(Re)Reading Wittig

Monique Wittig is best known for her literature. In 1964, her first novel, L'Opoponax, won the French literary award, the Prix Médicis (Wittig Reference Wittig and Weaver1976). Her later works, Les guérillères (1969) and Le corps lesbien (1973), found similar prominence among feminist and lesbian literary critics (Wittig Reference Wittig and Vay1985; Reference Wittig and Vay1986).Footnote ¹ Yet, compared to her intellectual contemporaries (Wittig wrote during the same period as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous, and presided on the editorial board of Questions Féministes), Wittig's theoretical works on heterosexuality and language have received scarce attention.Footnote ² Queer and feminist theory demonstrates a complex and often indebted relationship to Wittig's work, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Wittig Reference Wittig1992), yet these essays have largely been met with resistance or passed by in silence. This lack of engagement may be due to Judith Butler's significant, though critical, treatment in Gender Trouble (Butler Reference Butler1990), which has apparently had the final word on Wittig.Footnote ³ Wittig's theoretical work (and its explication in her literature—or, perhaps, the reverse) remains, furthermore, unfortunately limited due to her early death in 2003. However, I suspect difficulty also arises from simply engaging with Wittig's work. As Sandra K. Soto writes:

Wittig asks us to challenge our intuitions regarding sexual difference, heterosexuality, and society, and this confrontation can lead one to recoil or misread. In the interest of (re)engaging with an understudied figure, I thus attempt here to contend with that skepticism and disbelief and offer a rereading of Wittig's lesbian-feminist theory against some of her major critics. In this endeavor, I focus on what I see to be three core themes to Wittig's philosophy—domination, utopianism, and polysemy—which inform her feminism and the confrontational means by which it is articulated. In identifying and exploring these interrelated themes, I aim to respond to major critiques (also interrelated) that I believe have obstructed new appreciations of her work.

To begin, in response to criticisms that Wittig essentializes lesbian identity, I argue that Wittig is not explicitly concerned with questions of sexuality, but rather places her term lesbian in a critical relation to the phallocentric basis of subjectivity in domination, as supported by categories of difference and the heterosexual social contract that engenders them. Against criticisms that such a notion must rely on a subjectivity “outside” the hegemony of heterosexism and phallocentrism, I argue that Wittig's lesbian is better understood as a continual process of de- and reconstruction, a movement toward (from a marginal position) an idealized social form that Wittig expresses textually. Finally, against criticisms that this process would merely re-enact the phallocentric structure of a universalized (masculine, becoming lesbian) subject, I argue that Wittig's emphasis on polysemy (within language and subject/s) suggests, rather, a simulacrum of phallocentric universalization and an orientation toward un-fixing subjectivity from monosemic, heterosexist, phallocentric constraint. That is, Wittig orients toward a reconceptualization of universalized subjectivity through language; a universalization of the “I” that does not determine itself as the Subject, that does not establish itself through hierarchicalization nor naturalization.

Part of this rereading will involve an admittedly limited consideration of the intersection between Wittig's lesbian-feminist theory and her literary works, given the scope of this topic. In the various approaches to Wittig's work, however, these two strands are often considered only independently—Wittig as either a writer or a theorist—or only with oblique reference to each other. As Naomi Schor writes: “What Wittig's critics often fail to take into account in their readings is the centrality of literature in Wittig's theoretical writings on gender” (Schor Reference Schor1995, 22).Footnote ⁴ Yet, in more than one critical treatment, interpretations of Wittig's theory are contrasted with the supposedly contradictory themes of her literature (or vice versa).Footnote ⁵ I approach Wittig's literature only tangentially here, however; pointing out connections with her theory I view to be immediately significant, and drawing upon illuminating analyses already laid out by Jeffner Allen, Diane Chisholm, Karin Cope, Diane Griffith Crowder, and Namascar Shaktini. However, I wish to emphasize the largely unexplored link between Wittig's theory and her literature, not only because it presents new possibilities of interpretation, but because the unfolding of her theory through her literature is central to understanding her political and theoretical project. “If one is to take Wittig on, it is not as an essentializing anti-essentialist (Fuss), or even as an unrepentant metaphysician (Butler), but as a producer of war machines,” a feminist philosopher whose literature enacts her philosophy (Schor Reference Schor1995, 22). To sever Wittig-the-philosopher from Wittig-the-writer is to make impossible grasping the whole of Wittig's unique lesbian-feminism.Footnote ⁶

