"Valerie Solanas, SCUM artist: dyke anger and American (counter)culture"

In the past fifty years Valerie Solanas’s name has been associated with a single text, SCUM Manifesto (1967). The image of Solanas circulating in mainstream culture and media discourse has been produced through gendered categories of madness and violence, existing as “a distorted permutation of the archetypal ‘femme fatale’ figure”. Only recently literary scholars and cultural historians have started to unearth her other writings and reclaim Valerie Solanas as a crucial figure of the sixties counterculture – a writer, playwright and “social propagandist” who published her work in The Cavalier together with Ray Bradbury and other intellectuals, and was often interviewed by The Village Voice. This essay intends to illustrate the literary and cultural value of her works, the defiant play Up Your Ass (1965) and the autobiographical short-story “A Young Girl’s Primer on How to Attain the Leisure Class” (1966), as well as that of her most famous work, where she appropriated the genre of the avant-garde manifesto and manipulated it to her own ends through parody, sarcasm and a visionary rhetoric.