Talk:Valerie Solanas

on clarifying play and Fahs
It's common practice for an author who has submitted a work and then withdraws it from further consideration to reclaim the physical representation of it and it probably doesn't matter whether the author has a copy. I guess it has to do with law if the physical holder thinks there was still a right to publish (or will allege that right) if the author withdrew it without taking the physical version back. This can occur if, for example, an editor changed it in a way the author rejects.

If you have the source (I don't), feel free to edit the article accordingly.

Nick Levinson (talk) 23:25, 13 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your reply and for your very informative possible explanation, Nick Levinson. Unfortunately I don't have access to the source, so I don't feel free to edit the article (indeed without such access, I'm not even 100% sure that it is 'Up your ass' rather than some other play, such as perhaps some stage version of S.C.U.M., although I'm almost certain it's 'Up your ass'). And of course, assuming it is 'Up your ass', I still don't know whether Solanas had a copy or had to try to re-write it from memory. But presumably some editor who has access to the source can produce a clarification. Thanks again, and regards.Tlhslobus (talk) 01:30, 14 January 2018 (UTC)


 * According to the footnote that's visible at Google Books, Feiden had a play called The Society for Cutting Up Men, but it was a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass. I don't know if that sheds any light on the question. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 01:55, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, Malik Shabazz, that's a very important footnote, which may ultimately result in significant changes to quite a lot of the article (possibly even by me, but if so probably not just yet, due to having too many other things on my to-do list). Tlhslobus (talk) 02:09, 14 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, the footnote does not say the play was called The Society for Cutting Up Men, it says that Feiden had said in an interview that it was called that, when in fact it was a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass. I understand the footnote is implying Feiden's recollection (she was speaking decades after the event) was mistaken and it was called 'Up your ass'. The footnote doesn't say how it knows this, though it may be explained elsewhere in the book and/or in one of the two references it tells the reader to see. Maybe the copy is available (and has perhaps since been used in the recent production of the play, or maybe not). Or maybe the footnote is actually wrong (though we should normally assume it's right, assuming it's from a so-called Reliable Source, which it clearly is). But the fact that two of us seemingly understand the footnote differently may mean that it is inherently ambiguous about the actual name of the play, and thus arguably can't be used to state that, but it presumably can still be used to say that it was a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass, as that bit is unambiguous even if we arguably aren't sure of what it was actually called. That should probably be enough to enable me or some other editor to clear up the 'Clarify' bit, which I hope to try to remember to try to do fairly soon. But other possible uses of that footnote, such as using it in our article to question whether Warhol ever had a copy of the play, may be a lot more difficult, as it's not clear whether anybody except Feiden is asking such questions, in which case using it carelessly could easily run foul of WP:UNDUE, etc, especially as the "rather lamely" bit suggests the author of the footnote (Arizona State University associate Professor Breanne Fahs) disagrees with Feiden and O'Brien. Tlhslobus (talk) 20:47, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Footnote 161 says Feiden admitted fearing retaliation from Solanas for not producing Up your Ass, which I see as a Reliable Source (Fahs) saying the play was called 'Up your Ass' by referring to it as such, so I think we can use that, as well as the previous bit that it was a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass.Tlhslobus (talk) 21:19, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Incidentally, Fahs also repeatedly calls it Up Your Ass in the text from which the footnotes are called. Tlhslobus (talk) 21:34, 25 January 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree 100% that the footnote is ambiguous: "Feiden indicated that the play she possessed was called The Society for Cutting Up Men, when it was in fact a partial copy of ... Up Your Ass." Did Feiden indicate that the play she possessed was a partial copy, or is that the author's comment?
 * To be honest, I think Feiden is given too much weight in this article. And her hard-to-swallow story gets less credible the more I read. Footnote 161, which you mention, adds to my belief that very little of what people remember should be relied upon: "I was traumatized. It was the age of Kent State." Uh, no, it wasn't. If 1968 was the age of Kent State, 1964 must have been the Summer of Love. Warhol was shot in June 1968, Kent State was in May 1970, almost two years later. One was the action of a deranged individual. The other was the action of an out-of-control government. Like I said, 40+-year-old bad memories aren't very reliable. — Malik Shabazz Talk/Stalk 01:28, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * In fairness to Feiden, "the age of Kent State" doesn't necessarily mean "after Kent State" - the fear among counter-culture people of the police hostility and brutality that eventually culminated with the 4 Kent State killings in 1970 was already widespread in 1968 as a result of people's experience of protesting against the Vietnam War (either through protesting themselves, or through hearing from friends who did). As a late uncle of mine said about taking part in one such protest well before Kent State (he returned to Ireland shortly before 1969) "When a New York policeman kicks you, you stay kicked". (Such fears can be very real even when not well-founded - my aunt said that one of her 'duties' at such protests was to tell frightened sit-down and lie-down protesters that police horses would not step on them if they could possibly avoid it.) Once the war ended well-off white people like my uncle and aunt and presumably Feiden would eventually lose their fear of the police, but might sometimes need a convenient-but-not-necessarily-well-considered-or-accurate label to refer to that different era when they were afraid of the police, and 'the age of Kent State' looks like such a label. Tlhslobus (talk) 16:41, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * The excerpt that Feiden possessed was from Up Your Ass. You can see some of the actual pages here, as posted by Feiden herself: https://web.archive.org/web/20091006022832/http://alhirschfeld.com/warhol/play-pages.html. It's definitely Up Your Ass (which I have a copy of), but since it seems that Feiden didn't have a title page, she was just guessing on the title. Kaldari (talk) 05:38, 26 January 2018 (UTC)
 * Either guessing or having confused or false memories due to the passage of time and/or perhaps something like false memories created by something like Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Tlhslobus (talk) 16:28, 26 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks to everybody for all your helpful replies. I've now used footnote 198 to say it was a partial copy of an earlier draft of Up Your Ass (which I've placed beside 'handed her a copy of her play' as perhaps the best place for that info), and I've removed my Clarify request since I think it's now probably been clarified as much as we can. Contrary to what I said when I first saw the footnote, I no longer feel the footnote is useful for saying anything elsewhere, due to above-mentioned problems with Feiden's recollection, etc. But if others wish to try to use use it, I guess that's up to them. Regards. Tlhslobus (talk) 02:08, 28 January 2018 (UTC)