Domination

Perhaps Wittig's most contentious philosophical contribution is her disavowal of sexual difference as the means to women's liberation. In “The Category of Sex” Wittig claims: “there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 2). That is, Wittig understands sexual difference to be the result of women's oppression, a social mark levied against women by an oppressive system, and therefore not the cause. Indeed, “what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor”; that is, a “myth” of Woman (11).Footnote ⁷ For Wittig, then, women do not experience oppression because they are “women,” rather, “women” are sexually differentiated as such as part of the system that oppresses them. Through the naturalization of this myth, sexual difference is taken to be a “sensible given” located in “physical features” that themselves have yet already been interpreted and marked through a relationship of sexual oppression (11). The distinction between what would ordinarily (within an Anglo-American context) be viewed as biological “sex” and culturally constructed “gender” is thus collapsed for Wittig.Footnote ⁸ The terms woman and female denote not naturalistic categories—which would be to buy into the oppressive myth—but are rather both culturally constructed markers indicating a class. That is, a purely social grouping of persons.

In viewing the women's movement in terms of a class struggle, Wittig orients toward an abolition of these classes involved in making these sexual differentiated categories known as classes—as constructed social oppositions. However, as she writes in The Straight Mind, this abolition of sexual difference can occur only through the simultaneous destruction of “heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 20). Lasting change in the lives of women (and queer persons) cannot occur so long as the dominant discourse and social organization of heterosexuality refuses to reflect upon itself. Heterosexuality continues to take its own hegemony and concomitant categories of sex as given. Aiming toward disrupting the straight mind and abolishing categories of sex, Wittig turns to the figure of the lesbian, who “provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely” (20). Given that “woman” appears as a category only through the operation of a system of oppression (heterosexuality), and thereby exists through a specific social relation to the dominant (class of) “man,” the lesbian appears to reject this relation. Indeed, for Wittig, the lesbian “is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically” (20).

However, Wittig's critics argue that her separation of lesbianism from the categories of sexual difference leads to a concerning relationship between homo- and heterosexuality. Butler writes that Wittig's decisive split between sexualities means that her political strategy involves only “radical departure from heterosexual contracts—namely becoming lesbian or gay,” a position that arises “if one understands all ‘participation’ in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 121). Diana Fuss argues similarly that a generalization of heterosexual practice and categories as oppressive renders Wittig's theory “unable to account for heterosexual feminists except to see them as victims of false consciousness” (Fuss Reference Fuss1989, 44). This is echoed by Leo Bersani, who writes: “[For Wittig] It is not that we have been ruled by bad heterosexuals; the need to be identified as heterosexual is already a heterosexist position” (Bersani Reference Bersani1995, 38; see also Butler Reference Butler1990, 127). For each of these theorists, the underlying criticism operates on Wittig's supposed conflation between heterosexuality as a sexual practice and as an oppressive ideology, or “heterosexism.”

The issues presented against her portrayal of heterosexuality furthermore link to a deeper critique of Wittig's recourse to the lesbian as a subversive or disruptive figure: namely, the apparent deployment of lesbian as a metaphysical or humanist (and therefore essentialist) category. Such critics assert that although Wittig criticizes the ontology of the natural, unified, heterosexual subject, she merely replaces it with an ontological lesbian subject. Butler argues that Wittig takes lesbian as a position outside of sex and is therefore able to assume subjecthood, “confirm[ing] rather than contest[ing] the normative promise of humanist ideals” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 20). Wittig's distinction between lesbian and woman, Butler continues, is founded on a defense of “the pregendered ‘person,’ characterized as freedom” (20), a move that implies a presocial status of lesbian subjectivity. Along similar lines, Bersani explicitly designates Wittig's lesbian as a “metaphysical category” (Bersani Reference Bersani1995, 44), and this apparent essentializing of lesbian leads Fuss to conclude that the term “functions as a transcendental signifier, occupying none other than the place of the Lacanian phallus” (Fuss Reference Fuss1989, 43–44; see also Butler Reference Butler1990, 127). One of the dangers of Wittig's theory is thus “not only that she universalizes ‘the’ straight mind” but risks universalizing her own understanding of presocial Being (Butler Reference Butler1990, 118).

