SCUM MANIFESTO contexts 44

to live through and fuse with the female, and by claiming as his own all female characteristics — emotional strength and independence, forcefulness, dynamism, decisiveness, coolness, objectivity, assertiveness, courage, integrity, vital-ity, intensity, depth of character, grooviness, etc — and pro-jecting onto women all male traits — vanity, frivolity, trivi-ality, weakness, etc. It should be said, though, that the male has one glaring area of superiority over the female — pub-lic relations. (He has done a brilliant job of convincing mil-lions of women that men are women and women are men)”.

This passage can be read as the satirical revisiting of domi-nant, stereotypical representations, which still remain normalised today. Their violence and absurdity only become visible when the gendered narrative is reversed — when characteristics that are culturally perceived as masculine become assigned to women.

Through her subversive rhetoric, Solanas breaks away from images of respectable femininity and heteronormative happiness; she disrupts “gender sameness” 15 discourses, claimed by certain women and gay liberation movements 16; she collides with a white bourgeois feminism, shaped by neoliberal demands that consist in claiming the same “rights” — understood as a euphemism for “privileges” — as dominant men, in calling for the right to occu-py masculine, bourgeois, heterosexual norms.

“What will liberate women, therefore, from male control is the total elimination of the money-work system, not the at-tainment of economic equality with men within it”.