SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 39

Supporting and re-exploring the voices of Valerie Solanas, Delphine Seyrig and Carole Roussopoulos

Callisto Mc Nulty

SCUM Manifesto is one of the most disseminated 1970s femi-nist videos, whether it be in contemporary art spaces, activist and academic circles, or online. The great responsiveness of young and older audiences alike — ranging from (more or less nervous) laughs to door slamming — across Europe and further abroad, bears wit-ness to the way it still resonates today, but also to the troubled re-actions it continues to provoke.

In 1967, Valerie Solanas wrote and self-published SCUM Mani-festo, later published in 1968 in the United States by Olympia Press, under the impetus of the editor Maurice Girodias. Armed with a biting sense of humour, Solanas preys on male domination. SCUM is the manifesto of the female scum of the earth.

The French translation of the text, published in 1971, also by Olympia 1, was soon out of print, and is thereby hard to get hold of. In 1976, Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig decided to re-spond to the epistemic violence of such editorial silencing by per-forming a reading of the text. In doing so, the two directors aimed to make Solanas’s voice heard as well as to legitimise this radical