Corroded with SCUM: Valerie Solanas’s Theories of Mind

This essay argues that Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967), usually considered a treatise on gender, can also be read as a theory of mind. 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. Returning to Solanas’s corrosive ambitions for the manifesto, I will read for what might still be disruptive about Solanas’s text: How are the conventions of feminist scholarship and politics razed by this incendiary document? Solanas’s interest in, and facility with, psychological states is significant for two reasons. First, her writing introduces the problem of minded states that are violent and destructive (an internal, interminable negativity) to feminist literatures that often default to rationalist or benignly cognitive configurations of mind. Second, the clear differences between her writings and those of the liberal and radical feminisms that were emerging around her in the US in the 1960s and 1970s reveal how uninterested those feminists were in engaging with the vicissitudes of mentalization. Reading for mindedness in Solanas will make it impossible to think of the SCUM Manifesto as a feminist text and it will raise the possibility that many feminisms find their footing conceptually and politically by manifesting a lack of interest in the minds of others beyond what can be ascertained consciously or behaviorally.