can't relate to anything other than
his own physical sensations.''^
We can see that Solanas' claim that men lack cerebral potential, and
that their existence is determined by their biological limitations,
confronts head-on the gender binary on which the modern state
turns. She directly challenges the modern cultural construction of
men as rational and women as irrational by inverting the range of
assumptions that can be found in the body of modern theory that has
established women's fundamental irrationality as scientific fact.44 As
a text that reverses the dichotomy of gender difference that forms the
basis for the logic of the state as it is elaborated in social contract
theory, the manifesto, like terrorism 'from below', can be read as an
attack on the (gendered) state.
In a manner that parallels Pateman's critique ofthe modern state as
a gendered entity, the manifesto argues that modern social
organisation is based upon the systematic exclusion of women from
civil society. We should remember here that, in modernity, exclusion
from the institutions of civil society is an aspect of exclusion from the
power structures of the state. If the state can be defined as the
institutional apparatus that governs social life,45 then Solanas argues
passionately that the modern US state is one that is dominated and
controlled by men. For Solanas, this institutional command
constitutes an important mechanism by which men achieve and
retain power over 'the superior sex'. For example, Solanas writes of
education, 'the purpose of "higher" education is to exclude . . . The
male has an invested [sic] interest in ignorance; he knows that an
enlightened, aware, female population will mean the end of him [my
emphasis].'46 Further, Solanas alludes to women's exclusion when
she addresses the methods by which women must make amends. She
writes:
Dropping out is not the answer; fucking up is. Most women are
already dropped out; they were never in. Dropping out gives
control to those few who don't drop out; dropping out . . .
strengthens the system instead of undermining it, since it is
based entirely on the non-participation, passivity, apathy and
non-involvement ofthe mass of women.47
Solanas' suggestion here that women 'are already dropped out',
parallels Pateman's suggestion that the state and, by extension, the
social order it implies, is patriarchal and exclusive of women.48 in
these ways, Solanas may be understood to be attacking the notion of
the gendered state and its practices of power that enforce women's
exclusion. As such, Solanas' text can be considered to represent a

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fundamental threat to, an attack on, the modern state — a threat that
the society perceives almost subconsciously, and responds to by
classifying her as insane.
Whilst in Pateman's reading of the social contract as a gendered
pact tbe state is premised upon women's exclusion and
subordination, the sexual contract also constructs women as a threat
to the very entities it calls into being. Indeed, in a separate text,
Pateman argues that Western modernity has conjured women as a
permanent threat to the state and the social order it implies. She
identifies a broad cultural concern with what Rousseau termed the
'disorder of women'49 that threatens at the heart ofthe state:
Women, it is held, are a source of disorder because their being, or
their nature, is such that it necessarily leads them to exert a
disruptive influence in social and political life. Women have a
disorder at their very centres — in their morality — which can
bring about the destruction ofthe state [my emphasis].5o
While women's acceptance of their role in the private sphere is
necessary to the functioning of the state, women's exclusion from the
state thus constructs them as at once excessive to, and threatening of,
the state and its operation in the public sphere.
It is this idea of Woman as fundamental threat to the state to which
Solanas' manifesto gives expression. Noting that women make up the
majority ofthe population, the manifesto continues:
If a large majority of women were SCUM, they could acquire
complete control of this country within a few weeks . . . The
police force. National Guard, Army, Navy and Marines couldn't
squelch a rebellion of over half the population, particularly when
it's made up of people they are utterly helpless without.s^
This image of masses of newly empowered women — those
traditionally excluded from the pact that founds the state —
wrenching control from the patriarchal state in the most violent way
is perhaps the most powerful and terrorising threat to modern social
order that Solanas envisages. It marks the reinvestment of, in
Kristeva's terms, that 'implacable violence's^ that lies at the heart of
the foundational socio-political contract of modernity — the
reinvestment of women's anger at their exclusion from the social
(sexual) contract.53 This is a source of terror because it mobilises a
'rage beyond reason . . . the anger that comes to the dispossessed like
a fiash fiood.'54 it threatens a violence 'without limits' that extends
from the excluded themselves. And Solanas promises nothing but
total destruction.
Indeed, Solanas' manifesto is an apocalyptic text. Lois Parkinson
Zamora argues the difference between apocalyptic and Utopian
literature is a matter of focus. She writes:

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 Effective apocalyptic literature has always focused its descriptive
powers on the imperfect old world rather than the perfect new
world . . . Its focus on the 'before' rather than the 'after' is . . . the
factor that distinguishes apocalypticfromUtopian literature.ss
Whilst Solanas' ideal society is shaped by a Utopian vision,^^ the
manifesto's emphasis lies on descriptions of the shortcomings of the
lived experience of modern Western patriarchal society. She writes,
'the male, because of his obsession to compensate for not being
female combined with his inability to relate and to feel compassion,
has made of the world a shitpile.'s^ Solanas' tone is millennarian, that
of the sermon that depicts widespread doom, moral corruption and
the impending destruction of the world. Approximately two thirds of
the manifesto is dedicated to an annotated list of the atrocities that
shape modern American life and for which men can be held
accountable, among them war; mental illness; the suppression of
individuality; racial, ethnic and religious prejudice; ignorance;
boredom; hate; violence; disease; and death. As journalist and
feminist activist, Vivian Gornick notes, Solanas 'describes everything
as dead or dying.'s^ Solanas envisions, that is, a world on the brink of
apocalypse — indeed, in the grip of suicidal autoimmunity.s^ Gornick
notes that the manifesto gives expression to 'rage of an ungiving,
unstinting, unmediating nature. Rage to the death.'6° Hans Magnus
Enzensberger has noted that 'the apocalyptic fantasy [is] inescapably
bound up with the terror, the demand for vengeance, for justice.'^'
The kind of 'black rage' that Gornick claims motivates the violent
activist strategy of the manifesto thus operates to position it within
the apocalyptic genre.
Within W^estern culture, terrorism is frequently read through the
prism of the secular apocalypse. This is most acutely expressed by
Moshe Amon, who discusses terrorism as 'the last step' in twentieth-
century Western structures of thought that are 'rife with apocalyptic
premonitions.'^^ fje writes, 'terrorism is just the last stage in the age
of revolutions, the last step in a trend towards social and cultural
negation [my emphasis].'^3 Here Amon constructs terrorism as a
form of cultural suicide characteristic of end-time itself. Solanas'
terrorism similarly invokes apocalyptic end-time. She advocates that
women seize control of the institutions that shape the production of
everyday life, not in order to exercise bureaucratic power, but in
order to systematically destroy it. Not content to wage a war for
women's equality within the framework of conventional feminism,
'SCUM is out to destroy the system, not attain certain rights within
it.'^4 Solanas is not interested in merely attacking the state. She
wants, wholeheartedly, to dismantle it: 'SCUM is against the entire
system, the very idea of law and government.'^s it is in this claim that
the manifesto's apocalyptic vision is most apparent. If we understand

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the state as an expression of the linear time of modernity,^^ in her
anarchist call to abolish law and government we can understand
Solanas as conjuring not just the end of the state but, perhaps more
importantly, apocalyptic end-time. In this way, the manifesto
conjures the moment of cultural negation that Amon describes as
characteristic of terrorism. In combination with the advocacy of
terrorist tactics that target the (patriarchal) state, the apocalyptic
vision that frames the manifesto thus operates to underline its
terrorist quality.

