SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 40
feminist text through their video mise-en-scène. In this sense, this video is rooted in the feminist project of the two “Insoumuses” 2 di-rectors: giving voice to women whose voices are usually silenced, re-appropriated; “amplifying these silences in grating volume”. 3
Solanas’s troubling prose
Sensationalism sells: “it took Solanas’s gunshot against Andy Warhol [in June 1968] for Maurice Girodias to publish SCUM Man-ifesto”. 4 The editor replaced the title originally chosen by Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, by the acronym S.C.U.M. and the subheading “So-ciety for Cutting Up Men”, thereby inscribing the text within Olym-pia Press’s subversive editorial line. 5 As emphasised by the authors Annie Elm, Catherine Crachat and Rose Prudence, Solanas was subject to a form of “psychoanalyzing sexism” 6, used to under-mine her work. The act of underlining Solanas’s so-called deviant femininity which is connected to her eternal outsider status, trans-forms a real and legitimate collective rage into an individualised and pathologised cry of despair — the typical symptom of female hysteria — “that deserves to be rapidly forgotten due to its reso-lutely unrealistic nature”. 7
2 “Insoumuses” is the name of the video collective created by Delphine Seyrig, Ioana Wieder, and Carole Roussopoulos in 1976. It is a play on words with “insoumises” (which translates as “insubordinates” or “unsubmissive”) and “muses”.
3 Charles E. Morris quoted in “A turn to Rhetoric”. Enculturation → http://enculturation.net/files/QueerRhetoric/queerarchive/theory2.html.
4 Paul Krassner’s commentary of the first edition of S.C.U.M. Manifesto published by Olympia Press in 1968 in Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, Association pour tailler les hommes en pièces, Paris, Mille et une nuits, 2005, p.110
5 Olympia Press is renowned for its avant-garde, erotic editorial choices. For instance, it first published Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, which was censored in December 1956.
6 Annie-Elm, Catherine Crachat, Rose Prudence, “Le Sexisme Psychanalysant”, 1974, in Le Sexisme Ordinaire, Paris, Seuil, 1976, pp. 52-66
7 Dominique Fauquet, “Valerie Solanas Vivante” in Valerie Solanas, SCUM, Paris, L’Unique et son ombre, 1987, p. 72