SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 41

Valerie Solanas’s voice cannot simply be addressed as a cry, de-tached from her story and history. It is necessary to relocate the manifesto in its social, political and cultural context. The recep-tion of Solanas’s radical prose is differently problematic in 2017, which is a time marked by the “disciplining of female tongues” 8 through a certain progressive, politically correct mask of sexism. The manifesto’s satirical vision deserves to be underscored in or-der to avoid a literal reading of the text, fueled by the misogynis-tic mythology, which continues to shape the figure of the femi-nist killjoy — the fanatic, the man-hater or the “feminist stifled by austere activism ” 9 (Solanas obviously belongs to the first and sec-ond categories). SCUM Manifesto possesses a “quality that is too of-ten denied to women: humour” 10, an incisive sense of humour that echoes the “enchanted feminism” 11 evoked by Carole Roussopou-los’s video work.

“Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no as-pect 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, in-stitute complete automation and destroy the male sex.”

The first paragraph of SCUM introduces the anarchic-femi-nist-nihilistic tone of the manifesto whose violence resonates with the pandemic violence directed against women in general, and