Corroded with SCUM

In a letter to Andy Warhol in August of 1967, Valerie Solanas reports that she has almost finished writing the SCUM Manifesto and plans to start hawking it on the streets in the next few days: “SCUM’s about to get into high gear.” She anticipates that once the manifesto hits the streets, “the world’ll be corroded with SCUM.” (Letter from Valerie Solanas to Andy Warhol, August 1, 1967, Archives Collection, The Andy Warhol Museum).

As time has passed, however, the world seems less corroded by SCUM than enlivened, inspired, and amused by it. In the years since 1967 the SCUM Manifesto has become a well-regarded and widely circulated text in anglophone feminist literatures. Now mostly an object of veneration, it is not gnawing away at the world with the intensity that Solanas wished for in 1967.

Returning to Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the manifesto, this project will read for what might still be disruptive about Solanas’s text. In particular, how are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? Special attention will be paid to anger in feminist literatures.

I will be editing a volume of Solanas's correspondence. This book (“Dear Sniveling Cowards, Liars, and Libelers:” The Letters of Valerie Solanas) is under contract with Duke University Press for publication in 2027.