ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the possibilities and limits of anti-masculinist violence in two '1968' moments: mid-1970s mobilisations against sexual violence, including self-defence and vigilante action, and, briefly, Valerie Solanas and the Society for Cutting Up Men during the late 1960s. Female radicals and feminists during the 1970s held a variety of positions on violence. Women terrorists were rendered as non-women holding phallic guns. The moment revealed valuable debates over the legitimacy of violence, and one context in which 'women terrorists' appeared involved contemporaneous feminist critiques of violence. The goal of the feminist action is to call attention to, upset, and reverse quotidian masculinist violence; that is, to emancipate rather than intimidate. It dramatises the experience of women by forcing men to have an analogous experience. The new recuperative historiography on violent women re-subjectivises the positions of certain women in ways that lay claim to continuities with the 1970s.
