What the Afterlife of SCUM Can Teach Us about Autotheory
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Anna Ioanes [1]
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[1] University of St. Francis (Illinois)
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- Localización: American literature: A journal of literary history, criticism and bibliography, ISSN 0002-9831, ISSN-e 1527-2117, Vol. 94, Nº 4, 2022, págs. 677-703
- Idioma: inglés
- Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
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Resumen
The emerging genre of autotheory has been tied to a longer lineage of feminist and queer writing. Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1967) forms an important context for contemporary autotheoretical practices not only as an influence but also as a cautionary tale. Published in 1967, just one year before its author shot Andy Warhol, the SCUM Manifesto was quickly overdetermined by readings that saw the shooting as a fulfillment of the manifesto’s vision, rewriting the manifesto as a kind of autotheory in reverse. Tracing SCUM’s afterlife in a range of cultural texts, including Riot grrrl zines and Andrea Long Chu’s autotheoretical work Females (2019), reveals consistent anxieties about the relationship between the manifesto and the shooting. As a parallel cultural formation arising alongside autotheory, SCUM’s afterlife shows how anxieties about interpretation drive the autotheoretical impulse.