Radical feminist Zeitgeist

In her furious invocation of apocalypse, Solanas is emblematic of
radical feminism more generally. Radical feminists conceived of their
transformative project in teleological terms,^7 perceiving themselves
not as agents engaged in the evolutionary reform of gender relations
but as poised on the brink of total revolution, as positioned at the
moment of apocalypse.^^ For those who witnessed radical feminism
from the outside and those who practised it alike, radical feminism
presented as an 'explosion' of 'cumulative rage' bent on the
destruction of social order.^9 For example, in 1971, Gornick,
positioned the rise of radical feminism at the culmination of twenty
five years of social protest in the US, constructing it as the catalyst,
indeed the Aufhebung, of total revolution:
With the end of the Second World War, a crisis occurred in
American life . . . Beginning, most notably, with blacks and then
students, it has ended, most vociferously and most dangerously
and most radically, with women . . . Women, who are beginning
to say 'No, in thunder'... [and] who are determined . . . to make
a lunge for that brass ring which threatens — more than any
other element of social revolution abroad ever could — to bring
Western society toppling [my emphasis].7°
In the radical feminist imagination, women were thus bearing
witness to the last days. In the aftermath of the revolution, configured
in the radical feminist imagination as apocalypse, women would
fundamentally transform the world, indeed remake the world anew.^^
But first, patriarchal society would have to be forced to confront its
eschaton.
Opposed to the liberal feminist agenda of groups such as NOW that
argued for women's equality within the system, Solanas' manifesto
thus epitomised the spirit of nascent radical feminism that proposed
the complete overthrow of the system itself. Indeed, in Gornick's
estimation, Solanas' enraged treatise against men crystallised radical
feminist wrath. In 1971, she wrote of the manifesto:

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 It is the voice of one who has been pushed past the limit, one
whose psychological bearings are gone, who can no longer be
satisfied with anything less than blood... Solanas speaks the true
feelings of the quintessential feminist heart, and those feelings
are feelings ofblack rage.^^
Radical feminism was a notoriously angry movement that
frequently culminated in a call to arms. It was not uncommon for
radical feminists to preach violence as a way of forcing an apocalyptic
end to 'patriarchy'. Echols notes that, in the late 1960s young radical
feminists were strongly of the opinion that 'nonviolent protest had
long since outlived its usefulness,'''^ and that, rather than drav«ng
inspiration from the achievements and examples of earlier
generations of US feminists, they looked to the tradition of armed
revolution in the third world.74 The anonymous authors of 'What is
Liberation?' urged women to 'learn the meaning of rage, the violence
that liberates the human spirit.'^s And Atkinson excoriated 'women's
liberationists for failing to "pick up the gun".'^^ In the harnessing of
anger as a revolutionary tool then, the radical feminist vision
resonated as apocalyptic.
Whilst Echols claims that Solanas' views 'contravened the sort of
radical feminism that prevailed in most women's groups across the
country,'77 the manifesto was embraced as a key inspirational text by
the hard line 'movement heavies.'7^ For example, Atkinson attributed
her radicalisation out of NOW to form a radical women's liberation
group known as 'The Feminists' to the infiuence of the manifesto.
And at an August 1968 meeting of women's organisations from across
the United States, Roxanne Dunbar 'read aloud excerpts from Valerie
Solanas' SCUM Manifesto and proclaimed it the "essence of
feminism".'79 Dunbar reportedly visited Solanas in gaol and, when
she formed the radical feminist 'Cell 16' based in Boston later that
year, reading the manifesto was 'their first order of business'.s° As
Echols writes, 'after the shooting, Solanas' case became something of
a cause celebre among radical feminists . . . In the wake of the
shooting, [the] SCUM [Manifesto] was finally published by Olympia
Press^^ and it became obligatory reading for radical feminists [my
emphasis].'^^
At times, the infiuence of Solanas' outspoken misandry on early
radical feminist texts is explicitly recognisable. The formative work of
feminists such as Dunbar, Atkinson, and Shulamith Firestone, for
example, echoes Solanas' manifesto in both tone and content. Like
Solanas, this small but highly vocal number of women argued fiercely
for the elimination of sexual difference. For example, in 1970, in what
was to become a landmark text of second wave feminism. The
Dialectic of Sex, Firestone argued that 'the end goal of feminist
revolution, must be, unlike that of the first feminist movement, not

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just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself
[emphasis in original].'^3 These women interpreted Solanas' call for
'sexocide' as an attempt to shift the boundaries of the debate that had
been opened up by liberal feminists, and they boldly declared their
solidarity with her views. In 1968, for a number of women at the
forefront of the women's liberation movement then, Solanas'
manifesto epitomised the contemporary feminist Zeitgeist.
Remembering Solanas . . . or not
Given the importance of Solanas to radical feminism, it is perhaps
surprising that she does not feature more prominently in the
memoirs and histories of second wave feminism in the United States.
At best Solanas is regarded ambivalently, as she is in Roxanne
Dunbar's eloquent account of her involvement in an era of profound
radical political change in the United States. Dunbar's crediting of
Solanas' infiuence on her own radicalisation, which in turn translated
into the co-founding of the radical feminist group known as Cell i6, is
perhaps the most generous on feminist record. In her memoir,
Dunbar recalls her reaction to the news that Solanas had shot
Warhol: 'It changed everything for me, and gave a focus to my mental
chaos . . . I wanted to be a part of it. I had to be a part of i t . . . I would
find Valerie Solanas and I would defend her. I had never been so sure
of anything, or of myself, or so determined.'^4 she quotes a letter she
wrote to her male lover in the winter of 1968 in which she defended
Solanas:
I think you are wrong to focus on Valerie Solanas' 'insanity'.
Perhaps you fear the consciousness in her statements. Sure she
was 'crazy' to shoot Andy Warhol. The kind of oppression we
experience as women does make us kind of crazy one way or
another. I think compulsive shopping and plastic surgery are acts
of madness .. . Valerie's is a voice in the wilderness shouting her
rebellion, saying she will accept no arguments to the contrary,
allow no loopholes or fancy devices that could be used to counter
her argument. She is EVERYWOMAN in some basic sense.^s
Dunbar uses this excerpt from her letter to speak to her support for
Solanas in the late 1960s, and to problematise the ascription of
Solanas as mad. She goes on to recount how she measured her own
feminist awakening against the claims of the manifesto, noting how
she and her friends read the manifesto 'almost as a sacred text' and
'laughed hilariously at Valerie's wicked satire.'^^ She narrates in some
detail her involvement with Ti-Grace Atkinson and Florynce Kennedy
in garnering support for Solanas' release from the psychiatric
institution where she was incarcerated after her trial, and references
numerous occasions in which she quoted the manifesto at feminist

