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Conclusion Collage and Community My earlier reading of The SCUM Manifesto emphasized the implicit allusions to collage in the acronym for Solanas’s “Society for Cutting Up Men.” Not only do those allusions locate the practice of collage in a dissembling of men, but they also touch upon the substance of the acronym itself since the title SCUM is a construct, pieced together from fragments of words that have been cut apart in acts of what might literally be called linguistic violence. Whether this violence against words foreshadows the actual violent acts suggested in the title is uncertain because it is never entirely clear whether readers should take the title as an admonishment for violent revolution or as a piece of vitriolic hyperbole. Indeed, Solanas’s manifesto is marked by such an intense level of exaggeration that it is arguably more plausible to read Solanas’s admonishment to cut up men not as an endorsement of butchery but as a shorthand metaphor for sowing seeds of division, that is, for dividing and conquering the oppressive community of men and the society that this oppressiveness sustains. At one level, then, the acronym SCUM enacts this strategy by cutting up the word society and subordinating its fragment (the S) to the title of Solanas’s manifesto—a title in which Solanas’s acronymic construct ultimately refers to a very different type of society altogether. Looking beyond a patriarchal society, the “Society for Cutting Up Men” references a politically and aesthetically imagined community. Indeed , Solanas’s Manifesto falls well within “the protest writing in the sixties ” that, as Martin Puchner has noted, often emanated from “small groups consisting of only a handful of members or,” as was the case with Solanas, “even of a single member.”1 Puchner notes furthermore that “Solanas was isolated but not alone,” and he situates her within the 175 milieu of the wide range of political activists in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s.2 Yet the observation that Solanas “was isolated but not alone” might be better used to characterize her position within the larger context of feminist art and activism in the 1960s and 1970s, especially since this latter characterization tends to highlight the disparity between her status as a lone vanguard provocateur and the concerted efforts of other feminist artists who consciously structured the politics of their art within a community of similarly minded feminist activists. At the most immediate level, of course, such structuring was a shrewd recognition of basic political realities: namely, that collective resistance offers the only hope for real changes in the public sphere. But at the same time, the blurring of political realities and radical aesthetic agendas within the structure of feminist artistic communities and collectives suggests that they had experimental if not avant-garde proclivities. This convergence of the political and aesthetic is so central to how scholars have conceptualized feminist theater that its signi‹cance touches not only upon the position that Solanas occupies within the history of avant-garde performance but also upon much of the work to which this book has been devoted. If this book actually has the pretense of laying the foundation for a feminist historiography of avant-garde performance, it is therefore dif‹cult to close without at least some re›ection on the notions of collaboration and collectivity that have played a pivotal role in the feminist rethinking of theater. Indeed, many feminist theater historians would argue that it would be remiss not to do so. In her book Feminist Theaters in the U.S.A., for example, Charlotte Canning argues with speci‹c regard to collaboration and collectivity: “It is probably impossible to talk about feminist theater, or indeed any alternative theater of the 1960s and after, without discussing the collective.”3 Noteworthy in Canning ’s assertion is a positioning of the collective as a nexus between feminist and alternative theaters. Though somewhat of a passing reference, Canning’s assertion is thus an implicit argument about a connection between feminist theater and the avant-garde, an argument that, as was true of the aesthetics of the most prominent alterative group theaters in the United States in the 1960s, positions collectivity and collaboration in opposition to the coded bourgeois individualism that not only has sustained traditional, Western notions of the artist but has sustained patriarchal society as well. According to the particulars of Canning’s argument, the shared interest in collaborative creation that links feminist and avant-garde theaters 176 | CUTTING PERFORMANCES...

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