Moral Acts:

Valerie Solanas and Official Discourses on Violent Queerness1

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all
relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only
to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation,
and destroy the male sex.

Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto2

1610s, from L. hystericus “of the womb,” from Gk. hysterikos “of the womb, suffering
in the womb,” from hystera “womb”. Originally defined as a neurotic condition peculiar
to women and thought to be caused by a dysfunction of the uterus. Meaning “very funny”
(by 1939) is from the notion of uncontrollable fits of laughter.

Etymology of ‘Hysterical’3
 2

Valerie Solanas exists at the intersection of seemingly infinite social problems. Women are a
problem. Lesbians are a problem. Violence is a problem. Madness is a problem. Poverty, sex work,
irony, dystopia, radicalism, attempted murder: they are all problems. The woman who shot Andy
Warhol—as she will probably always be known—challenges everything we want to read into her.
The details of her life are infinitely unclear; her manuscripts and correspondences are difficult to
come by, and the published writing about her has mostly been unkind. Scholars of Solanas (or
Valerie, as journalists and academics alike seem to call her, sometimes affectionately and sometimes
derisively), for many reasons, are few. She did not write much, and what she did write survives
mostly through digs at exemplary insanity: get a load of this chick. Her brilliantly inflammatory
SCUM Manifesto is canonical, farcical. She is the latest in a long line of madwomen, whose
unsanctioned use of violence and unnerving refusal to step back or apologize for anything she did
instantly marks her as deranged. The time she spent in prison and mental institutions certainly do
not help to wrest her from the clutches of discursive madness, and because we keep saying she was
“crazy,” she always already is. Her Manifesto is a laugh. Rarely does anyone deign to engage with her
work critically (and this body of work is woefully incomplete, its remnants either held in personal
collections or completely lost).4 Valerie is lost in our assumptions about her, buried by the same
things that kept her infamous while she was alive.
Solanas was born on April 9, 1936 to a working-class family in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
Accounts of her childhood and adolescence are sparse, gathered mostly by Diane Tucker and Mary
Harron5, during research for Harron’s nascent (then-documentary) biopic about Solanas’ life.
Indeed, reading Harron’s introduction to she and Daniel Minahan’s screenplay I Shot Andy Warhol,
elicits jealousy from those attempting to wrest a fuller idea of Solanas from the archives; Harron and
Tucker were able to access rare, private psychiatric records from her stay at Bellevue after Warhol’s
shooting, documents from Solanas’ time at University of Maryland, not to mention numerous
interviews with people who knew Valerie. This paper deals with the scant I was able to recover:
scattered newspaper articles following the shooting and a handful of legal documents regarding
Solanas’ arrest and sentencing at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan.
Many archives that would seem relevant to Solanas’ life and times seemed devoid of Solanas
except in her manifesto: they held the SCUM Manifesto with all the questions it raises, but none of
the notes on Solanas’ existence that might begin to answer those questions. Searches of archives
available on the internet were no better: copies of the manifesto and reviews of Harron’s film were
all that seemed readily available; some digging produced a much-quoted 1977 interview that Solanas
 3