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meetings to argue against other women's feminist positions. By
implication then, Dunbar credits Solanas as an inspiration in her
formative experience as a radical feminist — she constructs Solanas
as someone in whom she believed and for whom she fought.
However, her support for Solanas is tempered later in the memoir
when she describes meeting Solanas in detention. Dunbar claims to
have seen in Solanas a refiection of herself: 'I felt I was face to face
with myself.'^7 Despite this identification and her earlier
problematisation of Solanas' 'madness', she confesses to realising that
Solanas' 'violent act had marked her and that she probably wouldn't
be able to become a whole person, much less a leader in the women's
liberation movement as I had hoped.'^^ Here, the claim that Solanas
might never be a 'whole person', although mediated in the memoir by
the acknowledgement that Solanas had been driven mad by her
feminist sense of injustice, works to position Solanas as crazed. And
then Solanas disappears from the memoir — 'I never heard from
Valerie again.'^9 Moreover, the memoir's descriptive emphasis means
that Dunbar falls short of critiquing Solanas' place in the rise of
radical feminism. Nor does she explicitly comment on how she
interprets Solanas' views through the lens of her engagement with
feminism nearly forty years later. As such, her memoir is permeated
by a strange ambivalence towards Solanas.
Whilst second wave feminist memoirs such as Dunbar's are
sometimes marked by ambivalence towards Solanas, more
frequently, her contribution to the development of radical feminist
theory and praxis is completely elided. And this disavowal sometimes
translates into dismissal by implication. For example, speaking of
WITCH'S politics of spectacle — a version of feminist politics that
drew, at least in part, on Solanas' politics — Robin Morgan claims
that, at the end of the day, the women of WITCH had not 'raised
[their] own consciousness very far out of [their] own combat boots.'^"
Solanas' disappearance from the scene of feminist memory can in
part be explained away as an effect of the process of writing history. It
was not until the late 1970s that histories of second wave feminism
began to be written, by which stage the last vestiges of radical
feminism had either disappeared or been reworked and subsumed by
the cultural feminist project.^' Cultural feminism tended to operate
within an 'evolutionary', as opposed to 'revolutionary', paradigm,92
constituting itself as a legitimate driver of institutional social change.
This was refiected in and bolstered by, for example, significant
legislative gains masterminded by 'institutional' feminists of
organisations such as NOW93 and the establishment of numerous
university programmes dedicated to the study of women's issues in
the early to mid-i97Os.94 That is, mid-1970s second wave feminism,
in no small part, enacted change that, rather than challenge the

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existence of the state, endorsed the institutional apparatus of the
state. Solanas' demand for the apocalyptic destruction of the state
thus sat uncomfortably with the cultural feminist worldview.95
Concurrent with the mainstreaming and institutionalisation
characteristic of cultural feminism, feminism's relationship to
'violence' also began to radically transform. Whereas radical
feminists had celebrated Solanas, the female terrorist, as an
inspirational figure, by the mid-1970s the female terrorist had
become a much more problematic figure for feminism. In the shift to
cultural feminism, feminists reconfigured the terms of the struggle
for women's liberation. Rather than seeking to annihilate sexual
difference, cultural feminists — some of whom had originally
identified as radical feminists — attempted to revalue those qualities
traditionally associated with femininity. In this context, for example,
motherhood began to be (re)valorised by feminists in the US as an
exclusively feminine experience that offered up a vision of an
alternative world based on women's values.^^ It was at this point in
the history of second wave feminism that the alignment of women
with 'peace' and men with 'violence' gained rhetorical significance
within US feminist thought. Against the backdrop of this shift within
feminist politics and practice, cultural feminists constructed the
female terrorist, not as a celebrated icon of revolution, but rather as
victim of 'male violence' — she was explained away as what Morgan
describes as the 'demon lover'.97 Given that the female terrorist
became a problematic figure for cultural feminism, we can read
Solanas' almost complete erasure from the history of second wave
feminism as symptomatic of the writing of any history. That is, all
history is written from and through the present. We configure the
past in ways that corroborate our understanding of the present,
eliding events and personalities that don't fit with our understanding
of the path that led us 'here', into the 'now' of history's recording.
Given the problematic positioning of the female terrorist within the
cultural feminist imagination at the moment when histories of the
second wave began to emerge, it is not surprising that Solanas only
appears momentarily. However, overlooking the importance of
Solanas to the history of second wave feminism is not merely a
product of the fact that the female terrorist resonated uneasily with
the cultural feminist project. By way of concluding this article, I
suggest that Solanas' genocidal politics threaten the feminist project
and, as such, this provides the most compelling explanation for the
oversight of SCUM in second wave feminist histories. To make this
argument requires contemplation of the limitations of second wave
feminism as a liberal humanist project.

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Sexocide and the death of modem representation
Claiming that women are the superior beings of the human race,
Solanas argues that it is necessary — indeed urgent — that women
embark on a process of what we might call 'gender cleansing'.
SCUM'S call to exterminate men is a form of genocide that transfers
the category distinction from race to sex, namely, 'sexocide'. The
manifesto's call for feminist revolution borrows its arguments from
the science of eugenics.^s This use of the determinist language of
genetics for a specific political objective parallels the eugenics
argument that shaped Hitler's apocalyptic project of cleansing the
German nation in the Second World War. I have already explained
how Solanas taps into the rhetorical power of terrorism 'from below'
to make her political statement. Simultaneously, couching the idea of
feminist revolution in the language of genocide operates to mobilise
the threatening potential of state terrorism.')^ Textually, this is
foregrounded by Solanas' allusions to the most infamous of the
modern technologies of genocide, the gas chambers of the Nazi
Holocaust. In the final section of the manifesto, Solanas draws on
Holocaust narratives that describe how Jews were led to the shower
rooms of concentration camps and gassed to death. She beckons the
day when, 'the few remaining men can . . . go off to the nearest
friendly suicide centre where they will be quietly, quickly and
painlessly gassed to death.'i°°
In making connections with the Holocaust, Solanas evokes the
modern experience of genocide as apocalypse. In Western culture.
Hitler's genocide of the Jews and other groups thought to pollute the
homogeneity of the German state is frequently interpreted through
the lens of the secular apocalj^se.^"^ One reason for this is that both
genocide and apocalypse are structured around a principle of
eradication. That is, they work in terms of destruction, selection and
elimination.
Discursively, the apocalypse operates as a metaphor for the method
by which Utopia can be ushered in. The discourse of apocalypse has
its origins in Judeo-Christian religious philosophy^o^ and 'entails the
destruction of those who, depending upon the ideological context of
the particular text, either have unwarrantedly harassed God's people
and failed to acknowledge him, or failed to acknowledge the advent of
his Son.''°3 In the modern, secular reworking of the religious
apocalypse, the focus has tended to be less on a revelatory promise,
and more on the advent of unmitigated destruction, preserving the
principle of eradication that informs the religious formulation. ^"4 The
apocalypse gets constructed in terms of the eradication of those who