However, these criticisms overlook Wittig's specific positioning of heterosexuality as a social contract linked with the perpetuation and legitimation of phallocentrism.Footnote ⁹ Wittig outlines both systems as predicated on the domination of one social group (women) by another (men) through the material appropriation of women's bodies and the symbolic appropriation of subjectivity to a (universalized) masculine position. Wittig's emphasis on domination as a key structural aspect of heterosexuality can be seen to establish an indissoluble connection between heterosexuality and phallocentrism—thus the domination of women and nonheterosexuals remains significantly linked for Wittig. Yet, through a focus on heterosexuality as a social form that privileges certain structural forms of domination, heterosexuality (as a practiced sexuality) and heterosexism (that dominating mode) are clearly differentiated—it is only the latter that is at stake for Wittig. In this vein, Wittig's lesbian can also be understood as a firmly social construction: not a metaphysical but political position that seeks to denaturalize and deconstruct the primacy of domination and ontological sexual difference in the process of subjectification.Footnote ¹⁰

Calling back to Simone de Beauvoir's analysis in The Second Sex, Wittig argues that since the masculine occupies the place of the universal, the category of sex is always feminine. That is to say, the feminine is the only sex, the particular and the relative. To be man/male/masculine is specifically not to be sexed, to occupy the universal and the neutral.Footnote ¹¹ Thus, as Beauvoir writes: “man today represents the positive and the neutral . . . whereas woman is only the negative, the female” (Beauvoir Reference Beauvoir and Parshley1974, 455); Wittig rejoins:

Further, because sex is seen not as a natural category but “a political and cultural interpretation of the body” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 113), sex does not operate with substantive distinction from gender. Sex as a “biological” measure of sexual difference is also subsumed under Wittig's critique of gender. Indeed, the difference between (natural) sex and (cultural) gender is taken to be part of the process by which systems of women's oppression institute and naturalize themselves. Butler succinctly writes: “gender is built into sex, and sex proves to have been gender from the start” (113). It is in part through the identification of woman with sex (as particularity) that man assumes a universal position. Insofar as phallocentric ideology enacts a “conflation of the category of woman with the ostensibly sexualized features of their bodies,” woman is denied access to a subjectivity constructed as indifferent to embodied existence (19). Sex as an attribute has thus, through phallocentrism, come to take the place of personhood for women. This process is, in fact, essential to the operation of phallocentrism, creating a negative Other against whom both a binarism (subject to other, man to woman) and hierarchy (subject over other, man over woman) is instituted.Footnote ¹² The refusal of sex (and gender) then, for Wittig, is a refusal of the phallocentric denial of women's subjectivity.

However, “the primacy of difference” in thought and discourse makes it difficult to question this basis by which sexual difference asserts itself (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 2). Wittig defines this hegemony in discourse as “the straight mind”: the totality of discourses that deploy (heterosexual) categories of sex as a priori. Categories of woman, man, sex, and sexual difference function as “primitive concepts” and leave a mark on the objects of discourse—history, culture, the real—one that remains unexamined, taken as given. Wittig writes:

Insofar as it takes its categories to be natural, the straight mind creates a “totalizing interpretation of history,” its concepts are “immediately universalize[d]” and applied to “all societies, all epochs, all individuals” (27). This action, begun at the level of abstract (philosophical) discourse and disseminated through language, is the same operation by which Man assumes the role of an absolute or universal subject. For “the category of sex is a totalitarian one” (8): heterosexuality and its attendant terms, like phallocentrist discourse, seek to universalize and naturalize themselves, to make thought outside such concepts impossible. Thus, Wittig argues, when Claude Lévi-Strauss outlined the exchange of women and its “fundamental” place as the status quo of culture, “he was obviously drawing for us the broad lines of the social contract” (43). It is a social contract “from which women are excluded, a social contract between men” (43): a phallocentric organization of society. Indeed, for Wittig, this is confirmed by Woman's place within the heterosexual contract: to be Woman is to be the dominated, the ruled.

