January 2000 

     "Our first task," writes Monique Wittig in her 1981 essay "One is Not Born a Woman," "is to always thoroughly dissociate 'women' (the class within which we fight) and 'woman,' the myth. For 'woman' does not exist for us; it is only an imaginary formation, while 'women' is the product of a social relationship" (15). Taking up the materialist feminist project as outlined by Christine Delphy in works such as The Main Enemy, Close to Home, and Familiar Exploitation, Wittig deconstructs Marxist feminism from a "lesbian" viewpoint, recasting the oppressor/oppressed relationship as stridently heterosexual. For Wittig, a feminist project should not "fight for woman and her defense--for the myth, then, and its reinforcement," but should rather fight "for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class" (14). Wittig's theoretical and fictional work refuses to conceive of women and men as categories which cannot exist without each other, economically, politically, or ideologically, and recognizes that lesbianism, in its refusal to participate in the binary opposition, in its rejection of its opposite, "man," opts out of the gender-class game, and evacuates it of meaning and importance:

When we discover that women are the objects of oppression and appropriation, at the very moment that we become able to perceive this, we become subjects in the sense of cognitive subjects, through an operation of abstraction. 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, from the point of view of oppression. This operation of understanding has to be undertaken by every one of us: call it a subjective, cognitive practice. (18-19).

The intricacies of this "operation of understanding" and their analogous representations in the politico-fictional sphere require an analysis of the five primary essays that lay out Wittig's theoretical foundations, and their implications in 1969's Les Guérillères, one of her most prescient imaginaries. Presenting a militaristic uprising from the vantage point of a sect of rogue warrior women in unspecified "golden spaces lacunae" (5), Wittig's novel revisions institutions as varied as capitalism, religion, warfare, and family. Given the coöperative nature of Wittig's fiction and her theory, Les Guérillères is best read concurrent with the materialist feminist project she constructs, as a proto-representation of the theoretical moves she will make in the academic sphere.

     "The Category of Sex," Wittig's 1976 deconstruction of gender and the heterosexist market, delineates the extent of "women's work," and its implications for feminist theoretical agendas. "Masculine/feminine, male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social difference always belongs to an economic, political, ideological order. Every system of domination establishes divisions at the material and economic level," she writes. Noting that, "It is the fate of women to perform three-quarters of the work of society (in the public as well as in the private domain) plus the bodily work of reproduction according to a preestablished rate," (3) Wittig suggests that "The compulsory reproduction of the 'species' by women is the system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economically based" (6). Taking up de Beauvoir's claim that a woman is made and not born, Wittig likens her creation to "the making of eunuchs, the breeding of slaves, of animals," (6) and notes that it is the category of sex itself which turns one half of the population into a sexual object, forced into production and reproductive tasks. In Les Guérillères, this division of labor is dramatized from the perspective of the rebel female class. They have "poured out the dishwater and scattered the dirty linen," refusing the chores of "the young girl who has given herself in marriage. The young girl in the house of her mother is like seed in fertile ground. The woman under the roof of her husband is like a chained dog. The slave, rarely, tastes the delights of love, the woman never" (108). Their dissent is fueled by a refusal "to pronounce the names of possession and non-possessionto mumble after [men] the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name"(107). The women in Wittig's work call forth the economic trades and burn them (assembly-lines and sewing machines all), exploding those which will not burn. The pieces left over are painted varied colors, and sculpted into artworks to which they give new names, creating new language that resignifies the capitalist symbolic. Throughout,

The women say, the men have kept you at a distance, they have supported you, they have put you on a pedestal, constructed with an essential difference. They say, men in their way have adored you like a goddess or else burned you at their stakes or else relegated you to their service in their back-yards. They say, so doing they have always in their speech dragged you in the dirt. They say, in speaking they have possessed violated taken subdued humiliated you to their hearts contentThey say thatdifference of sex difference of colour signify inferiority, their own right to domination and appropriation. (101-02)

