SCUM as Trans-form

ABSTRACT

Copacabana treats Valerie Solanas' 1967 SCUM Manifesto as "occupying a position that is both fascinating and disturbing--like so many manifestos of the male avant-garde tradition that came before it." Solanas wrote the SCUM Manifesto as a parody that, using the vernacular of her epoch, mocks popular, sexist, and heterocentric thinking about gender and sexuality of the time, upon reading it "everyone freaked out, because when we talk about men the same way men have talked about women for centuries, it reads as grotesque and insanely violent, un-compassionate, and shocking"--which was exactly the point of Solanas' intervention.