Monique Wittig (; 13 July 1935 – 3 January 2003) was a French author, philosopher, and feminist theorist who wrote about abolition of the sex-class system and coined the phrase "heterosexual contract." Her groundbreaking work is titled The Straight Mind and Other Essays. She published her first novel, L'Opoponax, in 1964. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), was a landmark text in the lesbian feminism canon.
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, 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. 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 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.
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. 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. 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.