With the assumption garnered by the straight mind that “society cannot function without this exchange,” heterosexuality is exposed as “not only an institution but as the social contract, as a political regime” (43). Importantly, Wittig notes that “sexual pleasure and sexual modes are not the question here” (43). Indeed, it should be clear Wittig is not speaking of heterosexuality as a sexual preference, but as a social structure predicated upon a phallocentric appropriation and domination of women (separate from sexuality per se). We have already seen the importance of the lesbian as a figure that rejects both categories of sex. However, in an earlier essay titled “Paradigm,” Wittig explicitly condemns the difference between homo- and heterosexuality as also a naturalizing product of the straight mind:

Though Wittig is never explicit on this point—at least in her theory—it appears that anyone who rejects the heterosexual contract (and its concomitant terms) as natural or eternal may be considered a lesbian. Wittigian lesbian-ism might be generally understood as the desire for a social relation and organization of society that does not predicate itself upon, nor operate according to, the categories of sexual difference by which (the class of) women are denied full subjectivity.Footnote ¹³

This analysis of Wittig's project draws upon what is implicit in her theoretical writings, but her literature makes this position much more explicit. For instance, Diane Griffiin Crowder's reading of Les guérillères—in which a group termed the elles wage a war against the universal masculine subject of the ils—notes that over the course of the text, the ranks of the elles are filled with any person “who does not find the call to destroy all vestiges of the sex/gender system too radical,” including defectors from the ils. Although these persons take up the collective label of elles, there is no indication that this social shift also involves their “becoming” lesbian or gay (Crowder Reference Crowder2007, 493).Footnote ¹⁴ The openness of Wittig's lesbian is further reinforced by the characters of Le corps lesbien, who, despite the title, are never overtly identified by gender or sexuality in the text. As Seth Clark Silberman notes: “the word lesbien [is kept] as an adjective modifying corps” indicating its status as a critical, textual relation, rather than sexual (Silberman Reference Silberman2007, 470). Instead of condemning men and women who practice heterosexuality, Wittig separates sexual practice from a social contract that “stabilize[s] class oppression as a permanent facet of human nature” (Bersani Reference Bersani1995, 38). Wittig's supposed exclusion of heterosexual feminists therefore seems like a conclusion drawn by considering lesbian only as a sexuality, and not as a political and relational category. Lesbian does not necessarily mean homosexual, but rather takes up a critical stance toward phallocentrism and the heterosexual social contract. By considering lesbian in this way we can account for not only heterosexual men and women who also take up this stance (they are lesbians in this schema), but also those whom Wittig does not view as lesbians because they perpetuate systems of difference.Footnote ¹⁵

Of course, the problem of the straight mind is that it does not describe this situation as a social contract. Rather, as Wittig writes, “it is indeed much simpler to take what I call ‘social contract’ in terms of the status quo, that is, in terms of something that has not changed, will not change” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 42). Through the operation of philosophy as a master discourse, legitimating its ontological and categorical systems across all discourses, the heterosexual and phallocentric social contract universalizes and naturalizes itself: heterosexuality is presented as the obligatory social relationship.Footnote ¹⁶ Importantly, much as with the operation of phallocentrism, this relationship is hierarchical; both Man and Heterosexual become privileged terms whose status as absolute is achieved by differentiation from and domination over all Others. The lesbian, then, takes aim at the current obligatory structuring of society through a de(con)struction of these privileged terms that perpetuate and legitimate a system of domination. Indeed, it is the very denaturalizing history of the term that Wittig appeals to with “lesbian.” For Wittig, Lesbians (referring to the denizens of the isle of Lesbos):

We have already established the straight mind as that which affirms the sexes as presocial, pregiven categories (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 4). This is understood insofar as phallocentrism seeks to naturalize itself, the categories of sex, and the dominance of men over women. As Wittig writes: “This thought based on the primacy of difference is the thought of domination” (4). The category of sex is a category of dominance and, since no dominance between humans can be “natural,” the categories themselves cannot be natural either. Yet categories of sexual difference continue to exist as largely unexamined metaphysical determinants. Woman, for Wittig, continues to be viewed as the presocial cause of the heterosexual system of oppression, rather than the effect of a social system of subjection predicated on the domination of one social group by another. In orienting toward a deconstruction of categories of sexual difference, it is ultimately domination, and the ontological status of domination in relations between subjects (as in the philosophies of Hegel, Sartre, and much of the Western philosophical tradition), that Wittig seeks to critique.

