Feminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas

Valerie Solanas holds an unsettled place in feminist history, notorious for both her incendiary 1967 diatribe the SCUM Manifesto and her near-fatal 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol. This paper explores the tangled links between Solanas and women’s liberation: how the movement briefly commandeered her as a feminist martyr and how, on her release from psychiatric prison, Solanas sought to regain control of her story. In the process it asks how Solanas’s words, actions, and decades-long struggle with mental illness haunted a generation of women who came of age with the feminist movement and defined liberation in terms of art.