Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword by Louise Turcotte
Preface
The Category of Sex
One Is Not Born a Woman
The Straight Mind
On the Social Contract
Homo Sum
The Point of View: Universal or Particular?
The Trojan Horse
The Mark of Gender
The Site of Action
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Mary Jo Lakeland, Susan Ellis Wolf, Sande Zeig, Louise Turcotte, Pascale Noizet, Suzette Triton, Romany Eveleigh, Andrew Hrycyna, Beacon Press, and Susan Meigs for their help and support.
Foreword
CHANGING THE POINT OF VIEW
If a single name has been associated with the French Women’s Liberation Movement, it is surely that of Monique Wittig. Her reputation is largely due to her literary works, which have been translated into several languages. But if Monique Wittig has made her mark as a writer in this second half of the twentieth century, the spreading of her theoretical texts will also show her to be one of the great thinkers of our time.
It is impossible to locate Wittig’s influence entirely in literature, politics, or theory, for her work in fact traverses all three, and it is precisely from this multidimensionality that the great importance of her thought derives.
Much has been written about her literary works, yet not enough has been said of her theoretical and political writings. This will be a more political testimony, then, for I have been very fortunate in knowing Monique Wittig personally since the early 1970s. While it is possible to articulate the immediate influence of Wittig’s thinking, it is still quite difficult to anticipate the full influence her work will have on the history of women’s struggle for liberation. Her essays call into question some of the basic premises of contemporary feminist theory. What is at issue here is a total conceptual revolution.
TRANSLATED BY MARLENE WILDEMAN
In 1978, at the Modern Language Association’s annual conference in New York, when Monique Wittig concluded her presentation “The Straight Mind” with the statement, “lesbians are not women,” the audience’s warm reception was preceded by a moment of stunned silence. When this essay was published two years later in the French journal Questions féministes, this stunned silence had been transformed—by some of the more radical feminists—into political pressure; a note had been added to “soften” the conclusion. Wittig’s startling point of view was unimaginable at that time. In point of fact, a page had been turned in the history of the Women’s Liberation Movement by one of France’s principal instigators. What exactly was this page? Why was it no longer possible to see the Women’s Liberation Movement in exactly the same way? Precisely because the point of view had shifted.
Since the beginning of this century, the entire women’s struggle, from the defense of “women’s rights” to a feminist analysis of “women’s oppression,” has taken as its foundation “the point of view of women.” That went without saying. This analysis was refined over the years and different tendencies emerged, as happens in all liberation movements, but never was this basic consensus called into question. It seemed, in any case, indisputable. And so it was that the statement “lesbians are not women” would, at one and the same time, theoretically and politically disrupt an entire movement.
Founded upon the latest concepts of materialist and radical feminism, among them the idea of “classes of sex,” Wittig’s statement called into question a fundamental point feminism had never disputed: heterosexuality. Not as sexuality anymore, but as a political regime. Until then, feminism had considered the “patriarchy” an ideological system based on the domination of the class of men over the class of women. But the categories themselves, “man” and “woman,” had not actually been questioned. Here is where “lesbian existence” takes on its particular meaning, for if these two categories cannot exist without each other, and lesbians exist by and for “women” only, there has to be a flaw in this conceptual system.
In the early 1980s, many lesbians in France and Quebec began calling this point of view “radical lesbianism” and totally revised their strategy. Radical lesbians have now reached a basic consensus that views heterosexuality as a political regime which must be overthrown, and we all draw inspiration from the writings of Monique Wittig. For us, Wittig’s body of work constituted a point of departure for analysis and action. All of history was to be reexamined.
When history is reexamined from this point of view, it is interesting to note that the groundwork of a critique of heterosexuality as a “political institution” had already been laid at the beginning of the 1970s by certain lesbian separatists in the United States.1 But American lesbian separatism did not take up this analysis. Rather its aim was to develop within an essentialist framework new lesbian values within lesbian communities. This was, and still is, to ignore that “heterosexuality . . . can ensure its political power only through the destruction or the negation of lesbianism.”2 The existence of lesbian communities is strategically necessary. But if they are not within the context of a political movement that aims to abolish the heterosexual system, their significance is entirely different; it is a matter then of creating a “new category.” But only the destruction of the existing categories can bring about real change. This is what we have come to understand through Monique Wittig’s work: it is not a question of replacing “woman” by “lesbian,” but rather of making use of our strategic position to destroy the heterosexual system. “We [lesbians] . . . are runaway slaves . . . escapees from our class” (“One Is Not Born a Woman”). This key sentence provides the political dimension of the lesbian point of view. When reading Wittig, it must always be borne in mind.