We see Wittig's view of sexual categorization as “an ontological concept that deals with the nature of Being” corroborated by the popular discourse of being one's gender or sexuality, as Butler points out (Butler Reference Butler1990, 21; see also Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 76). This understanding “subordinate[s] the notion of gender under identity” and leads to a sense of being one's gender “in virtue of his or her sex, psychic sense of self, and various expressions of that psychic self” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 21–22). This naïve association serves to “unify” the self and maintain that “unity” against an opposite sex, “whose structure is presumed to maintain a parallel but oppositional internal coherence among sex, gender, and desire” (22). Much like the maintenance of the masculine, one is one's gender only insofar as one is not the opposite gender. To be one's gender requires both the construction and negation of the other, “a formulation that presupposes and enforces the restriction of gender within that binary pair” (22).Footnote ¹⁷ Yet the creation of the different/other is explicitly a process of domination, for “what is the different/other if not the dominated?” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 29). To create difference, to produce an Other, is an act of expressing power, creating a relation of dominance over another subject so that they are not the same, no longer a subject. Thus the act of creating difference is an act of the privileged few (who themselves are not different), an operation performed and encouraged by the ruling class to institute themselves as subject and maintain that position: “the concept of difference ontologically constitutes women into different/others. Men are not different, whites are not different, nor are the masters. But the blacks, as well as the slaves, are” (29). Within specific contexts of Anglo-American culture, White Heterosexual Man assumes the universal, the neutral, and subjugates all Others to claim this position, rendering them different.

This close link between relationships of difference and relationships of domination is what leads Wittig to reject difference as a site of political action. Difference “is only the way that the masters interpret a historical situation of domination” (29)—difference is a mask of domination. As Bersani suggests, because “antagonism is bound up in the very origins of differential perception” it becomes nigh impossible to consider differences nonantagonistically (Bersani Reference Bersani1995, 40). Being a lesbian (adopting lesbian as a political category) is thus as much a rejection of domination as the basis for all relations as it is a rejection of Woman and Man. Wittig makes this position clearer when she identifies that sex “does not concern being but relationship” insofar as it is a “political category” that institutes the social contract as heterosexual (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 5). In this way, lesbian itself concerns relationship, not being. Lesbian is placed in opposition to the categories of heterosexuality, not as a third term (which would be to create a new ontology), but to critically evaluate the way domination is expressed and naturalized in and through the heterosexual social contract. The action of lesbian is not to “break off the social contract per se” but to “break it off as heterosexual” (35). It is to question the sexes, “which [themselves] delineated very narrowly the general design of society” (35). Contrary to the views of her critics, this suggests that Wittig is not appealing to a new ontology but is rather offering a shift in the social contract, however drastic, toward a notion of subjectivity not based on relationships of domination.

In this process of what I am coming to term “lesbian-ization”—the critical movement in philosophy and language toward a Wittigian lesbian-“ism”—the interrogation of sexual difference starts early in the history of philosophical discourse. Wittig traces the origins of the “status quo” to Aristotle's Politics and establishment of categories of opposition, themselves insinuated into “all mental categories” with “dialectical thought (or thought of differences)” as their champion (43). The introduction of duality in Aristotelian thought, following the Pythagoreans, involved a mixing of conceptual oppositions with ethical concepts: “terms of judgement and evaluation” (50). There followed a transposition of conceptual opposition into a metaphysical dimension: the ethical terms modified the meaning of the technical terms, and hierarchy accompanied division. The category of the One—expressed in language by “I”—ascended to a dominant position with the signifiers Male, light, good. All Others are accorded the status of non-Being and the position of dominated. The series of oppositions thus rests on a metaphysical connotation—Being or non-Being—that dialectics operates upon (51). We can see this connotation clearly played out in Hegel and, later, Marxism that, despite its attempt to historicize metaphysical opposition into political conflict, remained for Wittig “a prisoner of the metaphysical series” (51).Footnote ¹⁸

Wittig's questioning of dialectics thus proceeds in interrogating it “in relation to its terms of opposition as principles and also in its functioning” (52): that is, in bringing to light the jump from conceptual to ontological opposition, and questioning the given-ness of this oppositionality, of difference. Accordingly, the struggle for women (as a class) is to cast off the assertion of metaphysical difference, to question the categories of One and Other as categories. Naomi Schor's discussion of the universal and particular echoes Wittig's claims. Difference is understood as a result of sociopolitical discrimination, by which the universal ascends to its seat in establishing the particularity of others:

