Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig (July 13, 1935 – January 3, 2003) was a French author and feminist theorist who wrote about overcoming socially enforced gender roles, and who coined the phrase "heterosexual contract". She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark in lesbian feminism. She lived in France and the United States, and published in both French and English.

Quotes

Stein, Proust, Joyce, Dos Passos, Faulkner, Woolf, Sarraute, etc. These are the giants of our century. I always keep them in mind, for they taught us that form is meaning. They taught us to tear off limb by limb a new literary reality from the literary landscape of the time. The accent on form is what is new to this century. And a writer's work today is on form. But to invent a form that is new and raw is difficult. We aren't here to make pretty things. We might ask who is writing the new American experimental novel today? Is it not our work as writers to experiment so as to fight the canon, to break it down? A writer never works in (or to be in) the canon. All the above writers were fighting the canon.
- interview in Yale French Studies (1988), and included in Shifting Scenes by Alice Jardine and Anne M Menke (1991)

I can no more say I am a lesbian writer than I can say I am a woman writer. I am simply a writer. Writing is what is important, not sociological categories. I do think some changes of form are more open to history than others; but working, writing-for the writer-is an individual process, never a collective one.
- interview in Yale French Studies (1988)

To say that writers have been excluded from the canon because they are women not only seems to me inexact, but the very idea proceeds from a trend toward theories of victimization. There are few great writers in any century. Each time there was one, not only was she welcome within the canon, but she was acclaimed, applauded, and praised in her time - sometimes especially because she was a woman. I'm thinking of Sand and Colette. I do not think that real innovators have been passed by. In the university, we ruin the purpose of what we do if we make a special category for women-especially when teaching. When we do that as feminists, we ourselves turn the canon into a male edifice.
- interview in Yale French Studies (1988)

In this dark adored adorned gehenna say your farewells m/y very beautiful one m/y very strong one m/y very indomitable one m/y very learned one m/y very ferocious one m/y very gentle one m/y best beloved to what they, the women, call affection tenderness or gracious abandon. There is not one who is unaware of what takes place here, which has no name as yet, let them seek it if they are determined to do so, let them indulge in a storm of fine rivalries, that which I so utterly disown, while you with siren voice entreat some woman with shining knees to come to your aid.
- beginning of Le corps lesbien (1973), translated from the original French into English by David Le Vay with the title The Lesbian Body

The Straight Mind (1992)

Quotes are from The Straight Mind, 1992 ISBN 978-0-8070-7917-1 Wittig, Monique (1992). The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Beacon Press. ISBN 978-0-8070-7917-1. OCLC 748998545. Written in English, it was translated into French as La Pensée straight in 2001. Brad Epps and Jonathan Katz, 'Monique Wittig's Materialist Utopia and Radical Critique', Monique Wittig: At the Crossroads of Criticism, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, special issue, Duke University Press, 2007, page 424

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. (from "The Category of Sex" 1982)

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. ("The Category of Sex")

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes. ("The Category of Sex")

What does "feminist" mean? Feminist is formed with the word "femme," "woman," and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For many others it means someone who fight for woman and her defense – for the myth, then, and its reenforcement. ("One Is Not Born a Woman" 1981)

There is no possible fight for someone deprived of an identity, no internal motivation for fighting, since, although I can fight only with others, first I fight for myself. ("One Is Not Born a Woman")

..."woman" has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women. (from "The Straight Mind" 1980, p. 32)

The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language. ("On the Social Contract" 1989)

there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression. ("The Point of View: Universal or Particular?" 1980)

it is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch. ("The Trojan Horse" 1984)

men are not born with a faculty for the universal and ... women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics. ("The Mark of Gender" 1985)

Les Guérillères (1969 novel)

translated from the original French into English by David Le Vay (1971)

When it rains the women stay in the summer-house. They hear the water beating on the tiles and streaming down the slopes of the roof. Fringes of rain surround the summer-house, the water that runs down at its angles flows more strongly, it is as if springs hollow out the pebbles at the places where it reaches the ground. At last someone says it is like the sound of micturition, that she cannot wait any longer, and squats down. Then some of them form a circle around her to watch the labia expel the urine. (first lines)

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember…You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-colored and music good to hear.

Quotes about

Among the most provocative and compelling feminist political visions since The Second Sex. These essays represent the radical extension of de Beauvoir's theory, its unexpected lesbian future. Wittig's theoretical insights are both precise and far-reaching, and her theoretical style is bold incisive, even shattering.
- Judith Butler, used as blurb for The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)

My Opoponax does away with ninety percent of the books that have been written about childhood. It marks the end of a certain kind of literature, for which I thank heaven. The book is not only admirable, it is also important, for it is governed by an iron rule that is never, or almost never, broken. That rule is to use nothing but purely descriptive material and purely objective language. The latter assumes its full meaning here. It is the very language that children use to order and elaborate their world, but here transformed by the author into plainsong. What this comes down to is that my Opoponax is a literary masterpiece, because it is written in the very language that Opoponax would use.
- Marguerite Duras, "A Brilliant Work: L'Opoponax" (1964) translated from French into English by Arthur Goldhammer in Outside: Selected Writings

A delectable epic of sex warfare...an extraordinary leap of the imagination into the politics of oppression and revolt."
- Mary McCarthy, used as blurb for Les Guérillères

Ms. Wittig is a dazzling writer. Her words are lucid and gleaming like moonlight.
- Edna O'Brien, used as blurb for Les guérillères

that raw, brilliant female Utopia...Les Guérillières
- Joanna Russ, How To Suppress Women's Writing (1983)

External links

Wikipedia

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Monique Wittig