In the United States, Adrienne Rich put forward a feminist analysis of heterosexuality in her 1980 essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”3 For Rich, heterosexuality is “something that has to be imposed, managed, organized, propagandized and maintained by force.”4 This text poses heterosexuality as a political institution in the patriarchal system. Rich sees lesbian existence as an act of resistance to this institution, but for “lesbian existence to realize this political content in an ultimately liberating form, the erotic choice must depend and expand into conscious woman-identification.”5 Rich analyses the concept of heterosexuality within the framework of contemporary feminist theory from the “women’s point of view,” whereas radical lesbianism does without that point of view. It sees lesbianism as necessarily political and considers it outside the whole heterosexual political regime. For to speak of “compulsory heterosexuality” is redundant.
“Consciousness of oppression is not only a reaction to [fight against] oppression. It is also the whole conceptual reevaluation of the social world, its whole reorganization with new concepts . . .” (“One Is Not Born a Woman”). For me this summarizes the work of Monique Wittig. It was through militant groups that I came to know her. Her deep respect for each individual, her deep contempt for all forms of power, have forever altered my conception of militancy. And it is through her writing that I have also come to understand the necessity of going back and forth between the theoretical and the political. Political struggle cannot be conceived without this, and, as theory is gradually transformed, we must also transform our political struggle. This is a challenge that requires constant vigilance and a constant willingness to reconsider our actions and our political positions. It is in this sense that radical lesbians’ questioning of the feminist movement must be understood.
“We must produce a political transformation of the key concepts, that is of the concepts which are strategic for us” (“The Straig
ht Mind”). By not questioning the heterosexual political regime, contemporary feminism proposes rearranging rather than eliminating this system. Likewise, the contemporary development of the notion of “gender,” it seems to me, masks, or camouflages, the relationships of oppression. Often “gender,” even as it attempts to describe the social relations between men and women, lets us ignore, or diminish, the notion of “classes of sex,” thereby divesting these relationships of their political dimension.
I would like to mention here one of the critical elements of Wittig’s body of thought, neatly summarized by the following phrase: “A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal” (“The Universal and the Particular”). This exemplifies Wittig’s extraordinary effectiveness. In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add “the universal” to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience. Wittig’s lesbian thought does not aim to transgress but clearly to do away with the categories of gender and sex on which the very notion of universality rests. “Sexes (gender), difference between the sexes, man, woman, race, black, white, nature are at the core of [the straight mind’s] set of parameters. They have shaped our concepts, our laws, our institutions, our history, our cultures” (“Homo Sum”). To reexamine the parameters on which universal thought is founded requires a reevaluation of all the basic tools of analysis, including dialectics. Not in order to discard it, but to make it more effective.
Monique Wittig’s work is the perfect illustration of the connection between politics and theory. Too often, we perceive these two fundamental elements as separate entities; on one side, there is the theoretical work and on the other the political, working in parallel, when in fact they should intersect. This meeting of theory and politics is fundamental for all political struggle, and it is precisely what makes Wittig’s thought so disturbing. Theoretical agreement calls for political struggle. When theoretical agreement is reached, the course of history has already been shaken.
Louise Turcotte
Member of Amazones d’hier, Lesbiennes d’aujourd’hui
Preface
Materialist lesbianism, this is what I would call the political and philosophical approach of the first half of this collection of essays. I describe heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women. In desperate straits, exactly as it was for serfs and slaves, women may “choose” to be runaways and try to escape their class or group (as lesbians do), and/or to renegotiate daily, and term by term, the social contract. There is no escape (for there is no territory, no other side of the Mississippi, no Palestine, no Liberia for women). The only thing to do is to stand on one’s own feet as an escapee, a fugitive slave, a lesbian. One must accept that my point of view may appear crude, and no wonder, considering all the centuries it has had against it. First one must step out of the tracks of politics, philosophy, anthropology, history, “cultures,” to understand what is really happening. Then one might have to do without the munificent philosophical toy of dialectics, because it does not allow one to conceive of the opposition of men and women in terms of class conflict. One must understand that this conflict has nothing eternal about it and that to overcome it one must destroy politically, philosophically, and symbolically the categories of “men” and “women.”
Dialectics has let us down. Therefore the comprehension of what “materialism” and materiality are belongs to us. Here I will list a few names, names of those without whom I would not have been empowered to attack conceptually the straight world. By order of publication of their work, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Paola Tabet, Sande Zeig represent for me the most important political influences during the time I wrote these essays. Each one of them deserves a chapter.