Schor and Wittig point out that constructed categories of Man and Woman have been naturalized to legitimate the domination of the class of women, but further, that the very terms and processes of domination have been ascribed metaphysical status through an association with Being, such that it becomes the only way subjects, and therefore society, can be constructed. Wittig's lesbian, and indeed her overall project, is recognition of Other-as-subject, a destruction of domination as a necessary dialectical process. Lesbian politically emerges in response to this process, exposing and undermining the way domination has posed itself as the natural constitution of society. Wittig's lesbian thus recalls Elizabeth Grosz's refiguration of desire beyond phallocentric systems of control, as “a way of levelling, of flattening the hierarchical relations between ideas and things, qualities and entities . . . the male over the female, the straight over the ‘bent’” (Grosz Reference Grosz1995, 81). As with the figure(s) of the lesbian itself, this deconstructive political work most starkly appears in Wittig's literature and its operations on language itself. For instance, we can turn to Wittig's linguistic lesbian-ization of bodies (and subjects) to rearticulate them without reference to phallic signification.Footnote ¹⁹

Jeffner Allen, in her reading of Le corps lesbien, writes that the recognition of phallic control over language leads to “the decision of each female to determine the language, or languages, she will speak” (Allen Reference Allen1988, 112). This decision takes place within “a lesbian writing whose power imbues a subjectivity, j/e, the lesbian” that overturns the expectations of dominating discourse (112)—such as the fragmentation of women's bodies. This moment from Le corps lesbien is indicative of Wittig's approach to language:

Allen argues that this linguistic work enacts “a shift in what is language [emphasis mine]” (Allen Reference Allen1988, 113). Other critics have identified Wittig's writing as a textual violence that works within language, restructuring through “reappropriation, displacement, and redirection of dominant cultural themes, concepts, practices, and literary texts” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 80). Thus, as Wittig writes in Les guérillères: “let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles” (Wittig Reference Wittig and Vay1985, 85). The warriors of Les guérillères understand the restriction of subjectivity through language, and thus the need to take up a violent, deconstructive (lesbian) position against phallo-linguistic domination. In their war against phallocentrism, the elles “refuse henceforward to speak this language . . . to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession,” yet shunning a dominating mode of subjectivity such that “If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately” (107). In deconstructing the phallic hold on language, the elles do not seek to continue the mode of domination under a new ontological subjectivity, but instead “to forge new links between myself and the world” (107).Footnote ²¹

Wittig's assault also appears in the “narrator” of Le corps lesbien, j/e. Her splitting of the I (j/e) enacts a literal violence on the word such that distances from the universalized masculine that underlies the “neutral” I (je). Importantly, Karin Cope notes: “[j/e] does not name one gender or the other or even some kind of androgyny” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 82). Rather, j/e reminds us that the universal—Being, subjectivity, the “I”—does not designate or belong to a single sex or gender, contrary to the efforts of phallocentrism to disguise this fact. This critique continues in the textual body of Le corps lesbien, foregrounded by the blocks of physiology that interrupt the “narrative” at regular intervals. The “defamiliarizing morphology” of these pages serves to elaborate a new organization of the body (politic) that does not take the phallus (both literal and figurative) as its center (Chisholm Reference Chisholm, Neuman and Stephenson1993, 197). Dianne Chisholm writes:

In this way, the lesbian body is not specifically female, nor does it allow itself to be reabsorbed into a heterosexual or phallocentric structure. Presented as such, le corps lesbien resists both the sexed body of Woman and the sexed body politic of the heterosexual contract, organized as they both are in relation to the primacy of the phallus—it resists domination.Footnote ²² By commandeering the linguistic tools of domination and violently reshaping them, Wittig seeks to recast the social body; a reformation of subjectivity at the conceptual level (the body politic) consequently expressed upon the real (body politics). Thus, the lesbian body is “an anti-body” (Chisholm Reference Chisholm, Neuman and Stephenson1993, 202), producing a rupture in discourse (via language) “away from sex as what determines what one is . . . so that one may write [or speak or be] other than according to their ontological constraints” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 82–83). As with her theory, Wittig's aim in her literature is to critique the construction of subjectivity as domination.

