Feminism, Artistry, Madness, and the Ghost of Valerie Solanas
When Valerie Solanas died in a welfare hotel in San Francisco in 1988, she left a remarkably polarised legacy: reviled as a demented groupie for her near-fatal 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol; and revered as a feminist visionary for her incendiary diatribe The SCUM Manifesto. This paper explores that polarisation and the tangled links between the women’s movement and the art world. 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.
Marybeth Hamilton is a cultural historian, an editor of History Workshop Journal, and the producer/presenter of the History Workshop podcast. She is the author of two books, In Search of the Blues and When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment, and she has written and presented several features for BBC Radio. She is currently writing a cultural history of Valerie Solanas’s 1968 shooting of Andy Warhol.
This is a joint session between the Women's History Seminar and the Gender and History in the Americas Seminar.
All welcome-but booking is required.
This page was last updated on 29 June 2024