Schizophrenic
We source she was schizophrenic and is relevant to the opening because it was diagnosed from the attempted murder. ♫ RichardWeiss talk contribs 15:07, 16 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Your opening sentence mischaracterizes Solanas as a feminist, an author, and a schizophrenic. That's like describing somebody as a liberal, a poet, and a diabetic. The first two are political and career choices, the last is a condition that requires treatment. It's mixing apples and oranges.
 * If you wish to mention her schizophrenia, I think better ways to do it would be to describe her as a feminist and author who suffered from schizophrenia, or to mention schizophrenia in a second sentence. — MShabazz Talk/Stalk 15:35, 16 August 2018 (UTC)

Infobox
I do not see how 'Up Your Ass' could be classified as a 'notable work', though I can see why it might merit a mention in the article. Valetude (talk) 21:19, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Her Son
Why do we include the adoptive surname of her son? Irish Melkite (talk) 03:23, 22 December 2021 (UTC)

LEAD
I moved a lot of excess content out of LEAD and put here per WP:MOSLEAD, and WP:PRESERVE. If you can find some other place in the article it needs to be, then put it there. Anyhow, it should all be duplicated anyhow in the article already per policy as lead summarizes. Thanks Jtbobwaysf (talk) 21:49, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Solanas had a turbulent childhood, suffering sexual abuse from both her father and grandfather, and experiencing a volatile relationship with her mother and stepfather. She came out as a lesbian in the 1950s. After graduating with a degree in psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, Solanas relocated to Berkeley. There she began writing the SCUM Manifesto, which urged women to "overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex."

In New York City, Solanas asked Warhol to produce her play Up Your Ass, but he claimed to have lost her script, and hired her to perform in his film, I, a Man, by way of compensation. At this time, a Parisian publisher of censored works, Maurice Girodias, offered Solanas a contract, which she interpreted as a conspiracy between him and Warhol to steal her future writings. Jtbobwaysf (talk) 21:49, 20 July 2024 (UTC)