Language is conflated with binaristic inferiority and the capitalist hegemony in this way, the re-naming process the first step to the dissolution of gendered class struggle. In "One is Not Born a Woman," the Marxist angle of this argument is further unpacked, as the women in Les Guérillères similarly move from the work of re-naming their institutions to re-naming themselves. Criticizing both Marxism and the power of French feminists such as Irigaray, Cixous, and Clèmént, feminists whose work accepts a biological and historical basis for the oppression of women, Wittig refutes that a return to power for women under these theoretical positions would create a matriarchy, a regime no less oppressive than patriarchy, and most importantly, still imprisoned within the accepted binaries of woman and man, and thus, still prescribing governance through a heterosexist lens. For, as long as we are unable to abandon the idea that pregnancy and birth are the quintessential female creative act, with all the mystiques that accompany it, we cannot begin to envision ourselves outside the category "woman" and all of its supplementary political, economic, and ideological tropes.

     And yet, Wittig's withdrawal from a "woman is wonderful" standpoint and her fight for women as a class and for the destruction of that class refuse to pander to Marxist feminist ideology. Since Marxism denies subjectivity to individuals or groups except from within a relation of power, or since it argues that people are only the product of their social relations, those who extricate themselves from a power dynamic, lesbians, for example, are denied subjectivity. Thus, argues Wittig,

For women, Marxism had two results. It prevented them from being aware that they are a class, and therefore from constituting themselves as a class for a very long time, by leaving the relation "women/men" outside of the social order, by turning it into a natural relation, doubtless for Marxists the only one, along with the relation of mothers to children, to be seen this way, and by hiding the class conflict between men and women behind a natural division of labor. (18)

The obvious problems rooted within such a discourse of determinism are that without the realization that one is an individual, as well as a member of a class, no real transformation can take place; the individual's physical and intellectual contribution to class, and its reciprocal contribution to that individual's subjectivity and sense of self are necessary partners for social transformation. Wittig argues that Marxist critique evacuates the self from any extra-relational identity, and ironically enfeebles the very force it's attempting to mobilize.

     In Les Guérillères, the mobilizing force has to reconstitute itself as a group detached from a particular series of behaviors in an effort to make war. It cannot otherwise envision itself doing so:

The women say that even without the feminaries they can recall the time when, as was typical of them, they made war. They say that all they need to do is invent terms that describe themselves without conventional references to herbals or bestiaries. They say that this can be done without pretension. They say that what they must stress above all is their strength and their courage. (53)

Detaching oneself from the role one plays in a societal power dynamic is here compared to a more benign series of associations, but the meaning is clear: unless one can formulate an identity independent of one's current role, one cannot grow or change to meet the demands of a particular challenge. And as "One is Not Born a Woman" conflates these identity politics with current French Feminist ideology, so the women in Les Guérillères refuse to be re-defined according to conventional essentialisms:

They say they must now stop exalting the vulva. They say they must break the last bond that binds them to a dead culture. They say that any symbol that exalts the fragmented body is transient, must disappear. Thus it was formerly. They, the women, the integrity of the body their first principle, advance marching together into another world (72).

The novel, written prior to many of the French Feminist texts Wittig would challenge in her theoretical work anticipates this "fragmented body" as a masculine vision, a valuation project aimed at the signifying womb. That it comes to represent essentialist claims to power in the 1970s provides Wittig with a view that transcends contemporary feminist and fundamentalist projects, and in that way represents the very separatism she advocates. By refusing to "take sides" Wittig evacuates them both (and the gender binaries they represent) of meaning, positing her own vision as an alternative.