Mathieu was the first to establish women in the social sciences as a sociological and anthropological entity, that is, not as appendages to men, but as a group which stands on its own. She is the originator of what she has called the anthropology of the sexes. But she is a philosopher as well as an anthropologist in the French tradition. Her last essay on consciousness is a landmark. Mathieu gives us the missing link in the history of consciousness by providing an analysis of consciousness as oppressed—which does not mean consciousness as alienated.
Delphy coined the expression “materialist feminism,” and she changed the Marxist concept of class, showing it to be obsolete since it does not take into account the kind of work that has no exchange value, work that represents two thirds of the work provided globally, according to recent figures of the United Nations.
Guillaumin transformed the point of view on materialism and materiality in such a way that after her it cannot be recognized. One has to read Guillaumin to understand that what we have called materialism until now was very far from the mark, since the most important aspect of materiality was ignored. There is, on the one hand, the physical and mental exertion attached to the kind of work that is merely physical service to one or several persons without any compensation in wages, and, on the other hand, the physical and mental implications of the kind of work that robs the whole person of herself night and day. But Guillaumin is more widely known to have defined the double aspect of the oppression of women: a private appropriation by an individual (a husband or a father) and a collective appropriation of the whole group, including celibate individuals by the class of men. In other words, “sexage.” If you are unmarried, you will have to be available to take care of the sick, the aged, the weak, (as nuns and volunteer workers do), whether they belong to your family or not.
Tabet, in working in the anthropology of the sexes, has provided a link between women as collectively appropriated. Particularly in her last works on prostitution, she shows that there is a continuum between so-called prostitutes and lesbians as a class of women who are not privately appropriated but are still collectively the object of heterosexual oppression.
Zeig, with whom I wrote Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary and the play The Constant Journey, made me understand that the effects of oppression on the body—giving it its form, its gestures, its movement, its motricity, and even its muscles—have their origin in the abstract domain of concepts, through the words that formalize them. I was thinking of her work as an actor and as a writer when I said (in “The Mark of Gender”) that “language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it, for example, the bodies of social actors . . .”
There are many other important names I have not mentioned (Colette Capitan, Monique Plaza, Emmanuelle de Lesseps, Louise Turcotte, Danièle Charest, Suzette Triton, Claudie Lesselier, etc). But I am only enumerating the people who had a direct influence on my way of thinking.
These collected essays are divided in two parts. The first half, as I have already mentioned, is a political discussion. With “Category of Sex” I wanted to show “sex” as a political category. The word “gender” already used in England and in the United States seemed to me imprecise. In “One Is Not Born a Woman,” there is an attempt to establish a link between women fighting for women as a class, against the idea of “woman” as an essentialist concept. In the “Straight Mind,” I sketch the thought which throughout the centuries built heterosexuality as a given. “The Social Contract” discusses the idea that there is an issue beyond the heterosexual social contract. “Homo Sum” is about political thought and the future of dialectics.
In the second half of this collection I mention the object of my main concern: writing. My first book, The Opoponax, was supported by the French New Novel, a school of writers whom I will always admire for the way they ha
ve revolutionized the novel and for their stand for literature as literature. They have taught me what work is in literature.
In “The Point of View, Universal or Particular” I touch upon the problem of a work of art in which the literary forms cannot be perceived because the theme of the work (here homosexuality) predominates.
The “Trojan Horse” is a discussion of language as raw material for the writer and of how violently literary forms affect their context when they are new. This essay has been developed in an unpublished work which I call The Literary Workshop (le Chantier littéraire).
In “Mark of Gender” I examine the original meaning of gender and how it represents the linguistic index of women’s material oppression,
“The Site of Action” focuses on language as the ultimate social contract, an idea that Nathalie Sarraute’s work inspired.
Different journals have been involved in publishing texts on the new materialism. The first was Questions féministes, whose collective invited me to join them when I first came to the United States. At that time I worked on the preparation of a series of seminars in the French Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I was trying to inaugurate on my own an epistemological revolution in the approach to the oppression of women. It was then that I joined with enthusiasm this group whose members were working in the same direction.
Feminist Issues was begun in Berkeley a few years later to address the concept of feminist materialism, and their collective invited me to be their advisory editor. In spite of the conflict we had in France on the lesbian question, the American editors (Mary Jo Lakeland and Susan Ellis Wolf) decided that this question would not injure the journal and that it would receive the attention that it deserved in an international framework.
Amazones d’hier, Lesbiennes d’aujourd’hui was published in Montreal by radical lesbians led by Louise Turcotte and Danièle Charest who understood both the necessity of a theory of feminist materialism and the necessity of going beyond it, through the theory and the struggle that they have adopted and developed.
The Straight Mind Page 1