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.