gave and a few wire articles about the initial shooting. Few academics or historians of feminism
seemed able to engage with the Manifesto on its own terms, without assertions of Solanas’ insanity or
a simplistic reading of Warhol’s shooting (e.g., he was famous; she was crazy) looming over Solanas’
carefully constructed text. Even in the popular 1996 AK Press edition of the Manifesto or in Verso’s
2004 reissue of the text, biographical explanations of Solanas’ actions in introductions and post-
scripts invite readers to equate the two without fully understanding either. Solanas is famously
quoted as explaining her shooting Warhol with “He had too much control over my life…read my
manifesto and it will tell you who I am,”6:she did not mean for us to read the two without each
other. She did, however, expect a full willingness for spectators to meet with both on their own
specific terms, complicated and repellent as they may be.
From shooting to manifesto and back again, the picture of Solanas that is handed down to
us from liberal feminists and misogynists hiding behind Valerie’s alleged madness demands to be
complicated. Solanas would not want us to remember her for “pushing the envelope” for second-
wave feminism; or as a figure who is always already man-hating and psychotic (as indeed media in
the late sixties were wont to declare her). SCUM is about overthrowing capitalism as much as it is
about eliminating men (even to read it as baldly as to assume that Solanas’ deployment of “men” in
the text is literal is perhaps doing her an injustice). SCUM is rhetorically masterful, informed by years
of study at the University of Maryland and elsewhere; it is certainly not the lunatic scribblings of
someone the State declares “psychotic.”7 And what if it was? To what extent are modern readers
willing to engage with Solanas on her own terms, ironic and nasty as they we perceive them to be?
Why are details of Solanas’ personal life so inextricable from her theory—in a way that the skeletons
in other authors’ closets never are?
It comes back, of course, to the shooting. But even this can be troubled when one
denaturalizes a politic dependent on nonviolence. Life under capitalist patriarchy is imbued with
violence for women, for the working class, for people of color, and always for people dedicated to
uprooting that system. Biographical accounts of Solanas reveal a familiar resentment—she is called
cynical, sarcastic8, derisive, and tough9—doubtless from constantly being forced to engage with
people who had it infinitely easier than her for no reason at all. Harron insightfully notes that
Warhol saw himself in Solanas:

“both were Catholic, born into blue-collar families; had spent their childhood in
poverty; were intellectually precocious; and had experienced being tormented at
school. Perhaps most important, both claimed to have rejected sex, although for
different reasons…”10
 4

Perhaps Solanas saw herself in Warhol as well. But she certainly recognized his seemingly infinite
access to capital, fame, adoring fans: how could this mirror image of herself have so much more
than she? He was, of course, a man. It seems important to understand Solanas as an artist—the skill
with which she crafts language is apparent in her Manifesto—and any artist who takes herself
seriously also desires an audience. She resented Warhol (who didn’t?) and the violent ways in which
the world continued to turn around her; she refused a life of meaningless work and smiling
deference. This, naturally, was unacceptable, even in the late sixties, even in Greenwich Village. On
her own since age 15, spending nights on the streets or in cheap hotel rooms, turning tricks and
telling stories for income,11 Solanas was right to be angry. Her decision to shoot Warhol is
complicated, significant only because he was significant; it is a problem I will return to.
Particularly significant, given the text of the Manifesto, which commentators usually read
literally if at all, is Solanas’ consistent designation as a lesbian: in documents about Solanas from the
sixties and seventies12, and in reviews of Harron’s film (popular13 and scholarly14), and especially in
historic accounts of lesbian/separatist feminism in the 1970s15. If a “lesbian” can be understood as a
female-identified person who desires other female-identified people exclusively, Solanas certainly
does not fit the bill. Though the less debilitating categories of “bisexual” and “queer” did not exist
when Solanas was well-known, they exist now. Still, especially in reviews of Harron’s film, certain
details of Solanas’ life are rattled off in rapid succession, uncritically, indeed, with a trace of self-
satisfaction: Solanas was a “lesbian,”16 a “man-hater,”17 “disturbed,”18 “abused”19; she had had an
unstable home life and was therefore doomed to a life of psychosis and random violence. As Dana
Heller notes, Harron seems particularly interested in a psycho-criminal explanation of Solanas’ life
and actions, rather than attempting to critically situate Solanas’ actions within a historical moment.20
It would appear that attempting to recover Valerie from history is a process always haunted by
simplistic reductions of her Manifesto and her actions—and the theoretically disastrous equation of
the two. Everywhere, others’ understandings of Valerie’s politics precede her, shape the biographical
narrative of her life, and continue to marginalize her as a wingnut, a lunatic, a bulldyke, a man-eater.
Was Solanas a lesbian, per se? It is difficult to say: Harron cites Solanas’ first homosexual
experience as happening at a boarding school when she was 14, and later calls her an “out lesbian”
during her college years. There are also accounts of Solanas having a son by a sailor at fifteen21 and
reports of her having sex with men throughout her time at the University of Maryland—paid and
unpaid. When Warhol was shot, news reports about the incident mention Valerie’s role as a lesbian
in the film I, a Man22 and occasionally, the fact that Warhol’s films detailed the “life among lesbians,
 5