     Her next major essay confronts these binaries. "The Straight Mind," written in 1980, is Wittig's evaluation of "the thought which throughout the centuries built heterosexuality as a given" (xvi). What it also manages to do is disrupt poststructuralist linguistics as a socio-political phenomenon. Acknowledging that what is at stake in the analysis of language and semiotics is power and its transmission, Wittig attacks the matrix of incestuous linguistic registers that perpetuates social inequality. She writes:

Thus, the entire world is only a great register where the most diverse languages come to have themselves recorded, such as the language of the Unconscious, the language of fashion, the language of the exchange of women where human beings are literally the signs that are used to communicate. These languages, or rather these discourses, fit into one another, interpenetrate one another, support one another, reinforce one another, auto-engender, and engender one another. The ensemble of these discourses produces a confusing static for the oppressed, which makes them lose sight of the material cause of their oppression and plunges them into a kind of ahistoric vacuum. (22)

The concentration on language and floating signifiers removes the word from its referent, displaces the historical, material, and socio-political forces that engendered the word, and leave those oppressed by it mystified by its ubiquity. Of course, for Wittig, the oppressive historical forces are heterosexist; they emerge in pornography, the marriage market, and the distribution of reproductive labor. They are behind the word's power; they "function like primitive concepts in a conglomerate of all kinds of disciplines, theories, and current ideas that [Wittig] will call the straight mind" (27). For though semiotics and poststructuralist linguistics have asserted and reasserted that there is no nature, only enculturation, the obligatory relationship between "man" and "woman" is, for Wittig, an untouched binary that is forever excluded by social analysis, and thus remains beyond reproach or investigation.

     In an attempt to further characterize the motivations of the straight mind, the oppressive force that she has been examining for several years, Wittig writes that the straight mind totalizes interpretations of history, culture, language and all other subjective phenomena, universalizing these generalizations as truisms that apply and hold fast to all societies, epochs, and individuals:

Thus one speaks of the exchange of women, the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconscious, Desire, Jouissance, Culture, History, giving an absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality, or thought which produces the difference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma. (27-28)

This definition leads her into discussions of binary oppositions, and the blindness that such totalizing theoretical work will afford those oppressors who simply cannot conceive of an antithetical position. Knowing that their structure is made viable by the complete and utter submission of their oppressed, those in power assume that their totalizing view is shared; the different/other, the rebel, the lesbian, cannot exist. To complicate the problem, popular advocates of the Structural Unconscious (most specifically for Wittig, Lévi-Strauss and Lacan), present differences between classes or groups as unconscious, and thereby outside the control of individuals. At a time when oppression is beginning to wear on the oppressed, when their dominance no longer seems logical and beneficent, the theoretical matrices in play absolve the oppressors from conscious responsibility, and enfeeble the oppressed, who feel that rebellion is out of their control. Similarly, Wittig attacks post-Lacanian psychoanalysis for rigidly turning the concepts of Freud and Lacan into "over-mythified myths," a depersonalizing regimentation of heterosexuality that turns concepts such as Difference, Desire and Name-of-the-father into quasi-"natural" conditions. When such concepts coincide with other semiotic language, the effect is a massive reinforcement of heterosexist patriarchy, a reconstruction of gender determinism and essentialism that reinscribes the very roles that poststructuralist linguistics claims to escape.

     The presentation of this ubiquitous matrix of paroles in Les Guérillères is complex, largely because the women participate in myth-making, and in the telling and revisioning of legends to construct a history for themselves. Sophie Ménade rewrites Eve's fall, the feminaries rewrite the quest for the Grail, and the legends of Sleeping Beauty, Snow-White, and Rose-Red. But the faith in these stories wanes:

The women say that references to Amaterasu or Cihuacoatl are no longer in order. They say they have no need of myths or symbols. They say that the time when they started from zero is in process of being erased from their memories. They say they can barely relate to it. When they repeat, This order must be destroyed, they say they do not know what order is meant. (30)

As the time for war grows near, the feminaries expose the women to the dominant language, a language devoid of narrative and riddled with paradox and inconsistency. As the women attempt to speak the language, known to them as "official knowledge," their reaction is similarly destructive:

At a certain point someone challenges the speakers, calling a halt, demanding reasoning devoid of error [.] Their knowledge has competed successfully with the official knowledge to which they had no access, it has challenged it, found it wanting, threatened it, made it appear inefficacious. No police were powerful enough to track them down, no paid informer so opportunist, no torture so brutal, no army so overwhelming as to attack them one by one and destroy them. (61; 90)

