In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • SCUM as Trans-form
  • Lolita Copacabana (bio)

The summer of 2020 is the first summer of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I spend it (in the Midwest, locked up, scared, confused, alert, anxious, sad, sometimes mad) working on a series of collages. I’m not a visual artist, but a writer, and before this unexpected move into graphic media, I’ve been writing from cut-ups, finding hidden poetry, or what seems like it, in the headlines of the magazines available for free on the generous, quiet streets of Iowa City. The world is ending and I’m broke, in a country that is merciless to its immigrants. But is that even what I am? I’m a graduate student six thousand miles away from the place where I was born—I have a visa that only allows me to work under very specific and very limited conditions. I’ve been away for three years now, and I’m still not sure if I’m entitled to use the word. As a matter of fact, I’ve been explicitly denied it.

The Ides of March enter, like a lion, and April is the cruelest month. Although during the day the streets of Iowa City, a college town, are indeed suburban, peaceful, and pretty quiet, my nights are not so tranquil. There are lockdowns all over the world, including Argentina—my home country— and even in some parts of the U.S., but Iowa is one of only seven states that has entirely foregone a shelter-in-place order: from under my heavy blankets and the brightly dotted Midwestern sky, party music never stops playing outside. I still get invitations to get-togethers, and people get offended when I decline. My mood swings—to say the least—and, after a particularly challenging and confusing day, I find myself working on a collage that looks like the cover of a book: Todas las formas en las que estoy enojada. I staple a few blank pages behind the collage cover and—for some reason, the first paragraph of Valerie Solanas’s 1967 SCUM Manifesto ringing in my head—start [End Page 141] to quietly enumerate them. All the ways in which I’m angry. All the senses in which I am full of rage. All the forms taken by the fury inside me.

I start with a very detailed list of what the pandemic has stolen away from me. What it has imposed. What it restricts, what it implies. Fairly soon I’ve gone way past the virus, Solanas resounding more and more loudly inside of me. The list continues to grow, it seems to have a life of its own. Night comes, eventually, and, exhausted, I take a picture of my collage. I upload it onto Instagram, and, a couple of hours later, come to realize that the ways in which I’m angry are probably many, but also that I’m very evidently not alone. [End Page 142]

IN AN ESSAY PUBLISHED IN 2019 in the literary journal Full Stop, Chavisa Woods compares Valerie Solanas’s infamous status in social memory to the reputation of several male artist-felons, among them William Burroughs (who in 1951 shot his wife dead), Norman Mailer (who in 1960 stabbed his wife in the chest, nearly piercing her heart), Pablo Neruda (who matter-of-factly confessed to having raped a servant while visiting her country as a diplomat), Charles Bukowski (who kicked and punched his girlfriend during an interview about his writing and was said to have been abusive to several of his female partners), and the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser (who strangled his wife to death in an act of cold-blooded murder).

In an effort to re-signify Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto for what it actually is—a masterwork of literary protest art that is, generally, wholly misread— Woods also takes the time to show how much of her work is actually a point-by-point rewrite of multiple texts by Sigmund Freud. Where Freud’s renowned essays are rife with suggestions of female castration and hysterectomies as treatments for all sorts of psychological troubles suffered by women, says Woods, SCUM is...

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