men but also women wearing male masks — these “male-women” or “daddy’s girls”, “co-managing the shitpile”, and thus fueling the patriarchal system’s good functioning. It should however be not-ed that Solanas’s excessive project does not rank up with the tan-gible insanity of everyday life, illustrated by the television news footage in Carole Roussopoulos and Delphine Seyrig’s 1976 video response.

SCUM is a text of unsettling ambiguity, marked by the encoun-ter between excess and rationalism, utopia and nihilism, logs and pathos, fiction and reality, individualism and the desire for collec-tive resistance. The power and fragility of the work reside in this tension. As emphasised by Catherine Lord, “Solanas’s riffs backfire when they lie dead on the printed page, the voice of the reader be-ing their only hope of animation”. 25

The manifesto has been subject to several sexist editorial  “fram-ings” such as that by Girodias and Krassner at Olympia Press, who “distorted, warded off and cancelled the meaning of the book”. 26 Fixed within the categories of the scandal, the comical or the patho-logical, the manifesto’s troubling power becomes undermined.

For instance, while Christiane Rochefort’s text, “La définition de l’opprimé” (“The definition of the oppressed”), introduced the first French edition of SCUM Manifesto (1971) from a feminist perspec-tive, the 1998 edition published by Les Mille et une Nuits ends with an ironic afterword by Michel Houellebecq, “L’Humanité, stade sec-