Monique Wittig (1935–2003)
Author of Les Guérillères
About the Author
Works by Monique Wittig
Associated Works
Chloe Plus Olivia: An Anthology of Lesbian Literature from the 17th Century to the Present (1994) — Contributor — 482 copies, 1 review
What Is Gender Nihilism? A Reader — Contributor — 10 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- Wittig, Monique
- Birthdate
- 1935-07-13
- Date of death
- 2003-01-03
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, EHESS, Paris, France (Ph.D)
- Occupations
- writer
novelist
playwright
translator
short story writer
essayist (show all 7)
feminist - Organizations
- Mouvement de libération des femmes
Women's Liberation Movement
Gouines rouges
Féministes Révolutionnaires
Radical lesbianism - Short biography
- Monique Wittig was born in Dannemarie in Alsace, France. In 1950, she moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She earned her Ph.D. from the prestigious École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS, School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). In 1964, she published her first novel, L'Opoponax, which won her immediate attention in France and international recognition after it was translated into other languages. Her second novel, Les Guérillères, probably her most influential work, today is considered a founding event of French feminism. She became a leader of the French women's liberation movement. In 1971, she was a founding member of the Gouines rouges (Red Dykes), the first openly lesbian group in Paris. She was also involved in the Féministes Révolutionnaires (Revolutionary Feminists). She published various other works, including Le Corps lesbien (The Lesbian Body, 1973) and a feminist dictionary, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, 1976), co-authored with her partner, Sande Zeig.
In 1976, Wittig and Zeig moved to the USA, where Wittig focused on works that explored the inter-connectedness of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form. She was a visiting professor in various universities across the country, including the University of California, Berkeley, Vassar College, and the University of Arizona. A collection of writings, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992), was published in English. - Nationality
- France
USA - Birthplace
- Dannemarie, Haut-Rhin, France
- Places of residence
- Dannemarie, Haut-Rhin, France (birth)
Paris, France
Tucson, Arizona, USA
Rouergue, France - Place of death
- Tucson, Arizona, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- France
Members
Reviews
A truly special little book and maybe the ultimate realization of Wittig's fiction style. This is sort of a companion in my mind to Les Guérillères, as it is a similar fragmentary, psychedelic, vaguely tongue-in-cheek thought experiment around Wittig's conceptions of materialist feminism and lesbianism. Incidentally, if you read this and find its ideas hard to penetrate, her very short essay "One is Not Born a Woman" should give you a pretty strong idea of what she's doing with all show more this.
Regardless, these are the fragments of a dictionary from a future where only lesbians exist (though "lesbian" here should be understood as something closer to "queer" than "gay woman". Again, read the essay if needed). It is beautiful, strange, confusing, funny, and inspiring. Above all, it is one of the strongest examples I can imagine of how to theorize a future that is not, that can not be, and that we can still think of as part of our history-to-be. After all, queer people have always found ourselves by filling in the dots between recorded history. Why can't we do the same with our future? show less
Regardless, these are the fragments of a dictionary from a future where only lesbians exist (though "lesbian" here should be understood as something closer to "queer" than "gay woman". Again, read the essay if needed). It is beautiful, strange, confusing, funny, and inspiring. Above all, it is one of the strongest examples I can imagine of how to theorize a future that is not, that can not be, and that we can still think of as part of our history-to-be. After all, queer people have always found ourselves by filling in the dots between recorded history. Why can't we do the same with our future? show less
On the surface this book seems like it’s about the war between the sexes, but the actual war itself only starts in the last 50 pages and everything up till that point is just world-building and slice of life in the strange, surreal future Wittig has constructed. Some may find it boring, but I actually found the little day to day details very pretty. I’ve been reading a lot of epic poetry, and this seems like something like The Iliad except from the future instead of from ancient Greece. show more The world building is so good that it seems like a contemporary document send back from the future- as demonstrated by her neologisms like “feminaires” and “glénures” (some sort of many-legged horse??). The story never goes into detail about any one character, but namedrops them (always with first and last name) in a way that makes me think we’re supposed to know who they are, just another thing that reminds me of Greek poetry. The detached third person narration kind of reminded me of text-based video games like A Dark Room, and it got kind of impersonal at times, but that also helps it sound like an oral history. Every time a page was filled up with womens’ names, I would read them to myself and it felt ritualistic, like a way to honor the fighters in this future war.
