Solanas’s attempted murder of artist Andy Warhol took place in 1968, the same year that she self-published SCUM Manifesto, constituting a powerful attack on the human male. Reading Solanas as a feminist feeler driven by vision, intuition, and affect can offer an alternative to the binary that emerges from the hegemony of rationality in Western thought and society. These two approaches reveal an underlying binary between madness and normality, wherein madness has little or no agency and the “normal” is sanitized and reduced to select emotions. In both approaches, Solanas’s archive is caught within a dichotomy of forced inclusion or complete exclusion from public discourse. Whether read as a homicidal inpatient, a near-fictional cartoon character, a militant writer, or a groundbreaking revolutionary, Solanas’s entire project has either been dismissed as driven by madness, or defended and in turn recommended for inclusion in mainstream discourse. ABSTRACT: The archive of Valerie Solanas, an assemblage comprised of her actions, writings, and their circulation and reception, is marked by deep tensions between history, fiction, and critical thought.
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