Monique Wittig

Biography

Monique Wittig was born in 1935 in Dannemarie, Haut-Rhin, France. In 1950, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In 1964, she published her first novel, L'Opoponax which won her immediate attention in France and won the Prix Médicis. After the novel was translated into English, Wittig achieved international recognition. She was one of the founders of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) (Women's Liberation Movement). In 1969, she published what is arguably her most influential work, Les Guérillères, which is today considered a revolutionary and controversial source for feminist and lesbian thinkers around the world. Its publication is also considered to be the founding event of French feminism.

Wittig earned her PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, after completing a thesis titled "Le Chantier littéraire". Wittig was a central figure in lesbian and feminist movements in France. In 1971, she was a founding member of the Gouines rouges ("Red Dykes"), the first lesbian group in Paris. She was also involved in the Féministes Révolutionnaires ("Revolutionary feminists"), a radical feminist group. She published various other works, some of which include the 1973 Le Corps lesbien (or The Lesbian Body) and the 1976 Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (or Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary), which her partner, Sande Zeig, coauthored.

In 1976, Wittig and Zeig left France due to certain MLF members who sought to "paralyse and destroy lesbian groups." Wittig's attempts to create a lesbian-specific group within the radical branch of the MLF was met with resistance; "they almost succeeded in completely destroying me, and they have, yes, chased me out of Paris". Wittig and Zeig moved to the United States where Wittig focused on developing gender theory. Her works, ranging from the philosophical essay The Straight Mind to parables such as Les Tchiches et les Tchouches, explored the interconnectedness and intersection of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form. With various editorial positions both in France and in the United States, Wittig's works became internationally recognized and were commonly published in both French and English. She continued to work as a visiting professor in various universities across the nation, including the University of California, Berkeley, Vassar College and the University of Arizona in Tucson. She taught a course in materialist thought through Women's Studies programs, wherein her students were immersed in the process of correcting the American translation of The Lesbian Body. She died of a heart attack on January 3, 2003.

Writing style

Wittig had a materialist approach in her works (evident in Les Guérillères). She also demonstrated a very critical theoretical approach (evident in her essay, "One Is Not Born a Woman").

Wittig also emphasized the role of language in shaping reality. She used innovative literary techniques, such as split pronouns (e.g., "j/e" in Le Corps lesbien), to challenge the binary logic of gender and to create new forms of subjectivity.

Theoretical views

Wittig's essays call into question some of the basic premises of contemporary feminist theory. Wittig was one of the first feminist theorists to interrogate heterosexuality as not just sexuality, but as a political regime. Defining herself as a radical lesbian, she and other lesbians during the early 1980s in France and Quebec reached a consensus that "radical lesbianism" posits heterosexuality as a political regime that must be overthrown. Wittig criticized contemporary feminism for not questioning this heterosexual political regime and believed that contemporary feminism proposed to rearrange rather than eliminate the system. While a critique of heterosexuality as a "political institution" had been laid by certain lesbian separatists in the United States, American lesbian separatism did not posit heterosexuality as a regime to be overthrown. Rather, the aim was to develop within an essentialist framework new lesbian values within lesbian communities.

Wittig was a theorist of materialist feminism. She believed that it is the historical task of feminists to define oppression in materialist terms. It is necessary to make clear that women are a class, and to recognize the category of "woman" as well as the category of "man" as political and economic categories. Wittig acknowledges that these two social classes exist because of the social relationship between men and women. However, women as a class will disappear when man as a class disappears. Just as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men. The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. The category of "man" and "woman" exists only in a heterosexual system, and to destroy the heterosexual system will end the categories of men and women.

Wittig's work has had a significant impact on feminist and queer theory, though her relationship to these fields is complex. While some see her as a precursor to queer theory, others argue that her materialist approach sets her apart from more recent developments in the field.

Notable works

''Les Guérillères''

Les Guérillères, published in 1969, five years after Wittig's first novel, revolves around the elles, women warriors who have created their own sovereign state by overthrowing the patriarchal world. The novel is structured through a series of prose poems. "Elles are not 'the women'a mistranslation that often surfaces in David Le Vay's English renditionbut rather the universal 'they,' a linguistic assault on the masculine collective pronoun ils." The novel initially describes the world that the elles have created and ends with members recounting the days of war that led to the sovereign state.

''The Straight Mind''

In the first essay of the collection, titled The Category of Sex, Wittig theorizes the class nature of sex oppression, favouring a social constructionist rather than biological essentialist view of the dialect between the sexes.

While Wittig depicted only women in her literature, she abhorred the idea that she was a "women's writer." Monique Wittig called herself a "radical lesbian."

In "Point of View: Universal or Particular?", she states that gender "is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes." Only one gender exists: the feminine, the masculine not being a gender. The masculine is not the masculine but the general, as the masculine experience is normalized over the experience of the feminine. Feminine is the concrete as denoted through sex in language, whereas only the masculine as general is the abstract. Wittig lauds Djuna Barnes and Marcel Proust for universalizing the feminine by making no gendered difference in the way they describe characters. As taking the point of view of a lesbian, Wittig finds it necessary to suppress genders in the same way Djuna Barnes cancels out genders by making them obsolete.

Moreover, for Wittig, the social or gender category "woman" exists only through its relation to the social category "man," and the "women" without relation to "men" would cease to exist, leaving individuals freed from social constructs and categories dictating behavior or norms. She advocated a strong universalist position, saying that the expression of one's identity and the liberation of desire require the abolition of gender categories.

