Lesbian peoples: Material for a dictionary

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 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, show more 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

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 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 show more "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