This book being so female-centric parallels how male-centric the Greeks were too. Because of that, this book is just another example of how radical feminism isn’t as radical as the media makes it out to be, because even though the story is about the war between the sexes its conclusion is compassion, basically. The line “we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves” not only sums up the book but the 2nd wave movement in general! I think this book is very important because it contains a message of understanding and solidarity, without discounting the womens’ very real reasons to fight. Andrea Dworkin once said she wants to be remembered "In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I'd like my work to be an anthropological artefact from an extinct, primitive society." This book seems like something from that society.
It took me about a month to read Les Guérillères, and it was so worth it. It took longer to read than it otherwise might’ve because I read it in the original French, cross referencing with a translation whenever I didn’t understand (which was pretty often!!). It’s a really dense book, but like half the words I didn’t understand turned out to be made up when I looked them up! But if you’re able to, I would definitely recommend reading it in french! I mean, there’s a reason the English edition’s title isn’t translated, it’s an untranslatable word! Wittig honestly seems kinda Oulipo-adjacent in how she plays with language. French has gendered third-person-plural pronouns, and the “gender neutral” is “ils”, same as the masculine. Therefore, in french the word “elles” (feminine plural) has a lot of power that the translation just doesn’t have. At times it’s translated to “the women” or the neutral “they”, which misses the point that Wittig herself expounds upon: “They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated.” show less
This book being so female-centric parallels how male-centric the Greeks were too. Because of that, this book is just another example of how radical feminism isn’t as radical as the media makes it out to be, because even though the story is about the war between the sexes its conclusion is compassion, basically. The line “we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves” not only sums up the book but the 2nd wave movement in general! I think this book is very important because it contains a message of understanding and solidarity, without discounting the womens’ very real reasons to fight. Andrea Dworkin once said she wants to be remembered "In a museum, when male supremacy is dead. I'd like my work to be an anthropological artefact from an extinct, primitive society." This book seems like something from that society.
It took me about a month to read Les Guérillères, and it was so worth it. It took longer to read than it otherwise might’ve because I read it in the original French, cross referencing with a translation whenever I didn’t understand (which was pretty often!!). It’s a really dense book, but like half the words I didn’t understand turned out to be made up when I looked them up! But if you’re able to, I would definitely recommend reading it in french! I mean, there’s a reason the English edition’s title isn’t translated, it’s an untranslatable word! Wittig honestly seems kinda Oulipo-adjacent in how she plays with language. French has gendered third-person-plural pronouns, and the “gender neutral” is “ils”, same as the masculine. Therefore, in french the word “elles” (feminine plural) has a lot of power that the translation just doesn’t have. At times it’s translated to “the women” or the neutral “they”, which misses the point that Wittig herself expounds upon: “They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated.” show less
This book is strange. Like, very strange.
It's subtitled "materials for a dictionary", which is accurate - it's very clearly rough working notes or an early draft rather than a finished work, which makes it even stranger. I assume there's quite a lot of context here that I'm missing, because otherwise, I can't figure out why this book was ever published in its current state.
It purports to be an account of the world of the "Glorious Age", after half the human population "took a powder" and show more society rapidly changed. I *think* it's supposed to be a lesbian utopia, except that the way terminology is used, it's unclear as to whether all men actually disappeared, or gender distinctions were simply erased from language, as it consistently uses "companion lovers" as its only group noun for people, and nothing else is quite clear enough for me to tell.
Did I mention it's strange? As well as a complete re-organization of society, there's all kind of really bizarre psychic (and psychedelic) stuff going on in this world, which is described as if you're meant to take it for granted, so you're never given quite enough info to make real sense of it.
Overall, this book is very good at conveying a sense of alienness and the idea that the cultural perspective it was written from is very different from ours. It doesn't really do much else effectively, though. The organization is unhelpful; many of the entries are highly repetitive - in a cut-and-paste way (about five percent of the entries are for various Amazon tribes, all of which have the exact same last two paragraphs); much of the information is not provided under the entry you'de expect it to be under; and many of the entries to not provide any information actually related to the entry title (the entry for "Sappho", to give the most egregious example, is just a blank page. Was this a publisher's mistake? An artifact of the dictionary being unfinished? Or was it meant to make a meaningful statement? I can't tell.) And, while I can handle bizarre and psychedelic and contradictory, I never quite found this world believable, maybe partly because I never found an entry point for myself; *everything* was just too unfamiliar and non-human, and the occasional snip or quotation that did ring true to me felt so out of place with the rest of the book that it threw me out of the world rather than draw me in. It didn't help that I could never quite figure out whence this dictionary was supposed to have come; was it being written by a member of the lesbian peoples? By somebody in their future? By a present-day person who had seen their world, or by a present-day person who is writing it as fiction? By somebody alien to all of us? The voice was never consistent enough to tell, and one suspects the authors hadn't figured it out either, as they hadn't figured out a lot of things.
