ABSTRACT
My reading of Solanas’s manifesto counters her image as a “straightfor ward” feminist revolutionary who was antisex. Historians and commentators on the women’s movement such as Alice Echols and B. Ruby Rich have con nected the SCUM manifesto’s antisex element to celibate radical feminist groups and, later, lesbian separatism and the Mary Daly-Andrea Dworkin sex-dread politics.5 While the SCUM manifesto’s influence on these groups is undeniable, tracing such a lineage emphasizes the cultural feminist out comes rather than the radical potential of SCUM’s performative politics.6 What is lost in this reduction is the contingency of performative politics that constitutes its actors in a way that is radically different from identity politics in which the experience of oppression serves as the foundation for a political constituency. Solanas neither identified with a particular group nor was she, in practice, antisex. She sometimes claimed to be a lesbian; she had at other times worked as a prostitute, panhandled, and written pornography (Rich 18). SCUM’s satiric cool comes in part from knowing the sex “scenes.” SCUM females are “always funky, dirty, low-down” (32), but the fictional SCUM females bracket these personal idiosyncrasies so that they can mimic
Laura Winkiel
the disembodied, masculine universal, a mimicry that, at first, appears anti sex. Solanas considered infeasible sexual politics, a politics based on sexual desire; she states, “Sex is the refuge of the mindless” (30), and she substituted relationships reminiscent of erotically charged Platonic friendships: “Love is not dependency or sex, but friendship.. . . Love can exist only between two secure, free-wheeling, independent, groovy female females, since friend ship is based on respect, not contempt” (26). To this extent, she uncritically assumed a political position that leaves the body behind. This rhetorical stance serves two purposes. The first addresses the need for women to fight for control of their bodies and reproductive capacity. SCUM females are liberated from their bodies and their material condition as women by imagin ing themselves freed from biological constraints. By so doing, SCUM females are said to be no longer subjugated by men who mask their de pendency on women by dominating them.7 Second, the rhetoric reverses the roles between males and females and exaggerates them to make a contro versial point. Men are imagined to be encumbered by their bodies and sexu ality while women move effordessly through public space. In Melissa Deem’s apt phrase, SCUM females become “frictionless” (531). They confidently travel a “nomadic path” while the hyperembodied male encounters resis tance: “He is a completely isolated unit, incapable of rapport with anyone” (Solanas 4).