homosexuals, and dope addicts.”23 Most of the reports I found from around the time of the
shooting do not mention these things, but it seems significant that a few did—they are probably not
the only media sources that hung the scepter of lesbianism over Solanas’ decision to shoot Andy
Warhol. Notably, the Village Voice, to which Solanas had given an interview prior to the shooting
and in which she had advertised her Manifesto, described Solanas in a report published three days
after Warhol was shot as “not a lesbian, but consumed with a passionate loathing of men.” Solanas
would later take issue with this designation; in 1977 she gave another interview with the Voice in
which she said:

“The part where you said, ‘She's a man-hater, not a lesbian.’ That was in the 1968 column
on the front page of The Village Voice ... I thought that was just totally unwarranted. Because
I have been a lesbian, and I consider the part where you said, ‘She's not a lesbian’ to be
serious libel. Although at the time I wasn't sexual. I was into all kinds of other things. ...
The way it was worded gave the impression that I'm a heterosexual, you know...”24

At a time when “gay” and “lesbian” as were just emerging into the mainstream as fixed categories
(indeed, the Stonewall riots took place just over a year after Solanas shot Warhol), the idea that
Solanas “had been” a lesbian is one that we might assume had little currency in 1977, much less in
1968. Besides, that the Voice had to clarify that Solanas was not a lesbian (just a man-hater) works
from the assumption that readers had already identified her as such. Though Solanas herself
identified with different sexualities throughout her life, and at one point explicitly rejected both
straight and lesbian identifications, her professed hatred for men trumps the nuances of her desire.
In Lindsy Van Gelder’s widely-circulated account of the shooting Solanas was described as
an actress “who detests men in general and has some specific grievances against Warhol.”25 In 1968,
as gay liberation movements and feminist consciousness were beginning to gain momentum,
“lesbian” as a category was beginning to take on political dimensions in popular discourse. That is,
in the way that Valerie’s violence was taken as the logical extension of her manifesto (in the way that
the two were understood as political extensions of one another), feminism and lesbianism were
often derisively equated, with misandry trailing shortly behind. That Solanas was widely read (and
literally cited) as a woman who hated men made her a lesbian by extension—both at the time, and in
later readings of her work. (In fact, Paul Morrissey, Warhol’s producer and collaborator, who was
present when Warhol was shot, is quoted in a later interview explaining Solanas’ business at the
factory on June 3, 1968 as her wanting “to redress a grievance or something like that…You know,
Women's Lib Rights and all that crap. “26)
It is also rarely noted that Solanas may have never intended for SCUM to stand for “Society
 6

