Monique Wittig argued that 'woman' is a political category, not a natural one
For the French writer Monique Wittig, sex did not produce oppression; oppression produced the categories of sex. She treated heterosexuality as a political regime rather than a private preference, coined the phrase heterosexual contract, and wrote a 1969 novel often called the founding event of French feminism.
Born in 1935 in Dannemarie in Alsace, Wittig moved to Paris in 1950 to study at the Sorbonne. Her first novel, L'Opoponax, won the Prix Médicis in 1964 and brought international attention once translated into English. She helped found the Women's Liberation Movement in France and, in 1971, the Gouines rouges, the first lesbian group in Paris. In 1976, after clashes with members of the movement who she said sought to crush lesbian groups, she and her partner Sande Zeig moved to the United States.
Les Guérillères imagines women warriors who have overthrown the patriarchal world and built their own state, told through prose poems. Its heroines are called elles, the feminine plural they, a deliberate challenge to the French habit of letting the masculine ils stand for everyone; the English rendering as the women is often criticised as a mistranslation. In The Lesbian Body of 1973 she split the pronoun I, writing j/e, to unsettle gendered grammar.
Her theory was materialist. Women, she argued, form a class defined by their relationship to men, just as there are no slaves without masters, and both categories would vanish with the system that creates them. Only one gender really exists in language, the feminine, since the masculine passes for the general. She rejected the label of women's writer outright and praised Djuna Barnes and Proust for describing characters without gendered difference. In The Straight Mind she concluded that lesbians are not women, because the term only makes sense inside heterosexual thought.
Judith Butler drew heavily on her in Gender Trouble, while faulting her for assuming a humanist subject that exists before language. Teresa de Lauretis credits her with separating lesbian theory from feminist theory and anticipating queer thought. Wittig earned a doctorate under Gérard Genette, taught at Berkeley, Vassar and the University of Arizona, and died of a heart attack on January 3, 2003.
Source: Monique Wittig