It's a book with a lot of interesting ideas in it ("cyprine", for one, is a word that the English language needs to borrow), and I wish it had been put together well enough that I'd liked it more. As it is, I must continue my search for the elusive good feminist utopia. show less
It's subtitled "materials for a dictionary", which is accurate - it's very clearly rough working notes or an early draft rather than a finished work, which makes it even stranger. I assume there's quite a lot of context here that I'm missing, because otherwise, I can't figure out why this book was ever published in its current state.
It purports to be an account of the world of the "Glorious Age", after half the human population "took a powder" and show more society rapidly changed. I *think* it's supposed to be a lesbian utopia, except that the way terminology is used, it's unclear as to whether all men actually disappeared, or gender distinctions were simply erased from language, as it consistently uses "companion lovers" as its only group noun for people, and nothing else is quite clear enough for me to tell.
Did I mention it's strange? As well as a complete re-organization of society, there's all kind of really bizarre psychic (and psychedelic) stuff going on in this world, which is described as if you're meant to take it for granted, so you're never given quite enough info to make real sense of it.
Overall, this book is very good at conveying a sense of alienness and the idea that the cultural perspective it was written from is very different from ours. It doesn't really do much else effectively, though. The organization is unhelpful; many of the entries are highly repetitive - in a cut-and-paste way (about five percent of the entries are for various Amazon tribes, all of which have the exact same last two paragraphs); much of the information is not provided under the entry you'de expect it to be under; and many of the entries to not provide any information actually related to the entry title (the entry for "Sappho", to give the most egregious example, is just a blank page. Was this a publisher's mistake? An artifact of the dictionary being unfinished? Or was it meant to make a meaningful statement? I can't tell.) And, while I can handle bizarre and psychedelic and contradictory, I never quite found this world believable, maybe partly because I never found an entry point for myself; *everything* was just too unfamiliar and non-human, and the occasional snip or quotation that did ring true to me felt so out of place with the rest of the book that it threw me out of the world rather than draw me in. It didn't help that I could never quite figure out whence this dictionary was supposed to have come; was it being written by a member of the lesbian peoples? By somebody in their future? By a present-day person who had seen their world, or by a present-day person who is writing it as fiction? By somebody alien to all of us? The voice was never consistent enough to tell, and one suspects the authors hadn't figured it out either, as they hadn't figured out a lot of things.
It's a book with a lot of interesting ideas in it ("cyprine", for one, is a word that the English language needs to borrow), and I wish it had been put together well enough that I'd liked it more. As it is, I must continue my search for the elusive good feminist utopia. show less
You know how sometimes in a library when you've already gotten far too many books and your arms are full you reach a point of abandon and just throw anything on the pile? That's what was happening to me when I plucked The Lesbian Body on down from the shelf because, I figured, I like lesbians and I like bodies. I thought it might come in handy at a certain time of night. From the cover and description ("a rhapsodic hymn to women's bodies and women's relationships") I guessed that it would show more probably be a little bit ridiculous and a little bit sentimental, which I have to say I think it was, but not in the way that I expected.
In the introduction, Wittig writes of "The desire to bring the real body violently to life in the words of the book (everything that is written exists), the desire to do violence by writing to the language which I (j/e) can enter only by force." The urgency with which she was writing and the impossible scale of what she considered her mission are affecting. In a certain mood, the excitement could be contagious. You could picture the author, flushed and frantically writing, trying to push language to its limits, as though if she could just be brave enough, bold enough, violent enough, the whole compromised world might come down and a new one come up in its place, the distance between the self and the desired finally transcended.