for Cutting Up Men”; in an unpublished interview that Solanas gave in 1975, interviewers recall her
insisting that “SCUM” as acronym was “the fabrication of her publisher, Maurice Giordias” who,
“in his haste to sensationalize the shooting and sell copies of the SCUM Manifesto assembled an
edition whose back cover reproduced the New York Post front page with the headline “Andy Warhol
Fights for Life.”27 Though this discrepancy would not lessen the vitriol with which her Manifesto was
written, it would change the way Solanas was read in the media, and even the way we might read the
Manifesto. Interestingly, though the Manifesto refers on multiple occasions to the necessity of SCUM
women to kill men, it never uses the language of “cutting up” to describe the violent removal of
men from society. If Solanas’ use of “scum” was indeed “based on a subversive appropriation
insofar as ‘scum’ signifies women’s debased status in a male-defined system of social values”28—a
notion that fits into the Manifesto’s politic as well as its rhetorical and stylistic precision—would the
Manifesto be so quickly dismissed as a crazy dyke’s anti-man tirade? SCUM as an acronym brings one
aspect of a complicated text to the forefront for the public, and it is perhaps the most offensive
aspect of the Manifesto: it is certainly the one most easily connected to Warhol’s shooting, and the
easiest way to equate the two.
So Solanas wanted to “cut up men”; she had played a lesbian in a movie, is described by Van
Gelder in a way that conjures the stereotypical lesbian, as “square-jawed, slender and short-haired.”29
Her sexuality is always questionable; she denies lesbianism and heterosexuality alike, and she
performs male most of the time, with her trademark cap, foul mouth, sexual openness, and general
lack of “nice” feminine sensibilities. The Manifesto, however, in addition to Solanas’ self-
identification at the time and in later years, is literally against sex. Solanas sees sex between anyone as
an impediment to higher intellectual pursuits, though she seems to have the most disdain for
heterosexual sex.30 Though Solanas sees men as “morally deficient,” clearly undeserving of the
SCUM female’s company, she does not see sex with women as the antidote to the problem of
heterosexuality. She retreats instead into anti-sex rhetoric that almost echoes arguments for
abstinence until marriage—except that she is open about the fact that her anti-sex orientation is
informed by years of sex work, sexual abuse and bad sex:

“SCUM gets around…and around and around…they’ve seen the whole show—every bit of
it—the fucking scene, the sucking scene, the dyke scene—they’ve covered the whole
waterfront, been under every dock and pier—the peter pier, the pussy pier…you’ve got to
go through a lot of sex to get to anti-sex, and SCUM’s been through it all.”31
 7

Asexuality is rarely acknowledged as a valid orientation of desire (or lack of desire), though Solanas
insists that many women will have to condition away their sex drives. The designation of sexuality as
inherently impeding SCUM women’s personal intellectual satisfaction is perhaps more threatening to
sexual systems of capital than simple homosexuality, which replaces the reproductive opposite-sex
partner with one of the same sex, and, in its assimilatory early politic, holds all other details in
common with heterosexuality. That is: where homosexuality can be made to resemble the ideally
productive heterosexual pair (and indeed, in the early sixties, incorporation and visibility within
capitalist society was a major fight taken up by political homosexuals), asexuality refuses capitalist
notions of reproduction. SCUM’s nihilist conceptions of futurity (which are bound up in her anti-
sex ideas) in many ways precede its professed misandry. Solanas wonders:

“Why produce even females? Why should there be future generations? What is their
purpose? When aging and death are eliminated, why continue to reproduce? Why should we
care what happens when we’re dead? Why should we care that there is no younger
generation to succeed us?”32

Solanas is unconcerned with the future; she wants no children to survive her, to reproduce a family
which in fact reproduces structures of the State, with father-as-patriarch and women and children
working under him. This is only one piece of Solanas’ highly subversive plan to dismantle capitalist
patriarchy from the inside, through “un-working,” “fucking-up,” slowly seizing control of the menial
institutions by which SCUM women are employed, and of course, by eliminating men.33
What if we read Solanas as anti-capitalist first and anti-man second? It seems likely that
anyone who takes the time to read the Manifesto past its purported title, especially in 1968, would
realize that the text unflinchingly demonstrated the ways in which capitalism and patriarchy are
bound up in one another—and the ways in which burgeoning liberal feminism was bound to fail at
addressing that (Solanas marks SCUM in opposition to “nice, genteel ladies who scrupulously take
only such action as is guaranteed to be ineffective”34). Further, there is a rich critique of masculinity
that pervades the text if we read “male” as “body constructed under patriarchy to enact certain
violences on non-male bodies”—if Solanas’ “walking abortion”35 of a man is in fact embodied
masculinity. Solanas, as a threat to the patriarchal state, must necessarily be written off by the
extremity of her theory, and the equation of that theory with her actions. It is no mistake that she is
read historically as “psychotic,” “deranged,” and “disturbed,” that details of her rough childhood
and Greenwich Village life haunt her shooting Warhol and her Manifesto alike. Women are not
supposed to be violent, or lesbians, or anti-capitalists: not today, not in 1968. Details that might
 8

