Hating men will free you? Valerie Solanas in Paris or the discursive politics of misandry

Abstract

In the wake of contemporary controversies in France over feminist misandry, this article reflects on claimed hatred of men as a feminist discursive resource. I use the reception of Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto by some radical French feminists of the 1970s as a privileged case study, along with historian Colette Pipon’s study on misandry within French second-wave feminist movements and Judith Butler’s works on stigma reversal. I contend that in a seemingly paradoxical way, misandry is both an anti-feminist stigma and a feminist discursive strategy: the inhibiting effects of such injurious term on feminist politics – the aggressive, castrating and hateful feminist you should at all cost avoid to become – can be managed, if not neutralized, by means of feminist misandry. From that point, I argue that claimed hatred of men can open fruitful political venues in challenging the stifling effects of respectability politics.