Monique
Wittig called herself a Radical lesbian. She was a French author and
feminist theorist who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender
roles and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". In 1971, she
attended 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 her
first novel, L’Opoponax, in 1964 . Her second novel, Les Guérillères
(1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism.

This
is the one hundredth  post in a series highlighting the best gay and
lesbian authors from the 20th century (with a few before and after that
period) who have recorded in fiction, and nonfiction, the history of gay
people telling what life is, and was,
during an important time of history.


Biography

Monique
Wittig was born in 1935 in Dannemarie in Haut-Rhin, France. She was one
of the founders of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF)
(Women's Liberation Movement). On August 26, 1970, accompanied by
numerous other women, she put flowers under the Arc de Triomphe to
honour the wife of The Unknown Soldier; this symbolic action was
considered to be the founding event of French feminism.

Wittig
earned her Ph.D. from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
after completing a thesis named "Le Chantier littéraire".

College,
where she taught a course in Materialist Thought through the Program in
Women's Studies, wherein her students were immersed in the process of
correcting the American translation of The Lesbian Body. She was a
professor in women's studies and French at the University of Arizona in
Tucson, where she died of a heart attack on January 3, 2003.

Theories

Monique
Wittig called herself a Radical lesbian." This sensibility can be found
throughout her books, where she depicted only women. To avoid any
confusion, she stated:
"There is no such thing as women literature
for me, that does not exist. In literature, I do not separate women and
men. One is a writer, or one is not. This is a mental space where sex is
not determining. One has to have some space for freedom. Language
allows this. This is about building an idea of the neutral which could
escape sexuality".

A theorist of material feminism, she
stigmatised the myth of "the woman", called heterosexuality a political
regime, and outlined the basis for a social contract which lesbians
refuse:
"...and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate,
make love, live with women, for 'woman' has meaning only in
heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems.
Lesbians are not women." (1978)

For Wittig, the category "woman"
exists only through its relation to the category "man", and "woman"
without relation to "man" would cease to exist.

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

Through these critiques, Wittig advocated a
strong universalist position, saying that the rise of the individual and
the liberation of desire require the abolition of gender categories.

Bibliography
1964, L’Opoponax (prix Médicis)
1969, Les Guérillères
1973, Le Corps Lesbien (tr. The Lesbian Body)
1976, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes, (with Sande Zeig) (tr. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary)
1985, Virgile, non (tr. Across the Acheron)
1992, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (tr. La pensée straight)
1999, Paris-la-Politique
The film The Girl by Sande Zeig, Wittig's partner and collaborator, is made out of her first English novel.
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