otherwise have receded into the background as modern readers consider her writing instead hang
just above her work and theory: they all resonate against each other, obscuring any attempts to
grapple with her texts or her actions on their own specific terms.
Of course, to read the shooting without the Manifesto is impossible; without the shooting
Solanas would probably have faded into obscurity as a theorist and artist. Reading the two apart
further runs the risk of depoliticizing Solanas’ actions in a destructive way, rendering Solanas as
dealing violently with her petty problems with Warhol as irrational and hysterical. Misreadings of the
Manifesto are as frequent as misreadings of the shooting; indeed, when asked why she shot Warhol,
Solanas is said to have replied, “He had too much control over my life.”36 She further explains,
“There are many involved reasons” for the shooting. “I have written a manifesto of what I am and
what I stand for.”37 Another article published two days after the shooting and titled “Actress ‘Glad’
She Shot Warhol” quotes her as explaining “I was right in what I did. …I have nothing to regret. I
feel sorry for nothing. He was going to do something to me which would have ruined me.”38 It
seems that Solanas wanted people to politicize the shooting; however personal it might have been
for her, Warhol’s capitalistic, misogynist Factory scene was also deeply offensive to the politics
espoused by SCUM.
Ironically, it was the political conviction with which she regarded her crime—the
righteousness with which she refused to apologize or shrink from the shooting—that made her
appear all the more hysterical. Reports announce Solanas as the founder of the Society for Cutting
Up Men,39 as a “scorned gal,”40 and a “man-hating brunette,”41 and perhaps she was some of these
things. However, the simplistic reading of the Manifesto as exclusively anti-men and the shooting as
an insane extension of that rhetoric does justice to neither. The Manifesto is a text designed to
instigate action (such are manifestoes) and she wanted the shooting to be read with the Manifesto in
mind. Still, instead of reading the Manifesto, the public read the (perhaps fabricated) title—Society for
Cutting Up Men—designated Solanas as psychotic, and the shooting as a result of that.
Though Ti-Grace Atkinson, then-leader of the New York chapter of NOW, called Solanas
“the first outstanding champion of women’s rights” and feminist lawyer Florynce Kennedy stepped
forward to represent Solanas in the State Supreme Court,42 Solanas’ madness had been assumed
since the day she turned herself in. One article explains the delay of Solanas’ arraignment “for 24
hours to allow time for preliminary psychiatric examination ‘in view of the defendant’s conduct.’”43
Documents from Solanas’ time at the Criminal Court of New York are difficult to come by, though
they are indeed located in the Clerk’s offices at 100 Centre Street. Among affidavits from her
 9

arresting officer and Mario Amaya, orders of court appearances, indictments from the District
Attorney, court notes, trial and motion calendars, and numerous untitled documents that seem to list
appearance dates and court decisions, I find two orders for preliminary psychiatric examinations
(dated January 10, 1969 and April 30, 1969) as well as two forms titled “Commitment for Psychiatric
Examination Forms: Promulgated by Commissioner of Mental Hygiene Pursuant to Section 660 of
the Code of Criminal Procedure”, one dated from the day after the shooting (June 4, 1968) and one
dated May 14, 1969. The Commitment forms are most fascinating, reading:

“(a) The above named defendant [Valerie Solanas] being before this court charged with
attempted murder, etc. in violation of penal law and the court having reasonable ground
for believing that said defendant is in such state of idiocy, imbecility or insanity as to be
incapable of understanding the charge, indictment or proceedings or of making his defense
and the court having ordered the said defendant to be examined pursuant to Section (658)
of the Code of Criminal Procedure, and the recommendation of (blank) of (blank)
Hospital for commitment of said defendant thereto for purpose of making such
examination and report to the court, having been obtained, … now therefore, after due
deliberation having been had it is (c) ORDERED that the said Valerie Solanas be and
hereby is committed to Elmhurst General Hospital for such mental examination for a
reasonable period not to exceed sixty (60) days to be examined (to determine the question
of his sanity) and it is further (d) ORDERED and the N.Y.C. Correction Department
hereby is directed to cause the transfer of the said defendant from the place where the said
defendant now is to the aforesaid hospital for the purpose of such examination and to
return the said defendant to the place where the said defendant is now upon the
completion of such examination unless otherwise ordered by this court or by any other
court of competent jurisdiction pursuant to the provisions of the statutes in such case
made and provided, or unless the defendant is admitted to a hospital pursuant to the
provisions of Section 873 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and it is further ORDERED
that upon the completion of said examination that a report be made to this court as
provided in Section 662 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, or Section 2189a of the Penal
Law, whichever is appropriate.”44

Given reports of Solanas’ behavior following the shooting and during her arraignment, these
documents, with their male pronouns and insistence of the defendant’s “idiocy, imbecility, or
insanity,” point to the pathologization of a certain, determined woman’s violent, political outburst
against Andy Warhol. Solanas is always already marked as woman, lesbian: the insistence in her
psychosis points to the incongruity that the State perceives in a female using violence in a way that
she feels is not just right but righteous: political, anti-patriarchal, even anti-capitalist. Men who use
violence in these ways (see especially police officers and soldiers, whose use of violence is also
political, though endorsed by the State) are seen as enacting aggression attendant to their bodies.
Perhaps use of “he” and “his” in this document is meant to be gender-neutral, but it seems more
 10

likely that there is no room for women as criminals, certainly not as violent criminals who need
psychiatric review.

Solanas implores us to understand her shooting of Warhol in terms of her manifesto, but it
is this attempt to situate the crime as a logical extension of an anti-patriarchal politic that does her in.
Women are not supposed to be certain of their violence; they should by no means feel confident
and assured in it: women who do, who start societies for “cutting up men,” who refuse to back
down from their assertions of dominance (during those rare instants when such women seize power
for themselves by whatever means are available to them) are necessarily insane. By June 26, Solanas
was declared “psychotic” and committed to Bellevue Hospital. She was sentenced on June 9, 1969
to a maximum of three years’ prison45, with credit for time served in Bellevue. A trial and motion
calendar from her file at 100 Centre Street notes the various dates on which Solanas was declared
psychotic and not psychotic, ordered and reordered for psychiatric evaluation. It is important to
note that “psychotic” denotes a person’s mental and emotional of divorce from “reality” (apparently
as the State conceives of it, in this case)46. That Solanas could not be definitively diagnosed as
psychotic or not for periods of more than a year or so resonates with her general
incomprehensibility within a capitalist patriarchy that makes no space for even well-behaved women,
much less “hateful, violent bitches given to slamming those who unduly irritate them in the teeth,”47
as Solanas describes SCUM women. Solanas resisted control at every turn: from Warhol, from work,
from liberal feminism, from “propriety, niceness, discretion, public opinion, ‘morals,’ the ‘respect’ of
assholes.”48 Refusing counsel from Legal Aid, Solanas is said to have explained that her case would
“remain in [her] competent hands.”49 She was submitted by the court for psychiatric evaluation the
next day.

Did Solanas’ understanding of the world break with state-sanctioned reality the day that she
shot Warhol—the day she was committed, or any day after? She continued to make threatening
phone calls to the Factory even during her stay in Bellevue; she was arrested again in 1971 for
threatening various people, and continued to be in and out of mental institutions for the rest of her
life.50 In 1977 she gave an interview with The Village Voice in which she seems to heckle interviewer
Howard Smith as she disputes her treatment in popular media immediately following the shooting
and describes how she had been spending her time since. Her words ring with a certainty that alarms
as she makes claims about a mysterious “Contact Man” and “Money Men,” as well as positing these
Money Men paid off the psychiatrists who examined her in order to make her appear insane.51 These
 11

