SCUM Manifesto

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The SCUM Manifesto is a work of radical feminism . It comes from Valerie Jean Solanas (1936–1988).

history

In 1967 Solanas met the publisher Maurice Girodias , who at that time mainly published underground literature and pornography . He was enthusiastic about her “pun” and described her as an “ iconoclast ”. He bought her the rights to the SCUM Manifesto .

On June 3, 1968, Solanas shot Andy Warhol . Girodias used the public attention generated by the scandal to publish Solanas' SCUM Manifesto .

The SCUM Manifesto was filmed in 1976 with Delphine Seyrig . It was adapted and staged for the stage by Mario Eick in 2004 under the title Manifesto .

content

The manifesto begins with the following passage:

"Life in this society is a complete stupidity, no aspect of society can interest women, so the enlightened, responsible and adventurous women have no choice but to overthrow the government, abolish the monetary system, introduce comprehensive automation and that destroy male sex. "

Solanas writes that history has shown that men are neither able nor willing to act humanly and therefore must be destroyed in order for a human society to be built. Those women whom she describes as “collaborators of male rule” are judged even harsher.

Maurice Girodias, the editor of the SCUM manifesto, claimed that SCUM stands for Society for Cutting Up Men (literally: Society for the dismemberment of men). Solanas, however, never seemed to have intended it that way. The phrase Society for Cutting Up Men never appears in the text and Solanas refers to a specific type of woman, not men, as SCUM . She writes:

"The real opposition therefore does not exist between women and men, but between SCUM on the one hand - dominant, secure, self-confident, nasty, violent, selfish, independent, proud, adventurous, stormy and pressing, arrogant women who feel able to rule the universe who have already stormed to the limits of this society and who are ready to push beyond what is offered to them here - and on the other side the nice, passive, accommodating, 'cultivated', polite, modest , submissive, dependent, frightened, unconscious, insecure, recognition-seeking daddy-daughter [...] "

reception

Mary Harron praises Solanas' "pronounced propensity for comedy" and describes the SCUM manifesto as a "brilliant satire " in which Solanas blames men for every evil in the modern world. Solanas himself denied that your work was a 'put-on', that is, a prank or a parody.

Other authors also argue that the SCUM Manifesto is a satire and parody in the spirit of Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal , which deals with patriarchy and Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis . The text only replaces the word woman with man and uses all the clichés of psychoanalytic theory: the biological accident, the imperfect sex, the penis envy , which has now become pussy envy . In an interview with Village Voice magazine , Solanas said that her manifesto was not intended as a serious guide to action.

The Scum Manifesto is mentioned in the novel Kampfsterne by the writer Alexa Hennig von Lange , published in 2018 .

literature

  • SCUM manifesto , Olympia Press, London, 1971, ISBN 0-7004-1030-9 .
  • Manifesto of the Society for the Destruction of Men, SCUM , March Verlag, Darmstadt 1969. Licensed edition by Philo Fine Arts, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-86572-666-7

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ EMMA March / April 1997: The Destruction. Accessed December 25, 2010.
  2. ^ Susan Ware, Stacy Lorraine Braukman, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study: Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary Completing the Twentieth Century Belknap Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2004, ISBN 0-674-01488-X , p. 603: "When publisher Girodias claimed that SCUM was an acronym for Society for Cutting Up Men (something Solanas never seems to have intended), he reinforced the idea that the manifesto was part of a movement of man haters. "
  3. ↑ Elizabeth D. Hoover: She Shot Andy Warhol ( Memento June 8, 2007 in the Internet Archive ). Retrieved May 26, 2019. "Girodias did publish the" SCUM Manifesto. "(He apparently made up the fact that SCUM stood for" Society for Cutting Up Men. "Solanas denied that was her acronym.)"
  4. ↑ Solanas quoted in: Brigitte Classen: Pornost: Triebkultur und Profit Raben Verlag, Munich 1988, ISBN 3-922696-18-X , p. 160.
  5. ↑ marble stone, Robert: A winter memory of Valerie Solanis: scum goddess . In: The Village Voice . tape 13 . New York.
  6. ^ Ginette Castro: American Feminism: A Contemporary History New York University Press, New York 1990, ISBN 0-8147-1435-8 , pp. 73-74: "If we examine the text more closely, we see that its analysis of patriarchal reality is a parody [...] The content itself is unquestionably a parody of the Freudian theory of femininity, where the word woman is replaced by man [...] All the cliches of Freudian psychoanalytical theory are here: the biological accident, the incomplete sex, "penis envy" which has become "pussy envy," and so forth [...] Here we have a case of absurdity being used to as a literary device to expose an absurdity, that is, the absurd theory which has been used to give "scientific" legitimacy to patriarchy [...] What about her proposal that men should quite simply be eliminated, as a way of clearing the dead weight of misogyny and masculinity? This is the inevitable conclusion of the feminist pamphlet , in the same way that Jonathan Swift's proposal that Irish children (as useless mouths) should be fed to the swine was the logical conclusion of his bitter satirical pamphlet protesting famine in Ireland. Neither of the two proposals is meant to be taken seriously, and each belongs to the realm of political fiction, or even science fiction, written in a desperate effort to arouse public consciousness. "
  7. ↑ Patricia Juliana Smith: The Queer Sixties Routledge, New York 1999, ISBN 0-415-92168-6 , pp. 68-69: "The SCUM Manifesto parodies the performance of patriarchal social order it refuses. It claims a universal authority to run the world on a seamless "we" of SCUM women, but by the appropriation of universalizing discourse, the manifesto reveals how the universal is not universal at all. Solanas's imagined group of vanguard feminist revolutionaries proclaim their takeover of the world. Those particular women, who are only a subset of all women, mock the "serious" way in which certain men actually do run the world. Those men naturalize their their universal authority through the guise of a purportedly democratic access to such power within the public sphere.
  8. ↑ James Penner: Pinks, Pansies, and Punks: The Rhetoric of Masculinity in American Literary Culture Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2011, ISBN 978-0-253-35547-8 , p. 233: "As a work of satire, the" SCUM Manifesto "is rhetorically effective in that it deconstructs the reader's received notions of masculinity and femininity."
  9. ^ J. Hoberman: The Magic Hour: Film At Fin De Siècle Temple University Press, Philadelphia 2003, ISBN 1-56639-995-5 , p. 48: "[...] Solanas's outrageous SCUM Manifesto - pegged by its first publisher Maurice Girodias as a Swiftian satire on the depraved behavior, genetic inferiority, and ultimate disposability of the male gender. "
  10. ↑ Howard Smith: Valerie Solana's Interview . In: Village Voice. July 25, 1977, p. 32 ff.