120 HECATE
impede homogeneity. That is, apocalypse engages with the problem
of representation.
In modernity, the Utopian vision of the state is often conceptualised
in terms of absolute homogeneity. The modern state is integrally
concerned with the problem of perfect representation. As Jon
Stratton argues, 'representation is the defining political feature of the
modern state,''°5 and further:
The nation is thought of as the undifferentiated entity made up
of individuals who represent themselves to themselves as an
imagined community having the identity of a particular nation.
The state represents the nation, something expressed through the
importance of voting to the modern state [my emphasis].'"^
In modern historical terms, the solution to this problem of perfect
representation by the state has, under certain conditions, been
thought to lie in the practice of genocide — the identification and
extermination of whole groups of people thought to impede the
homogeneity of the modern state. As Zygmunt Bauman identifies,
genocide only becomes thinkable in modernity. i°7 This is not to
suggest that genocide is inevitable in modernity but, rather, that it is
an everpresent potentiality of modernity; that the conditions of
modernity make genocide possible. In Bauman's argument, the two
primary conditions of modernity that render genocide a possibility
are those of technology and bureaucracy. He posits that it is not until
modernity, when technology is privileged as the major vehicle of
progress, and bureaucracy becomes central to the functioning of the
modern state, that mass extermination becomes a realisable goal.^°^
While this is true, there is a further feature of modernity that
facilitates the possibility of thinking genocide, namely the modern
representational order based on binarisms — Othering — that enables
the 'classifying out' of certain groups of people from society.
Genocide relies upon the identification of certain individuals as
members of distinct groups which are constructed as fundamentally
Other ('them') to the imagined community (the 'we') that forms the
basis of the nation-state. Stratton suggests that 'it was the modern,
discursive production of Otherness that made genocide a meaningful
possibility.'i°9 The formulation of certain groups as Other within the
oppositional structure of modern representation renders genocide a
thinkable practice. It is in this context that genocide registers as a
specifically modern possibility, and that Jonathan Boyarin can claim
that the Holocaust represents 'the funeral pyre of the Enlightenment
and of a certain culminating vision of Europe as the problem of
difference resolved.'""
In the same way as modernity renders genocide a thinkable
practice, the modern structure of gender representation sustaining

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order in modernity — dependent as it is upon the binary opposition of
Man and Woman, operating in a society that privileges technology as
progress and administered by the bureaucratic state — gives rise to
the possibility of sexocide that Solanas articulates.
In Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, Luce Irigaray
writes that:
Certain modern tendencies, certain feminists of our time, make
strident demands for sex to be neutralised. This neutralisation, if
it were possible, would mean the end of the human species . . . To
wish to get rid of sexual difference is to call for a genocide more
radical than any form of destruction there has ever been in
History."!
We can argue that Solanas' project of annihilating the entire male
population constitutes one method by which this neutralisation of sex
might take place. However, this is not in itself what makes Solanas'
proposition a radical one.
Greer writes of Solanas that 'more than any of the female students
she had seized upon the problem of the polarity which divides men
and women from humanity and places them in a limbo of opposite
sides [my emphasis].'"^ Here Greer signals Solanas' engagement with
modern forms of representation as a technology of (patriarchal)
power. "3 That is, she highlights the way that Solanas hones in on the
modern process of Othering — the binary opposition of Man and
Woman — that has been so central to the legitimisation of patriarchal
structures of power. Indeed, the problematic of modern forms of
representation constitutes a central concern of Solanas' manifesto. As
DeKoven notes of the manifesto, the call for:
Not just insight and change from men, [but also] retribution,
possibly to the extent of total annihilation . . . is very different
from eliminating oppression or even from anarchist acts of
targeted assassination. The target here is an entire identity
category rather than a position of power, or its symbolic
representative, within an oppressive system.""*
Sexocide entails not only imagining a literal form of destruction — a
monumental destruction of material bodies — but also the
obliteration of the binary structure that underlies the symbolic order
of gender relations in Western culture. In effect, what Solanas
proposes is the eradication of an entire group that constitutes one
half of the binary structure through which modern gender identity is
most commonly constructed. If genocide tends to be understood in
postmodern culture in terms of the apocalypse,"^ then Solanas'
manifesto represents an apocalyptic methodology for attaining the
modern Utopian promise of feminist equality. The manifesto, whilst it
inevitably draws upon the binary structure of representation

122 HECATE
 characteristic of modernity in order to make its case, when imagined
in practice, powerfully undermines that very system of
representation. Sexocide, in caUing for the eradication of men, marks
the apocalyptic end to gender representation and as such, the end to
the structure of representation underpinning the discursive
legitimation of modern social organisation. As Gornick notes, 'of
course, to contemplate such a world is also to contemplate the
eventual end of the family as we know it, competitive society as we
know it, sexuality as we know it.'"^
Imagining the feminist revolution in the apocalyptic terms of
eradication outlined by Solanas has important imphcations for
feminism. Indeed, the implications of the manifesto constitute a
threat to feminism; a threat that has inevitably meant that feminists
have overlooked Solanas as worthy of critique and failed to include
her in histories of the US second wave. Given that feminism as both a
social and philosophical practice draws upon the binary distinction
between men and women as its fundamental organising category,
Solanas' proposed annihilation of the male sex poses a profound
threat to the production of identity that is so crucial to the feminist
project, and in this sense threatens the existence of feminism itself.
Sexocide threatens feminists' ability to represent themselves not only
to the rest of society, but also to themselves. It marks the apocalyptic
end to feminism as a politics that represents itself in terms of the
binary distinction between men and women. Solanas' manifesto thus
describes a limit case for modern feminism, a historical end-point
beyond which feminism becomes both unimaginable and
impracticable. Positioned as she is, at the beginning of second wave
feminism in North America, Solanas' manifesto gets ignored by
second wave feminist histories because the implication of her
manifesto is the destabilisation of the defining category, the
differentiation between men and women, that forms the basis of
feminism's ability to represent itself, right at a point in time when
cultural feminists were struggling to construct women as a category
in order to effect social and political change.
In the contemporary political climate, feminists are no more
comfortable with Solanas' brand of violent resistance. She still makes
us feel uneasy — indeed, disarmingly so. Added to the problems she
poses to the representational structure around which feminism
organises, as I suggested at the beginning of this article, Solanas
represents the stereotypical man-hating lesbian feminist — a
stereotype that feminism has struggled to contain in the face of the
forces of the ongoing anti-feminist 'backlash'."^ in current times, she
still threatens, that is, to undo the work of 'legitimate' feminism. This
multifaceted threat she poses to feminism is further compounded in
the context of the current 'War on Terror' precisely because both

