The previously unproduced play Up Your Ass, by Valerie Solanas, requires it to be analyzed in consort with Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto and the life of Solanas herself. The play is a fictionalized version of the principles put forth in her SCUM Manifesto, which was largely dismissed in its time but has been resurrected in conversations about feminist and gender theory. The play’s main character, Bongi, could be considered an avatar for Solanas, as a tough-talking street-smart masculine dyke who encounters and seduces the very types of men and women that she names in her manifesto.
Valerie Solanas has solidified herself in populist folklore as he angry lesbian who shot Andy Warhol because she was upset that he wouldn’t put her in his films. The truth of the legend is that she did shoot Andy Warhol. The reason why is a complicated one. Solanas was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Some claim it was because he wouldn’t produce Up Your Ass. Others claim it was because he held her only copy and did not give it back. More than 50 years later, Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto has become a staple of the genealogy of feminist studies. Whereas in the popular imagination it may appear as a hateful, murderous, and as extreme call for murdering men. Just recently, Solanas was portrayed by Lena Dunham and revealed to be behind the Zodiac Killers’ crimes. However, more careful consideration finds it to be a critique of a capitalist, patriarchal system that enables compulsive heterosexuality. Solanas’ manifesto has the affect of anger and rage, but one can also consider that part of the performance. To be performative is not, however, a negation of her original intent.
Solanas was raised middle class and received a college education, which would surprise many as she later spent sometimes as a homeless and as a sex worker, as those things were often seen as a choice by the individual and thus deserving. Valerie did have sexual relationships with women, but she did not exclusively sleep with women. She engaged in several emotional relationships. In her manifesto, she also explains her disinterest in sex, which is both political and personal. The term “lesbian” is something she would likely not embrace fully and something that was placed as a description of her instead of by her. As queer theory continues to evolve and identity orientation is more fluid, Solanas’s identity was likely more fluid than originally thought.
One truth that remains is that she was, indeed angry. She felt an urgency that something needed to disrupt the patriarchy that was holding women (and men) back. The title of her manifesto is almost satirical, implying she wanted to kill men. Whether she was kidding or not, she felt that men were the problems with society, and women could not reach potential until men were not in the picture.
Solanas used her written work as a megaphone for her anger. She recognized the power of the written word to make her case. Recent reassessments have asked if she was performing her anger, implying that she was strategically creating a persona to amplify her cause. Recent feminist scholars do not seek to justify her attempted murder nor her advocacy of eliminating men. Rather, what is helpful is how she expressed her rage on behalf of women, and how her manifesto was not about her specifically, but a way to free the dystopian world that had been in place, according to her, on capitalist trappings and how men reacted to threats of masculinity. Women were also to blame. Solanas took what she considered “Daddy’s Girls” to task in perpetuating the patriarchy, yet she did neglect to see this as a survival strategy.
Supplementary Reading
Chu, Andrea L. Females. Verso, 2019.
Andrea Long Chu’s Females purports that “everyone is female and everyone hates it”. She draws a lot from Solanas and Up Your Ass to support her own coming out as trans and present a new framework that surpasses the binaries of sex and gender. Chu argues that Solanas was railing against the trap of being female and how women were in a double bind because they need to deflect their female-ness. As a transwoman, Chu acknowledges Solanas’s dismissal of a trans identity, yet takes a lot of her writing to apply to a new way of thinking about gender theory.
Everyone is female—and everyone hates it. By the second claim, I mean something like what Valerie meant: that human civilization represents a diverse array of attempts to suppress and mitigate femaleness, that this is, in fact, the implicit purpose of all human activity, and, most of all, that activity we call politics. The political is the sworn enemy of the female; politics begins, in every case, from the optimistic belief that another sex is possible. This is the root of all political consciousness: the dawning realization that one’s desires are not one’s own, that one has become a vehicle for someone else’s ego; in short, that one is female but wishes it were not so. Politics is, in its essence, anti-female. (13)
Looking beyond Up Your Ass, this framework can be applied to depictions of the Villainess. The Villainess is tortured by her excess desires and some that may not even be their own. Their desires were thrust on them by others and by their situations. Chu’s work is a contribution to trans and gender studies as it reconfigures ideas of gender, sex, and performance. In this, she also gives more depth to Solanas, while not agreeing with her, but tries to tease out her arguments to make sense of where gender lies today.
Warner, Sara. “Scummy Acts: Valerie Solanas’s Theater of the Ludicrous.” in Acts of Gaiety: LGBT Performance and the Politics of Pleasure. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2012, 31-71
In Acts of Gaiety, Sara Warner examines the widely ignored area of lesbian performances and theater. Her book decentralizes the idea of performance as only being performed on stage and that scholars should “pay greater attention to the imbrication of sexual politics with other historical forces, political dynamics, and spheres of social engagement” (3). In the chapter about Up Your Ass, Warner names the play and its author as a Theater of the Ludricous. The play, which has not been received critically for its content, provides a parallel into the queer politics of Solanas’ life. Warner notes that “rather than [Solanas] rejecting her female body, as many butches at that time did, Solanas understood, validated, and harnessed its erotic power. She made her living from the art of seduction through sex work, a profession rooted in illusion and gender play” (38). Warner also conducted extensive archival work to trace how Solanas promoted, advertised, and sold her work—both her play and the manifesto. Solanas’s persona, her performance of queerness, becomes a political act just as much as her play. Warner cites both Up Your Ass and Solanas’ persona as satirical, ridiculous, and raunchy, all moves that can be contextualized in new understandings of queer performances.