At this point Wittig's theoretical work and her fiction most clearly reinforce one another. Her 1989 essay, "On the Social Contract," returns to materialist feminism and an attempt to infuse her theories with praxis. Opening with Marx and Engels's revision of Rousseau's conceptualization of the Social Contract, and their adamant refusal to submit to theoretical work that had no cognitive relationship to class struggle, Wittig notes that, like the serfs in their revision, women as a class must "tear themselves away from the heterosexual order only by running away one by one" (34). But, cautions Wittig, the social contract must not be broken in entire, it must only be broken as heterosexual. Social obligations that do not oppress, social obligations that are questioned, revised, and kept alive through debate can and should exist, but the oppression of women under contractual heterosexism cannot:

In conclusion I will say that only by running away from their class can women achieve the social contract (that is, a new one), even if they have to do it like the fugitive serfs, one by one. We are doing it. Lesbians are runaways, fugitive slaves; runaway wives are the same case, and they exist in all countries, because the political regime of heterosexuality represents all cultures. If ultimately we are denied a new social order, which therefore can exist only in words, I will find it in myself. (45)

The representation of this resolve in Les Guérillères is obvious: the women, believing "that it is better to die than to live as slaves," (92) revolt. At times, the war is visceral and deadly, and the tactical arrangement of forces is debated and strategized, in an attitude befitting any anti-institutional faction:

The women say they have a concern for strategy and tactics. They say that the massive armies that comprise divisions corps regiments sections companies are ineffectual. Their exercises consist of manoeuvres marches guards patrols. These afford no real practice for combat. They say that such armies are institutionsThey say that these armies are not formidable, their effectives being conscript, participation not being voluntary. (94)

And yet, the warrior army is also effective when it silently removes itself, person by person, from the status quo:

The women demonstrators advance all holding a book in their upraised hands. The faces are remarkable for their beauty. Great commotions take place at various points in the square when the demonstrators attempt to halt around groups of one or more speakers. Despite the disturbance of the general order created by individual movements there is no trampling underfoot, there are no shouts, there are no sudden violent rushes, the speakers are able to stay put. (39)

It is the precise collection of these two forms of struggle that Wittig has advocated. Learning to speak the language of the oppressor, and finding it wanting, women should be both bold and runaways; they should launch a two-pronged attack when threatened, liberating themselves and pronouncing their liberation to others. It is in many ways, as I have previously noted, a strategy present within Wittig's compositional genres, as well, her political fiction, both a narrative test case and the attitudes underlying it, and her theoretical work, boldly centered in materialist feminism, while quietly taking on all other contemporary feminist agendas. This accumulated to the theoretical and fictional genres themselves allows Wittig a broad, multifaceted foundation for her critique while it underscores the possibility of binary transcendence.

     As this work becomes increasingly political and strategic, mirroring in many ways the rise of legal feminism (that is, feminist law), she writes "Homo Sum," a 1990 work that attempts to politicize the future of dialectics, at the same time that it acknowledges binaristic thinking as the target of her theoretical project. Acknowledging that Marx politicized the essential, unwavering nature of Hegel's dialectics, making the relationship between opposing forces conflicted and oppressive and the result of class struggle, Wittig moves on to the failure of Marxist theory, it's assumption that when workers "won" the class struggle, their owners would destroy themselves as a class. In "Homo Sum," she traces the construction of the genders as classes, analyzing their correlatives in the Pythagorean table of opposites, as recorded by Aristotle in the first six books of his Metaphysics. Moving from terms used to classify, to sort and to measure, such as Limited/Unlimited, Odd/Even, One/Many, Rest/Motion, the terms take on a symbolic or ethical meaning, registering judgment and evaluation, such as Right/Left, Male/Female, Light/Dark, Good/Bad. According to Wittig, "Everything that was 'good' belonged to the series of the One (as Being). Everything that was 'many' (different) belonged to the series of the 'bad,' assimilated to nonbeing, to unrest, to everything that questions what is good" (51). The implications of this shift from measurement to valuation are for Wittig related to the persistence of the rational in contemporary theoretical discourse. "Every philosopher of our modern age," she writes, "including the linguists, the psychoanalysts, the anthropologists, will tell us that without these precise categories of opposition (of difference), one cannot reason or think or, even better, that outside of them meaning cannot shape itself, there is an impossibility of meaning as outside of society, in the asocial" (52). The danger that exists in contemporary feminist confrontations with the dialectical is, for Wittig, the "pride" in being "Other," in "Difference," in "Woman":