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Solanas and her manifesto invoke the highly politicised and globally
(for which we can read 'Western') denounced enemy of civil society —
namely, terrorism — as a vehicle for social change. In this context, it
is necessary, indeed urgent, that feminists turn their attention to
reconciling their 'violent' past with their vision for the future. Current
debates on terrorism would be usefully informed by such (feminist)
interventions, especially given that, in the midst of the minefield of
political allegiances proscribing the 'War on Terror', the invasions of
both Afghanistan and Iraq have been partly justified by Western
governments' opportunistic appropriation of feminist demands for
the 'liberation' of women from the brutal practices of their
governments.
Amanda Third
Notes
' Solanas as cited in Freddie Baer, 'About Valerie Solanas' in Valerie Solanas, The
SCUM Manifesto. Edinburgh and San Francisco: AK Press, 1997: 56.
2 Mary Harron and Daniel Minahun, I Shot Andy Warhol. London: Bloomsbury,
1996: XXV.
3 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch. London: Paladin, 1971: 308. Solanas'
attack, it seems, was in part motivated by what she saw as Warhol's personal
betrayal of her. Under the impression that Warhol had promised to direct a film
based on a script she had written entitled 'Up Your Ass', Solanas had reportedly
given Warhol her one and only copy of the manuscript to read, but he claimed to
have misplaced the script. Solanas accused him of appropriating the script as his
own, and seems to have been convinced that Warhol intended to produce the film
without giving her due credit (see Baer).
4 This image of Solanas as mad was further reinforced by Olympia Press' decision
to publish Solanas' SCUM Manifesto. In the midst of the publicity opportunity
created by Solanas' shooting of Warhol, Maurice Girodias published an edition of
the Manifesto whose cover featured a reproduction of the front page story from
the New York Post that had appeared on the day, with the headline ANDY
WARHOL FIGHTS FOR LIFE. Girodias' preface to the edition stated, 'this little
book is my contribution to the study of violence' as if the text represented a
psychological critique of the mind of a fanatical murderer (Harron and Minahan,
xxvii). In doing so, Girodias effectively undermined the political significance of
Solanas' text, downplaying its ability to impact on its audience. The history books
have not been much kinder to Solanas. Indeed, her political views have been all
too easily devalued as the mere ravings of a desperate lunatic, even amongst
some who recognise in themselves a shared anger at women's subordination. The
1995 film, / Shot Andy Warhol, retrieved Solanas from the relative obscurity in
which her memory has languished for the past three decades, and made
significant progress towards resurrecting her as a subject meriting intelligent
discussion. In this sense, the film attempts to offer something of a counter-
memory to Solanas' erasure from the annals of second wave feminism — and one
that has the capacity to reach a popular audience. In her introduction to the
screenplay, co-author, Mary Harron refers to Solanas as a 'neglected genius', and
claims that Solanas' fate 'made me wonder about blighted talents, vanished
possibilities, and what might be lurking in the great host of humanity we call
failures' (Harron and Minahan, ix). Evidently, in the screenplay, Harron wished

124 HECATE
to reclaim Solanas to some extent — to contextualise her attack on Warhol and
give credence to her strength and political insight. The film makes a concerted
effort to move beyond simplistic understandings of Solanas as crazed lesbian,
interspersing the scenes ofthe film with excerpts from the SCUM Manifesto in an
attempt to foreground Solanas' politics. However, / Shot Andy Warhol
overwhelmingly constructs Solanas as the victim of a history of abuse and traces
her actions in the context of a developing mental illness. In the final analysis, it is
Solanas' struggle with mental illness that prevails as the motive for the shooting
and, as such, the film works to reinforce dominant understandings of Solanas as
mad. The film also overwhelmingly constructs Solanas as a loner and accordingly
fails to pay attention to her impact on the community of radical feminists who
regarded her as an inspiration. Moreover, as the title ofthe film suggests, the plot
tends to revolve around events at the Factory, displacing the emphasis onto
Warhol and undermining Harron's intention to reclaim her as a political figure.
In this respect, the film exemplifies the way 'Warhol's account of Solanas' actions
has endured even in projects implicitly aimed at finally giving Solanas her due'
(James M. Harding, 'The Simplest Surrealist Act: Valerie Solanas and the
(Re)Assertion of Avantgarde Priorities', The Drama Review. 45.4 2001:143).
5 Valerie Solanas, The SCUM Manifesto. Edinburgh, San Francisco: AK Press,
1997:1.
* Solanas, 42-43.
7 Solanas, 1.
^ Solanas, 1.
9 Harron and Minahan, x.
'° See for example, Phyllis Chesler's landmark text. Women and Madness. San
Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1989.
" In North America, the group of women we now refer to as 'radical feminists'
comprised women who identified as 'politicos' (those who argued that women's
liberation was an important arm of the broader social protest movement — the
'New Left') and women who identified as 'feminists' (who insisted women needed
to organise separately).
'2 Ellen Willis, 'Foreword' to Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism
in America 1967-1975. Minneapohs: University of Minnesota Press, 1989: vii.
Barbara A. Crow credits radical feminism with slightly greater longevity — 1967-
1975 (See 'Introduction' to Barbara A. Crow (ed.). Radical Feminism: A
Documentary Reader. New York: New York University Press, 2000: 2).
'3 Alice Echols, Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America 1967-1975.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989: 243.
"t '15 Minutes Later . . . (or: The Short Sad Life of Valerie Solanas)', In Focus,
http://www.ge0cities.com/S0H0/2904/reviews.html [Date Accessed: 3 Jan.
2006].
15 Warhol subsequently claimed that 'if I weren't famous, I wouldn't have been
shot for being Andy Warhol' (Andy Warhol, The Philosophy ofAndy Warhol. San
Diego: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1975: 78).
1^ Harding, 142.
^7 Baer, 53. Warhol was pronounced clinically dead after the shooting but was
revived.
»8 Baer, 53.
•9 Harding, 144.
^° See '"Making Do": Uses and Tactics' in Michel de Certeau, The Practice of
Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1988: 35-39.