Wittig identified herself as a radical lesbian. In her work The Straight Mind, she argued that lesbians are not women because to be a lesbian is to step outside of the heterosexual norm of women, as defined by men for men's ends.

Wittig also developed a critical view of Marxism which obstructed feminist struggle, but also of feminism itself which does not question the heterosexual dogma.

A theorist of materialist feminism, she stigmatised the myth of "the woman," called heterosexuality a political regime, and outlined the basis for a social contract which lesbians refuse.

Reception and influence

Wittig is a major influence in Judith Butler's classic Gender Trouble. However, Butler identifies a "metaphysics of presence" in Wittig’s theory (a Derridean critique), suggesting that it presupposes a pre-discursive, humanist subject – an idea Butler rejects as essentialist.

Linda Zerilli states that Wittig's work challenges traditional, male-dominated notions of universalism by deconstructing the heterosexual framework that underpins societal and linguistic structures. Contra Butler, Zerilli suggests that the universalization of the lesbian subject is strategic, aimed at exposing the contradictions inherent in traditional notions of the universal subject.

For Teresa de Lauretis, Wittig's work helped distinguish lesbian theory from feminist theory by conceptualizing lesbians as an "eccentric subject" existing outside the heterosexual framework. She argues that Wittig’s ideas, though sometimes misunderstood – referring especially to Butler – anticipated later developments in queer and postcolonial theory. De Lauretis also emphasizes Wittig’s lasting influence, as contemporary gender studies increasingly move beyond fixed identity categories, inadvertently realizing Wittig’s vision.

Brad Epps and Jonathan Katz argue that Wittig’s materialist approach and radical critique remain relevant, particularly in the context of contemporary debates about queer theory and the politics of identity. They also draw parallels between Wittig and the thinkers of the Frankfurt School.

Bibliography

Novels

• (Winner of the Prix Médicis.)

Plays

• (Unpublished.)
• (Radio Stuttgart.)
• (Radio Stuttgart.)
• (Radio Stuttgart.)
• (Vlasta 4 supplement.)

Short fiction

Most collected in Paris-la-Politique. Paris: P.O.L., 1999

Translations

Essays and criticisms

Most collected in La Pensée straight, Paris: Balland, 2001 (trans. by the author and Sam Bourcier) and in The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Boston: Beacon Press, 1992

::Reprinted as:

::Reprinted as:

::Translation of:

::Reprinted as:

::Reprinted as:

• Wiitig, Monique (March 1990). "Homo Sum". Feminist Issues 10, 3–11. doi.org/10.1007/BF02686514
• Alternative version.
• Alternative version.

References

References

1. [https://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E5DA1731F931A25752C0A9659C8B63&scp=1&sq=%22The+Straight+Mind%22&st=nyt "Monique Wittig, 67, Feminist Writer, Dies", by Douglas Martin, January 12, 2003, ''The New York Times'']
2. Benewick, Robert. (1998). "The Routledge Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Political Thinkers". Routledge.
3. (2019-06-25). "Drafting Monique Wittig".
4. Balén, Julia. ''In Memoriam: Monique Wittig'', ''The Women's Review of Books'', January 2004, Vol. XXI, No. 4., quoted in [http://www.triviavoices.net/archives/issue5/balen.html Trivia Magazine, Wittig Obituary]. {{webarchive. link. (June 19, 2008)
5. link. (July 11, 2011)
6. link. (March 4, 2016 ; Monique Wittig, Catherine Temerson, Sande Zeig. "The Literary Workshop: An Excerpt", in ''GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies'' – Volume 13, Number 4, 2007, pp. 543–551)
7. Eloit, Ilana. (December 2019). "American lesbians are not French women: heterosexual French feminism and the Americanisation of lesbianism in the 1970s". Feminist Theory.
8. Hewitt, Leah Dianne. (1992). "Autobiographical tightropes: Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, and Maryse Condé". University of Nebraska Press.
9. Turcotte, Lousie. "Foreword." ''The Straight Mind and Other Essays''. Ed. Monique Wittig. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. viii–xii. Print.
10. Wittig, Monique. "One Is Not Born a Woman." ''Feminist Theory Reader: Local and Global Perspectives''. Ed. Carole R. McCann and Seung-Kyung Kim. New York: Routledge, 2013. 246–250. Print.{{ISBN?
11. Wittig, Monique. "The Category of Sex." ''The Straight Mind and Other Essays''. Ed. Monique Wittig. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 5–8. Print.
12. Epps, Brad. (2007-10-01). "Monique Wittig's Materialist Utopia and Radical Critique". GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.
13. {{cite glbtq.com. Creet. Julia. (March 2, 2004)
14. Kirkup, James. (2003-01-09). "Monique Wittig". [[The Independent]].
15. Wittig, Monique. "Point of View: Universal or Particular?" ''The Straight Mind and Other Essays''. Ed. Monique Wittig. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. 60–61. Print. {{ISBN?
16. Salih, Sara. (2002). "Judith Butler". Routledge.
17. Zerilli, Linda. (1990). "The Trojan Horse of Universalism: Language as a "War Machine" in the Writings of Monique Wittig". Social Text.
18. de Lauretis, Teresa. (2005). "On Monique Wittig: theoretical, political, and literary essays". University of Illinois Press.