“Returning to the scenes of your crimes” 1

Hélène fleckinger

In the article “SCUM ou l’écume inconnue”, published in 1972 in the Torchon brûle, the feminist writer Cathy Bernheim evokes, through a series of striking metaphors addressed to men, the overthrowing moment when women become aware of their specific oppression and choose the path of their liberation:

“One day, you cannot find your socks. Or the roast gives you heartburn. Or your Report on firing without warning has been used as a trivet. Something gets stuck, everything goes wrong, the chips are down, all bets are off: this is when SCUM appears”. 2

From 1970 and the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement, the “scum” rebels reject the priority given by leftist or-ganisations to class struggle and constitutes itself as an independ-ent political force. This is what the manifesto by the American fem-inist Valerie Solanas envisioned a couple of years earlier: “SCUM announces our storms, here we are, hidden behind each word, only visible by ourselves”. 3 As the result of “rage accumulated over cen-