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2' Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the
Postmodern. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004: 256.
22 D e K o v e n , 2 5 6 .
23 Jonah Raskin, For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman.
Berkeley: University of Cahfornia Press, 1998: 220.
24 D e K o v e n , 2 5 6 .
25 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil
Rights Movement and the New Left. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979: 213-214.
This is the event that inspired the widespread myth of feminist l5ra burning and
is testimony to radical feminism's good sense of public relations. Robin Morgan
had sent press releases to a variety of media outlets, who then wrote and
published stories without actually attending the event, let alone witnessing a bra
burning.
=^ Echols, 93.
27 Greer, 3 0 8 . Robin Morgan, Florika, Peggy Dobbins, J u d y Duffett, Cynthia
Eunk, N a o m i Jaffe were a m o n g t h e 13 'heretical w o m e n ' w h o founded WITCH.
See Echols, 96.
28 W I T C H ' S guerrilla theatre w a s inspired b y t h e Yippie style activism
popularised b y J e r r y Rubin a n d Abbie Hoffman. F o r discussion of t h e Yippies,
see J o n a h Raskin; Aniko Bodroghkozy, Groove Tube: Sixties Television and the
Youth Rebellion. D u r h a m : Duke University Press, 2 0 0 1 ; a n d Lynn Spigel a n d
Michael Curtin (eds.). The Revolution Wasn't Televised: Sixties Television and
Social Conflict. New York: Routledge, 1997. The Yippies' political lineage itself
can b e traced back t o t h e Erench radical avantgarde Situationist m o v e m e n t . See
Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989, a n d Sadie Plant, The Most
Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age. London:
Routledge, 1992.
29 Evans notes that 'even t h o u g h t h e coverage of such [feminist] events was likely
to b e derogatory. . . t h e dra ma t i c rise in media coverage in 1969 a n d 1970
provoked a massive influx of n e w m e m b e r s into all b r a n c h e s of t h e feminist
m o v e m e n t ' (214).
30 I argue elsewhere that in t h e late 1960s a n d early 1970s, radical feminism gets
crosswired with t h e threat of feminism within t h e N o r t h American popular
imagination a n d that this h a d i m p o r t a n t implications for t h e ways radical
feminists enacted their version of feminist revolution. See A m a n d a Third,
'Eeminist Terrorists a n d Terrorist Feminists: Cross-wiring Terrorism with t h e
Violent Eeminist Threat' in S u s a n n a Scarparo (ed.). Violent Depictions.
Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, forthcoming.
3' Kennedy as cited in Baer, 54.
32 Echols, 168. This show of solidarity horrified Eriedan a n d other N O W
m e m b e r s w h o feared t h a t m e m b e r s of t h e general public might t h i n k t h a t N O W
condoned t h e shooting. Eriedan later said, ' n o action of t h e b o a r d of N e w York
NOW, of national NOW, no policy ever voted by t h e m e m b e r s advocated shooting
m e n in the balls, t h e elimination of m e n as proposed b y t h a t SCUM Manifesto^
(Eriedan as cited in Echols, 168). Solanas never expressed a n intention t o shoot
Warhol 'in t h e balls'. Indeed, it h a s always been a s s u m e d that Solanas shot with
'intent to kill'. However, if she was m e a n i n g to hit W a r h o l in t h e genitals, she was
a very b a d shot. H e r first two shots missed Warhol completely a n d h e r third shot
penetrated h i s u p p e r a b d o m e n . Eriedan's c o m m e n t m a y t h r o w a n ambiguous
light o n Solanas' claim t h a t 'I consider it i m m o r a l that I missed. I should have
done target practice' (Solanas as cited in Baer, 56).

126 HECATE
 33 Atkinson as cited in Baer, 54.
34 Solanas, 28.
35 Solanas, 4 3 .
36 In dominant discourse the terrorist challenge to the state is primarily
articulated in terms of a straightforward attack on the government of the day. As
Edward Herman and Gerry O'SuUivan in recounting the ways terrorism has been
represented in Western official discourse suggest, 'terrorists were evidently those
who used violence in opposing governments [my emphasis]' (The Terrorism'
Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of Terror, New
York: Pantheon, 1989: 44).
37 Social contract theoreticians such as Hobbes and Locke describe the transition
from the state of nature to civil society as the product of a contract between
rational individuals a n d the state whereby members of civil society agreed to
surrender a degree of individual freedom in return for the protection of the state.
See for example, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, C.B. Macpherson (ed.).
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968; and John Locke, Social Contract: Essays.
Oxford: Oxford University Press, i960. Importantly, the evolution of the modern
concept of society takes place at the very same time as the modern concept of the
state. Indeed, for Hobbes, standing at the beginning of the modern tradition of
social contract theory, society and the state were in fact the same thing.
38 If we consider the political theory of the seventeenth century, we fmd that
Reason is understood as forming the very basis of social organisation. Although
the state is often theorised in terms of the structural organisation of violence, it is
Reason that provides t h e legitimating discourse for the existence of the state in
modernity.
39 J o n Stratton writes, t h e 'social contract . . . is determined b y exclusion. T h e
social contract. . . provides security from those w h o a r e n o t a par t of it. T h e
contract t h u s calls into being t h e threat t o t h e existence of civil s o c i e t y . . . Those
t h a t a r e n o t a part, d e t e r m i n e t h e existence of civil society t h r o u g h t h e threat
which they pose t o it' {Writing Sites: A Genealogy of the Postmodern World.
Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1990: 210).
40 For further discussion of this idea see Genevieve Lloyd The Man of Reason:
'Male' and 'Female' in Western Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1993.
4' As Rose Weitz writes of Aristotle, for example:
Aristotle's biological theories centred a r o u n d the concept of heat. According t o
Aristotle, only embryos that h a d sufficient heat could develop into fully h u m a n
form. T h e rest b e c a m e female. I n other words, w o m a n was, in Aristotle's
words, a 'misbegotten m a n ' a n d a 'monstrosity' — less t h a n fully formed a n d
literally half-baked . . . Lack of heat, classical scholars argued, also produced a
plethora of other deficiencies in women, including a smaller structure, a frailer
constitution, a less developed brain, a n d emotional a n d moral weaknesses that
could e n d a n g e r any m e n who fell u n d e r w o m e n ' s spell
(Rose Weitz, 'A History of W o m e n ' s Bodies' in Rose Weitz (ed.). The Politics of
Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance and Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1998: 3-4).
42 Solanas, 1.
43 Solanas, 2.
44 See Miriam F. Polster, Eve's Daughters: The Forbidden Heroism of Men. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992.
45 Anthony Giddens describes the modern state as 'a set of institutional forms of
governance maintaining an administrative monopoly over a territory' [my