Unfortunately it seems that trying to amp up the language as much as possible ends up having the opposite effect and much of The Lesbian Body is repetitive and even boring. The language is so ceaselessly, insistently erotic that it becomes unerotic in its predictability. Here is a passage that I think is pretty representative: "Your hand followed by your arm have entered into m/y throat, you traverse m/y larynx, you arrive at m/y lungs, you itemize m/y organs, you make m/e die ten thousands deaths while I smile, you rip out m/y stomach, you tear m/y intestines, you project the uttermost fury into m/y body, I cry out but not from pain, I am overtaken seized hold of, I go over to you entirely, I explode the small units of my ego, I am threatened, I am desired by you. A tree shoots in m/y body, it moves it branches with extreme violence with extreme gentleness, or else it is a bush of burning thorns it tears the other side of m/u exposed muscles m/y insides m/y interiors, I am inhabited, I am not dreaming, I am penetrated by you, now I must struggle against bursting to retain m/y overall perception, I reassemble you in all m/y organs, I burst." There is something frustratingly literal about all of this.
Still, I ended up reading the whole thing although I didn't expect to. There were moments when sudden unexpected images were really arresting, and then the rawness of it did, I think, add to the impact. But I would have to disagree with the jacket blurb "the art and the courage are of the highest level." I couldn't really speak to the courage without sounding, maybe, ungrateful and inconsiderate. Perhaps it's that The Lesbian Body did its work so well that the message seems a little tired to us today. I certainly imagine it was fresher in the climate in which it was originally published. As far as the level of the art, well, I think it's pretty clear that aesthetic considerations weren't the writer's primary concern. I have to say, a little bit apologetically yet, that, though I admire them in a way, strength of feeling and rawness aren't enough to trump aesthetic merit. All the same, I found myself reaching for this book at a time of night that I wasn't exactly reaching for the Henry James, so it did offer both pleasures and merits not always found in works that might be aesthetically better. show less
In the introduction, Wittig writes of "The desire to bring the real body violently to life in the words of the book (everything that is written exists), the desire to do violence by writing to the language which I (j/e) can enter only by force." The urgency with which she was writing and the impossible scale of what she considered her mission are affecting. In a certain mood, the excitement could be contagious. You could picture the author, flushed and frantically writing, trying to push language to its limits, as though if she could just be brave enough, bold enough, violent enough, the whole compromised world might come down and a new one come up in its place, the distance between the self and the desired finally transcended.
Unfortunately it seems that trying to amp up the language as much as possible ends up having the opposite effect and much of The Lesbian Body is repetitive and even boring. The language is so ceaselessly, insistently erotic that it becomes unerotic in its predictability. Here is a passage that I think is pretty representative: "Your hand followed by your arm have entered into m/y throat, you traverse m/y larynx, you arrive at m/y lungs, you itemize m/y organs, you make m/e die ten thousands deaths while I smile, you rip out m/y stomach, you tear m/y intestines, you project the uttermost fury into m/y body, I cry out but not from pain, I am overtaken seized hold of, I go over to you entirely, I explode the small units of my ego, I am threatened, I am desired by you. A tree shoots in m/y body, it moves it branches with extreme violence with extreme gentleness, or else it is a bush of burning thorns it tears the other side of m/u exposed muscles m/y insides m/y interiors, I am inhabited, I am not dreaming, I am penetrated by you, now I must struggle against bursting to retain m/y overall perception, I reassemble you in all m/y organs, I burst." There is something frustratingly literal about all of this.
Still, I ended up reading the whole thing although I didn't expect to. There were moments when sudden unexpected images were really arresting, and then the rawness of it did, I think, add to the impact. But I would have to disagree with the jacket blurb "the art and the courage are of the highest level." I couldn't really speak to the courage without sounding, maybe, ungrateful and inconsiderate. Perhaps it's that The Lesbian Body did its work so well that the message seems a little tired to us today. I certainly imagine it was fresher in the climate in which it was originally published. As far as the level of the art, well, I think it's pretty clear that aesthetic considerations weren't the writer's primary concern. I have to say, a little bit apologetically yet, that, though I admire them in a way, strength of feeling and rawness aren't enough to trump aesthetic merit. All the same, I found myself reaching for this book at a time of night that I wasn't exactly reaching for the Henry James, so it did offer both pleasures and merits not always found in works that might be aesthetically better. show less
Lists
Awards
You May Also Like
Associated Authors
Statistics
- Works
- 19
- Also by
- 8
- Members
- 1,496
- Popularity
- #17,172
- Rating
- 3.8
- Reviews
- 15
- ISBNs
- 74
- Languages
- 8
- Favorited
- 7