Never has the Other been magnified and celebrated to this extent. Other cultures, the mind of the Other, the Feminine brain, Feminine writing, and so on--we have during these last decades known everything as far as the Other is concerned. and the most absurd of all things, the need and necessity in reaction to this evidence and these certainties to support and advocate, in contrast, a "right to Difference" (a right of difference) which by reversing everything corresponds to the Tweedledum and Tweedledee of Lewis Carroll--these are the symptoms of what I have once called, out of exasperation, the straight mind. (57)

The ultimate problem with the semiotic, psychoanalytic, and Marxist paradigms that weave through the "right to difference" is that the land of the symbolic is, for Wittig, intricately bound to the economic, political, and ideological struggles that compose it; one cannot escape them through abstraction and an acceptance of the symbolic order. Removing oneself from the dialectics that comprise it feasibly evacuates it of power, and allows one the opportunity to reconstruct an identity removed from oppressive relationships.

     In Les Guérillères, the binary oppositions Wittig traces are borne out in discussions between the women and the feminaries. She writes, "Lucie Maure cries to the double echo the phrase of Phénarère, I say that which is is. I say that which is not also is" (14), reinforcing the presence of the "non-Being" in Hegel's dialectics, and rehabilitating the position of women within the valuation project, while at the same time reaffirming the presence of the Being itself, and in so doing, acknowledging their co-existence and the possibility for categorical effacement. For, "When she repeats the phrase several times the double, then triple, voice endlessly superimposes that which is and that which is not" (14). But the recognition that the binaries exist for the opposition, and in many ways initiate their aggression is also made pointedly clear:

The women say that they could not eat hare veal or fowl, they say that they could not eat animals, but man, yes, they may. He says to them throwing his head back with pride, poor wretches of women, if you eat him who will go to work in the fields, who will produce food consumer goods, who will make the aeroplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then the women laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent. (97)

"Man" is of course the semiotic being Wittig has bemoaned as oppressor; he is a representation of the kinds of gendered behavior responsible for the political, economic, and social enslavement of women. That lesbianism and other forms of socio-cultural rejection are the tools that deconstruct and evacuate the man/woman dyad is always Wittig's primary critical position, and the warrior women's appetite for the destruction of man is thus the objective correlative for her feminist agenda.

     When Wittig, at the end of "The Straight Mind" says, "Lesbians are not women," she implicates all of the major contemporary feminist movements in a heterosexist project that ceases to acknowledge the very real identities of those free, "runaway" individuals who refuse to participate in oppressive dialectical relations. The recognition that women and men do not form inextricably co-dependent unions frees women cognitively, and then physically, from participation in a discourse that endeavors only to economically, ideologically, and politically enslave them. By viewing all of Wittig's major theoretical essays alongside one another, and their manifestations in her fiction, the intricacies of this project, its historical influences, and its implications can be more readily apprehended. What I think we see in Wittig's genre work, and her political voice in its theoretical and fictional spheres, are meta-representations of her feminist agenda. The blending of heretofore-antithetical techniques, essays, characters, and chapters, should be considered demonstrative gestures furthering the societal reconfiguration project at the center of each. Reading Wittig's fiction as theory is like listening to "the double, then triple, voice endlessly [superimposing] that which is and that which is not" (14), it represents the breakdown of binaristic evaluation and unequal, co-dependent dyads, emerging as a synthesis whose construction manages to be both literal and figurative, transcending yet another binary.

Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon, 1992.

--. Les Guérillères. Boston: Beacon, 1985.