claims are made alongside Solanas’ explanation that SCUM is “hypothetical. No, hypothetical is the
wrong word. It’s just a literary device…women who think a certain way are in SCUM. Men who
think a certain way are in the men’s auxiliary of SCUM,” and her insistence that her shooting of
Warhol was misunderstood and buried in misinformation from journalists: “I concede that I shot
Warhol. But that’s not the issue. …I’m talking about a whole lot of other things. They said a lot
more things that were untrue. Now the fact that I shot him does not give them the right to tell any
amount of lies about me.”52 These assertions seem appropriate, reflective of the circumstances
surrounding the shooting and the Manifesto. But are the conspiracy theories jokes or evidence of
Solanas’ building paranoia? How can we know? It is hard to imagine a Solanas who is anything but
convicted about her words and ideas, and indeed, to what end might we imagine a sane Valerie or an
insane one, after all she said and did?

Lesbians, according to the American Psychological Association, suffered from the mental
disorder of homosexuality in 1968. Before we totally discount Solanas’ words and actions as those of
a lunatic’s, we might do well to recall the extent to which mental health has always been constructed
by discourses of power. Valerie Solanas struggled violently against such discourses in word and in
deed: she was, quite literally, out of control. We must then attempt to grapple with her without
playing into the assumptions these discourses of power hand to us in order to make her coherent to
a capitalist, patriarchal logic. We must not do the work of the State Solanas was attempting to
dismantle if we want to understand her. Indeed, Solanas implores her readers not to “kick or
struggle or raise a distressing fuss, but just sit back, relax, enjoy the show and ride the waves to their
demise.”53 In Valerie’s honor, I will echo her: allow Solanas to lead you to your demise on her own
terms. It is a terrible, delightful ride.
 12

Notes

                                                                                                               
1
“I consider that a moral act. And I consider it immoral that I missed. I should have done target practice.”
Valerie Solanas, on the shooting of Andy Warhol, quoted by Howard Smith, "Valerie Solanas Replies," The
Village Voice, August 1, 1977, Scenes section, p. 28
2
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto. (Oakland: AK Press, 1996). 1.
3
“Hysterical,” Online Etymology Dictionary. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=hysterical (accessed May
9, 2010)
4
Amanda Third and Dana Heller are notable exceptions; I draw from their work later in this paper.
5
Mary Harron, introduction to I Shot Andy Warhol, by Mary Harron and Daniel Minahan (New York: Grove,
1996) “On Valerie Solanas,” vii-xxxi.
6
Freddy Baer, “About Valerie Solanas,” in SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas (Olympia: AK Press, 1996),
53.
7
Court of General Sessions of the County of New York, Criminal Court of the City of New York. Trial and
Motion Calendar. New York, 1968-69. (noted: “6/28/68-Psychotic [see Elmhurst Report]”)
8
Dana Heller, "Shooting Solanas: Radical feminist history and the technology of failure," Feminist Studies 27,
no. 1 (2001), p. 168.
9
Avital Ronell. "Cutting Remarks." Artforum: Bookforum, April 1, 2004, 30-33.
http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010).
10
Mary Harron, “On Valerie Solanas,” xix.
11
Ibid., xii-xvii.
12
UPI, "Warhol Assailant Is Committed in N.Y." The Washington Post, June 6, 1968, Section A, p. 32.
13
Richard Johnson with Paula Froelich, Bill Hoffmann & Corynne Steindler, "Warhol Shooter's Twisted
Ploy," New York Post, March 21, 2009. http://www.nypost.com/p/pagesix/item_iaYkje2Q0IGDCxxbKp250H
(accessed May 6, 2010); see also
14
L. Hart, “Killing Representation: Feminism And Violence At The Limit,” Psychoanalytic Review 84 (1997), p.
789-812 http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=PSAR.084.0789A (accessed May 9, 2010)
15
A few examples include Avital Ronell’s "Cutting Remarks” and Jennifer Doyle’s "Warhol's Women (one in
particular)," Gay & Lesbian Review 13, no. 3 (2006) , p. 32-33.
http://ezproxy.library.nyu.edu:2094/hww/results/results_single.jhtml;hwwilsonid=NEU2EUNZDHJGVQA3DILCF
GGADUNGIIV0 (accessed May 9, 2010)
16
"The talk of the town: The woman who shot Warhol." The New Yorker, May 29, 1995, 33.
http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010).
17
Rick Groen, "FILM REVIEW: I SHOT ANDY WARHOL," The Globe and Mail, May 17, 1996,
http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010).
18
Eric Konigsberg, "Fifteen More Minutes," New York, February 15, 1996, p. 42-6 (in which Solanas is
described as a “disturbed groupie”)
19
Rita Kempley, "’Andy Warhol,' Abrasively; Why Did She Shoot Him? Why Should We Care: Review of I
Shot Andy Warhol” The Washington Post, May 17, 1996, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed May 9, 2010).
20
Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas,” 169.
21
Liz Jobey, "Solanas and Son" The Guardian, August 24, 1996, http://www.proquest.com/ (accessed May 9,
2010).
22
UPI, "Warhol Assailant Is Committed in N.Y."
23
Lindsy Van Gelder, "Pop Artist Andy Warhol Is Shot," The Times-News, June 4, 1968, Section A, p. 4.
24
Howard Smith & Brian Van der Horst. "Valerie Solanas Interview," The Village Voice, July 25, 1977, Scenes
section. p.32
 13

