Valerie Solanas Livres

Valerie Solanas’s legendary play explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces. Valerie Solanas’s legendary play, Up Your Ass—never published during her lifetime but full of her signature irreverence and wit, incisiveness, and camp—explodes social and sexual mores and the hypocritical, patriarchal culture that produces them. The play, the full title of which is Up Your Ass Or From the Cradle to the Boat Or The Big Suck Or Up from the Slime, marches out a cast of screwy stereotypes: the unknowing john, the frothy career girl, the boring male narcissist, two catty drag queens, the sex-depraved housewife, and a pair of racialized pickup artists, among others. At the center is protagonist Bongi Perez—a thinly veiled Solanas—a sardonic, gender-bending hustler who escorts us through the back alleys of her street life. The fictionalized predecessor to SCUM Manifesto, the play shares the same grand, subversive, implicative language, equally spitting and winking, embracing the margins, the scum, and selling a trick along the way.

Classic radical feminist statement from the woman who shot Andy Warhol “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect 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, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Outrageous and violent, SCUM Manifesto was widely lambasted when it first appeared in 1968. Valerie Solanas, the woman who shot Andy Warhol, self-published the book just before she became a notorious household name and was confined to a mental institution. But for all its vitriol, it is impossible to dismiss as the mere rantings of a lesbian lunatic. In fact, the work has proved prescient, not only as a radical feminist analysis light years ahead of its time—predicting artificial insemination, ATMs, a feminist uprising against underrepresentation in the arts—but also as a stunning testament to the rage of an abused and destitute woman. In this edition, philosopher Avital Ronell’s introduction reconsiders the evocative exuberance of this infamous text.

'Zu den vielen erstaunlichen Merkmalen, die Valerie Solanas’ S. C. U. M. Manifesto (Manifest der Gesellschaft zur Vernichtung der Männer) kennzeichnen, gehören sein scharfsichtiger Blick und seine konsequente Durchführung. So, als kreise die Verfasserin wie ein Greifvogel hoch oben über der Zivilisation, während sie seelenruhig entscheidet, in welchen der Zuchtbullen auf der Weide des rechtschaffenen Bauern sie ihre Klauen schlagen soll – und schließlich alle, einen nach dem anderen, zerfleischt, bis nur noch ein einziges Rindvieh übrig ist, das mit dem kleinsten Pimmel und dem lautesten Schnarchen: der Bauer selbst.' (Sjón) Im Juni 1968 borgte sich Valerie Solanas etwas Geld, kaufte davon eine Pistole, warf sich in schwarze Klamotten und ging in die Factory, um Andy Warhol niederzuschießen. Sie feuerte drei Schüsse auf ihn ab, der letzte traf ihn in die Lunge. 'Es geschieht nicht oft, dass ich jemanden erschieße', sagte sie in der Verhandlung – und: 'Lest mein Manifest, das erklärt euch, wer ich bin.'