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emphasis]. {The Nation-State and Violence: Volume Two of a Contemporary
Critique of Capitalism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985:121).
46 Solanas, 20.
47 Solanas, 4 1 - 4 2 .
48 I mean here that t h e modern democratic nation state is patriarchal a n d
excludes women not only from sites of power, but also, as Carole Pateman argues
in The Sexual Contract (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), from the very political system
on which the state is based.
49 Carole Pateman, 'The Disorder of Women' in The Polity Reader in Gender
Studies. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994.
5" Pateman, 1994: 108-109. The nature of the threat women pose to dominant
order is grounded to a large degree in the historical linkage of 'women's nature'
with their reproductive physiology. In t h e modern Western patriarchal
imagination, t h e female body is constructed as a (potential) site of excess —
elusive, fiuid a n d requiring constant surveillance lest it escape t h e roles
prescribed for it by patriarchal culture. See also Alison Young, Imagining Crime:
Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations. London: Sage, 1996; a n d Lynda
Hart, Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. New Jersey:
Princeton University Press, 1994.
51 Solanas, 36.
52 Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time' in Toril Moi (ed.), The Kristeva Reader. New
York: Columbia University Press, 1986: 203.
53 Kristeva writes:
When a subject is too brutally excluded from this socio-symbolic stratum;
when, for example, a woman feels her affective life as a woman or her
condition as a social being too brutally ignored by existing discourse or power
(from her family to social institutions); she may, by counter-investing the
violence she has endured, make of herself a 'possessed' agent of this violence in
order to combat what was experienced as frustration — with arms which may
seem disproportional, but which are not so in comparison with the subjective
or more precisely narcissistic suffering from which they originate
(Kristeva, 203).
54 Vivian Gornick, 'Introduction t o the Olympia Press Edition of Valerie Solanas'
SCUM Manifesto published in London in 1971,' http://www.alexia.net.au/
~www/mhutton/iwd/gornick.html [Date Accessed: 27 June, 1998].
55 Lois Parkinson Zamora, Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in
Contemporary US and Latin American Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989:133.
5^ Solanas, 13.
57 Eor e x a m p l e , s h e writes, ' t h e female function is t o . . . c r e a t e a m a g i c w o r l d '
(Solanas, 4).
58 Gornick.
59 I take the idea of 'suicidal autoimmunity' from Jacques Derrida. See Giovanna
Borradori, 'Autoimmunity: Real a n d Symbolic Suicides: A Dialogue with Jacques
Derrida', Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues With JUrgen Habermas and
Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2 0 0 3 . SCUM, in Solanas'
vision, will only hasten a process that is already well underway: 'The male is
gradually eliminating himself. In addition to engaging in time-honoured and
classical wars and race-riots, men are more and more either becoming fags or are
obliterating themselves through drugs' (Solanas, 33).
^° Gornick.

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^' Hans Magnus Enzensberger, 'Two Notes on the End of the World', New Left
Review, n o (July — August, 1978): 79.
*2 Moshe Amon, 'The Phoenix Complex: Terrorism and the Death of Western
Civilisation' in Lawrence Zelic Freedman and Yonah Alexander (eds.).
Perspectives on Terrorism. Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1983:15.
^3 Amon, 17.
^4 Solanas, 42-43.
*5 Solanas, 43.
^^ See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin
and Spread ofNationalism. London: Verso, 1991.
67 As DeKoven states, 'this rising up was conceived . . . as a stage in the historical
sequence of capitalism, imperialism and world sociahst revolution' (DeKoven,
254).
^8 Indeed, for Kristeva the distinction between radical feminism and the forms of
feminism that preceded it revolves around a difference in orientation towards
time, around a temporal disjuncture. It is worth quoting her at length here:
In its beginnings, the women's movement, as the struggle of suffragists and of
existential feminists, aspired to gain a place in linear time as the time of
project and history [my emphasis]. In this sense, the movement, while
immediately universalist, is also deeply rooted in the socio-political life of
nations. The political demands of women; the struggles for equal pay for equal
work, for taking power in social institutions on an equal footing with men; the
rejection, when necessary, of the attributes traditionally considered feminine
or maternal in so far as they are deemed incompatible with insertion in that
history — all are part of the logic of identification with certain values
[emphasis in original]: . . . with the logical and ontological values of a
rationality in the nation-state ... Ina second phase, linked.. .to the younger
women who came to feminism after May 1968... linear temporality has been
almost totally refused [my emphasis], and as a consequence there has arisen
an exacerbated distrust of the entire political dimension . . . This current seems
to think of itself as belonging to another generation — qualitatively different
from the first one — in its conception of its own identity and, consequently, of
temporality as such [my emphasis] (Kristeva, 193-94).
We can understand Kristeva here as alluding to radical feminism's
conceptualisation of revolution as the apocalypse.
*9 DeKoven, 267.
70 Gornick. Similarly, Todd Gitlin argues that, in response t o their perceived
oppression both within and vrithout the New Left, 'women's groups reacted . . .
with their o w n version of revolutionary apocalypse' (Todd Gitlin, The Whole
World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and the Unmaking of the New
Left. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980: 373). He goes on to suggest
that, in the late 1960s, there was a palpable feeling that 'sisterhood was, indeed,
powerful, that this commune or collective or 'relationship' or theory was
hastening the Last Days of Patriarchy' (Gitlin, 375).
71 Revolution, in as much as 'it affirms the schismatic nature of the
transformative moment, as a qualitative leap towards an unimaginable future'
(Rita Felski, Gender and Modernity. Cambridge, Mass, and London: Harvard
University Press, 1995: 170) and the arrival of Utopia, intersects with the
eschatological discourse of apocalypse. Configured as the fundamental rupture of
history — a rupture beyond which society is no longer imaginable or recognisable
— the idea of revolution is cast as end-time manifested. Revolution thus signifies

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in the cultural imagination as the moment of the apocalypse. Or in other words,
in modernity, the apocalypse is secularised in terms of revolution.
72 Gornick.
73 Echols, 55.
74 See Echols, 54.
75 'What is Liberation?' Women: A Journal of Liberation in Barbara A. Crow
(ed.). Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York
University Press, 2000: 81.
76 Echols, 185.
77 Echols, 105.
78 Echols, 158.
79 Echols, 104.
80 Evans, 2 0 9 .
8' Maurice Girodias w a s t h e chief editor of t h e radical Olympia Press t h a t
published, a m o n g other works, William Burroughs' The Naked Lunch, Samuel
Beckett's Watt, Nabokov's Lolita, a n d Henry Miller's Plexus. Solanas h a d been
actively pursuing Girodias t o publish t h e SCUM Manifesto for s o m e t i m e prior t o
t h e shooting at t h e Eactory, b u t it was not until Solanas' shooting of W a r h o l t h a t
Girodias perceived an audience for t h e text.
82 Echols, 105.
83 Shulamith Eirestone, 'The Dialectic of Sex' (1970) in Barbara A. Crow (ed.).
Radical Feminism: A Documentary Reader. New York: New York University
Press, 2000: 95.
84 Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Outlaw Woman: A Memoir of the War Years, 1960-
1975. San Francisco: City Lights, 2001:119-120.
85 Dunbar-Ortiz, 123.
86 Dunbar-Ortiz, 128.
87 Dunbar-Ortiz, 138.
88 Dunbar-Ortiz, 138-139.
89 Dunbar-Ortiz, 139.
90 Morgan cited in Echols, 97.
91 See Echols.
92 In her discussion of the rhetoric of English suffragette literature, Rita Eelski
(1995) argues there are two main tropes through which feminism has envisaged
social change. The evolutionary paradigm configures the shift towards the
feminist Utopia as 'an organic process of development' (Eelski, 148) whereby,
through a process of piecemeal reform in the context of the inexorable fiow of
history, society gradually progresses towards the feminist Utopia. In this
formulation, the individual is understood as shaping history both from within,
and in relation to, the state. This contrasts with the revolutionary paradigm that
envisages 'the violent overthrow of an existing regime, but it simultaneously
encompasses a wider and more general meaning of any process of radical and
fundamental change' (Eelski, 148). The idea of revolution encompasses a notion
of individuals bringing on, forcing even, the advent of Utopia. I posit that this
troping infiuences the production of the two dominant paradigms of second wave
feminist activist strategy; ongoing reform as posited by liberal and institutional
forms of feminism, and the call for violent feminist revolution that characterises
radical feminism.
93 Eor example, in 1972, US Congress had passed the Equal Rights Amendment,
followed quickly by the US Supreme Court's 1973 legalisation of abortion (Susan
Ealudi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. New York:
Anchor, 1991: 233).