                                                                                                               
25
Lindsy Van Gelder, “Pop Artist Andy Warhol Is Shot”; also printed as "Actress Shoots Pop-Artist
Warhol," The Pittsburgh Press, June 4, 1968, Section A, p. 1, and "Artist Warhol Critically Shot By Scorned
Gal," The Bryan Times, Tuesday, June 4, 1968, Section A, p. 10.
26
Taylor Meade, “Interview with Paul Morrissey,” http://www.altx.com/interzones/meade/shot.html (accessed May
9, 2010)
27
Dana Heller, “Shooting Solanas,” 168.
28
Ibid., 168.
29
Lindsy Van Gelder, “Pop Artist Andy Warhol Is Shot.”
30
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, p. 27, 39.
31
Ibid., 28.
32
Ibid., 35.
33
Ibid., 36-39.
34
Ibid., 42.
35
Ibid., 1.
36
Lindsy Van Gelder, “Pop Artist Andy Warhol Is Shot.”
37
Ibid., 1.
38
UPI, “Actress ‘Glad’ She Shot Warhol,” The Pittsburgh Press, June 5, 1968, Second Section, p. 30
39
Lindsy Van Gelder, “Pop Artist Andy Warhol Is Shot.”
40
“Artist Warhol Critically Shot By Scorned Gal,” The Bryan Times, Tuesday, June 4, 1968, Section A, p. 10.
41
UPI, “Actress ‘Glad’ She Shot Warhol.”
42
Freddy Baer, “About Valerie Solanas,” p. 54.
43
UPI, “Actress ‘Glad’ She Shot Warhol.”
44
Hon. David Getzoff, Commitment For Psychiatric Examination, Criminal Court of the City of New York, New
York, June 4, 1968; Hon. Gerald P. Culkin, Order for Preliminary Psychiatric Examination, Criminal Court of the
City of New York, New York, June 27, 1968.
45
Hon. Gerald P. Culkin, Untitled Document, New York, June 9, 1969. (noted: “State Prison for Women
Indeterminate Period Maximum 3 yrs. credit for time serverd” signed Gerald P. Cukin, Justice of Supreme
Court”)
46
Trial and Motion Calendar, 1968-69.
47
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 28.
48
Ibid.
49
UPI, “Actress ‘Glad’ She Shot Warhol.”
50
Freddy Baer, “About Valerie Solanas,” 55.
51
Howard Smith & Brian Van der Horst. "Valerie Solanas Interview."
52
Ibid.
53
Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto, 47.