Why you should read Dans Ton Cul, a work by Valérie Solanas as funny as it is gritty and radical

Violent and corrosively humorous, Dans Ton Cul is a play written in the 1960s by Valérie Solanas. A short and powerful text by a radical author ahead of her time, to discover urgently today.

It is often presented for two feats of arms: the publication of SCUM Manifesto in 1967, feminist firebrand and misandreand the attempted assassination of Andy Warhol the following year. Valerie Solanasa radical feminist figure born in 1936 and died in 1988, is again highlighted through the publication in May 2022 and for the first time in France of In Your Ass. This play was translated in France by Wendy Delorme and published by Éditions Fayardin the 1001 Nights collection.

An opportunity to see that the anger of Valérie Solanas is still alive, that his verve still hits the mark, and that his denunciation of male domination and capitalism finds still resonates with feminists today.

How In Your Ass Almost Never Came to Be

In Your Ass (in English Up Your Ass), it is a work of around thirty pages, which Valérie Solanas took three years to write. Claimed lesbian, she then lives in New York, tries to become a writer and earns her living by prostituting herself.

His play almost remained lost in limbo : when in 1967, Valérie Solanas presented her manuscript to Andy Warhol and asked him to produce his play, the latter believed not in a joke, but downright in a set up. Because at that time, he was not in the odor of holiness with the authorities, as he told in his memoirs, co-written with Pat Hackett and published in the 80s: “I quickly took a look at it and it was so lewd, I thought it was working for the police and it was some kind of incitement to crime”. Andy Warhol ends up telling him that he has misplaced the manuscript and, in return, offers Valérie Solanas a role in the film. I, a Man.

It was not until 1999 that the text was found. Director George Coates directs it. It was only in 2014 that it was published for the first time in the United States.

Each dialogue is finely chiseled, rhythmic, everything hits the spot. “It’s extremely built”tells us the author Wendy Delorme, to whom we owe in particular The time of fire will come at Cambourakis and who translated this first French edition of the play.

Valerie Solanas, forgotten radical feminist figure - #CulturePrime

The Story of In Your Ass

“In your ass, it’s a fierce and hilarious pamphlet that comes in the form of boulevard theater”summarizes Wendy Delorme.

The short play features the cheeky Bongi Perez, a sort of incarnation of Valérie Solanas, who like her, prostitutes herself. As they meet and interact, it highlights and denounces the norms, the patriarchal springs and the hypocrisy of the American society of the 60swith a harsh and terribly corrosive spirit.

“She is funny, and her humor is a weapon”explains Wendy Delorme. “The way she brings form and content together is an example to follow, it’s a source of inspiration. One of the problems in getting the facts about sexual violence across is precisely who you talk to and how you do it. Sometimes a message does not get through, because its enunciation does not get through. Valérie Solanas, while being radical, while seeming excessive, always manages to get a message across. »

Radical, extreme, rabid… There is no shortage of adjectives to qualify Valérie Solanas and her provocations. In Your Ass do not take gloves and shows all the irreverence of this author totally out of step with the times : “She is way ahead of her time,” summarizes Wendy Delorme.

“She wrote Dans Ton Cul when we weren’t yet talking about gender issues. She was brilliant, off the charts, but that wasn’t a choice on her part. She went to college, but in her day, women were said to go to college to find a husband and were never given positions in research labs. Her rage comes from there too, she can’t live in that world. »

She is finally even too transgressive for the already very transgressive Factoryshe does not fit into the codes of the studio where Andy Warhol and his clique of marginals and artists gather, in no way resembling the stars who gravitate around the artist and populate his universe.

After shooting Andy Warhol, she is brought to justice and sent to a psychiatric hospital, where she is diagnosed with schizophrenia. This assassination attempt makes her ironically famous.

The other major work of Valérie Solanas is of course SCUM Manifesto (SCUM for Society for Cutting Up Men, in other words “Society to emasculate men”), in which Valérie Solanas spits his desire to eliminate men. “Un funny and jubilant text, cathartic and humorous. It’s a big puppet that has real political power” describes the author Chloé Delaume, in an article in the World which celebrates 50 years of the work of Valérie Solanas. It was reissued in France in 2021 by Fayard with an afterword by Lauren Bastide.

Scum Manifesto - Valerie Solanas
Marc Wathieu via Flickr

To listen to “In your ass”

In Your Ass also exists through a translation into French and a radio play produced by a collective TPG (Trans Pédés Gouines). It is broadcast on Station Stationthe media of La Station — Gare des Mines.


Read also :

“To be a political lesbian is to prove that we don’t need men anywhere, that a life without them is possible. »

Photo credit : Capture

Why you should read Dans Ton Cul, a work by Valérie Solanas as funny as it is gritty and radical