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94 The San Diego State University established its Department of Women's Studies
in 1970 and lays claim to being the oldest women's studies program in the United
States. According to the university's website, by the early 1970s, 'some 6 0 0
courses and 20 programs were identified by Female Studies II, a collection of
curricula and syllabi' ('Program History Timeline,' San Diego State University
Women's Studies, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/wsweb/timeline.htmtfi97os
[Date of Access: 14 J a n . 2006]).
95 Whilst there is not the space to elaborate this idea further here, the historical
neglect of Solanas can be understood as a function of a more generalised retreat
from the validity of the idea of 'revolution' that began in the mid-1970s and has
reached its heights in the neo-liberal context of current day culture.
96 J a n e Alpert is often credited with writing the landmark text of cultural
feminism — an essay entitled 'Mother Right: A New Feminist Theory'
{Documents from the Women's Liberation Movement: An On-line Archival
Collection, http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/dept/wsweb/timehne.htmtfi97os [Date
of Access: 14 J a n . 1006]) in which she viciously condemned 'male violence' and
argued that women's maternal capacities provided the basis for a peaceful
society. Alpert served time in prison for 'terrorist activities' carried out while she
was a member of the Jackson-Melville Unit (see J a n e Alpert, Growing Up
Underground: The Astonishing Autobiography of a Former Radical Fugitive —
and the Illumination of an American Era. New York: Morrow, 1981). She wrote
'Mother Right' whilst she was on the run, publishing it through the help of her
close friend, Robin Morgan. The vehemence of Alpert's condemnation of male
violence and her rejection of her association with terrorism in this piece may be
read as an attempt to recuperate her 'terrorist' actions by embracing feminism.
Indeed, in this sense, the text speaks to the problematic positioning of the female
terrorist in the context of cultural feminism. However, this also suggests that
cultural feminism's emphasis on peaceful transformation based on the
revaluation of 'feminine' values might also have been a response to feminism's
perceived need to distance itself from terrorism.
97 Robin Morgan, The Demon Lover: The Roots of Terrorism. London: Piatkus,
2001.
98 For a history of the science of eugenics, see Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of
Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1985.
99 The idea of state terrorism, as distinguished from state sponsored terrorism,
encompasses violence or repressive action carried out by governments against
either their own populations (or segments thereof) or the populations of other
states. Historically, the idea of state terrorism has been associated with the
practice of genocide, with Hitler's Nazi Germany providing the archetype for both
state terrorism and genocide.
'00 Solanas, 46.
'°' The usual claim made about the term 'Holocaust' is that it means 'burnt
offering' and is used to describe the Nazi genocide because of its connotations of
widespread or total destruction. Similarly, the Hebrew term commonly used in
Israel to refer to the slaughter of the Jews in the Second World War is Shoah,
meaning destruction. Further, Jonathan Boyarin argues that we live 'in the
shadow of the apocalypse . . . The specific event I am thinking of as casting that
shadow is indeed the Nazi genocide' ('At Last, All the Goyim: Notes on a Greek
Word Applied to Jews' in Richard Dellamora (ed.). Postmodern Apocalypse:
Theory and Cultural Practice at the End. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995: 43).

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•02 Traditionally, apocalypse is thought in terms of revelation; the time when God
will reveal the secrets of everlasting happiness to those who believe in Him,
followed by their elevation to the realm of divine perfection. Although Jewish and
Christian thought construct the apocalypse quite differently, they both share a
vision of widespread destruction as the necessary precursor to the advent of the
divine community.
'03 Boyarin, 42.
104 As Boyarin notes, 'in recent usages of the apocalypse, this destructive element
has come to the fore' (42).
'05 Jon Stratton, Coming Out Jewish: Constructing Ambivalent Identities.
London and New York: Routledge, 2000:118.
'°6 Stratton, 2000:119.
'07 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust. Cambridge: Polity, 1989.
'08 xiie call for sexocide expressed in Solanas' manifesto is a possibility produced
by the conditions of modernity. For example, technology is central to the
realisation of the goals of the manifesto. Solanas claims that, with modern
reproductive technologies, it is possible to reproduce the human race without the
help of men. She writes, 'it is now technically possible to reproduce without the
aid of males. . . and to produce only females. We must begin immediately to do
so' (Solanas, 1). Indeed, she privileges technology as central to the emancipation
of women from 'male control'. Technology is the tool that provides the feminist
revolution with its Aufhebung. It is constructed as the mechanism of apocaljrpse.
She writes, 'the male changes only when forced to do so by technology, when he
has no choice, when 'society' reaches the stage where he must change or die.
We're at that stage now, if women don't get their asses into gear fast, we may very
well all die' (Solanas, 21). Solanas' call to action is couched in the language of
urgency, situating SCUM's arrival on the political scene at the moment of the
apocalypse. Women are constructed here, in a particularly modern sense, as the
rational agents of history's transformation, indeed its termination. And
technology, so central to both the imagining and the implementation of
modernity, provides them with the means to achieve their ends.
'°9 Jon Stratton, 'Thinking Through the Holocaust. A Discussion Inspired by
Hilene Flanzbaum (ed.). The Americanisation of the Holocaust,' Continuum:
Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 14.2 (2000b): 237.
"0 Boyarin, 43.
'" Luce Irigaray, Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison
Martin, New York, London: Routledge, 1993:12.
"= Greer, 308.
"3 In describing the process of Othering as a 'technology of power', I am drawing
upon Teresa de Lauretis' Foucauldian reading of gender in Technologies of
Gender: Essays on Theory, Film and Fiction. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1987.
'"> DeKoven, 260.
"51 refer here to postmodern culture because Jean-FranQois Lyotard argues that
Auschwitz (the Holocaust) marks the end of modernity and 'the crime opening
postmodernity' inasmuch as it signifies the end of 'progress' and the notion of
man's [sic] perfectability" (TTie Postmodern Explained to Children:
Correspondence 1982-1985, trans. Don Berry et al. Sydney: Power Publications,
1992: 30-1).
"* Gornick.
"7 See Faludi.

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