Utopianism

Undoubtedly there remains a certain utopianism in Wittig's work, and the articulation of utopian possibilities likely contributes to criticisms that Wittig advocates a lesbian separatism; that she idealizes the status of lesbian as somehow outside the heterosexual social contract and, as a result, the lesbian emerges in reference to a subject prior to language and the social.Footnote ²³ Butler notes such criticisms rest upon a normative dispute “over whether there is a retrievable sexuality either ‘before’ or ‘outside’ the law” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 28). In asserting a “before” or “after” of the law, one articulates the possibility of a presently subversive sexuality that somehow escapes heterophallic hegemony. This results in a “utopian notion of sexuality freed from heterosexual constructs,” which fails to acknowledge the ways in which heterosexism still operates upon women even within a “liberated” heterosexuality or lesbianism (29; 156–57, note 53). Fuss similarly asks if “there [can] be such a thing as a ‘free space’ in a strict anti-essentialist view” such as Wittig's, and “whether, as a social construction, lesbianism is not also somehow ‘obligatory’ or ‘learned,’ rather than freely chosen” (Fuss Reference Fuss1989, 43). Butler continues:

We should recall that Wittig does not argue for a “specifically feminine pleasure” but that the hegemonic form of (phallic) subjectivity that bases itself upon difference (and thus domination) is an unexamined part of society that must be resisted. As I have argued, Wittig's lesbian does not necessarily resort to a metaphysical or humanist position but can be understood as a critical stance taken up toward the heterophallic (that is, dominating) organization of subjectification and intersubjectivity, in the interest of deconstructing such structures. I would suggest that Wittig's lesbian, itself a process of critique, can be understood not as taking a utopian sexual position as starting point or end goal, but as a “process-as-utopia,” in which the textual realities of Wittig's literature articulate possible utopias subsequently worked toward through a continual process of de- and reconstruction.Footnote ²⁴

The lesbian as processual does not find itself outside the social but has, in Wittig's terms, “run away . . . partially and precariously” and must continually work against full (re)assimilation into the terms and structures of the heterosexual social contract (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 47). Despite her assertion that: “[Lesbians] are escapees from our class in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free” (20), this “escape” is neither totalizing nor permanent.Footnote ²⁵ As Crowder writes: “the fugitives who escape win a precarious freedom, for they leave intact the system of slavery” (Crowder Reference Crowder2007, 494). For such runaways there is no haven to escape to; they live with constant risk of re-enlistment under the terms of heterosexuality and indeed must re-enlist themselves should they wish to remain intelligible to (heterosexual) society.Footnote ²⁶ Those discourses that express the straight mind deny subjectivity to those outside its narrow conception and who undermine its universality: “you-will-be-straight-or-you-will-not-be” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 28). The hegemony of heterosexuality means that persons must either participate in the hommo-sexual economy and system of domination—for “what does women being exchanged mean if not that they are dominated” (30–31)—or they must forsake all claim to “cultural intelligibility” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 17).

In recognizing the processual character of Wittig's lesbian, critiques of separatism must thus rely on the assertion of an underlying lesbian-humanism in her work. Linda Zerilli writes:

However, Wittig's anti-essentialist critique of the division of sex makes it clear the lesbian refusal of domination comes not through reference to a presocial subjectivity free of heterosexuality. Further, such views ignore Wittig's own recognition that the heterosexual social contract continually reproduces itself in all areas of social life (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 39). As I have argued, lesbian is not a naively conceived “third gender” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 19), nor does it assume to exist miraculously free of influence from heterophallic structures of signification. If the lesbian runaway is “outside” heterosexual norms, it is “not in any easy or ‘magical’ way” (Crowder Reference Crowder2007, 493).Footnote ²⁷ It represents a process as opposed to a clean break; a crucial stage (perhaps never-ending) in working toward a new social contract “without categories that empower some humans at the expense of others” (496). Just as Butler asserts that the category of Woman must be read as “a term in process, a becoming, a constructing that cannot rightfully be said to originate or to end” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 33), this characterization might be extended to the Wittigian lesbian. Its existence as a critically oriented political position serves not to sediment a particular subjective position (pre- or postheterosexuality), but rather to engage (violently) with heterophallic signifying and subjectifying structures, in the interest of denaturalizing and deconstructing such systems of meaning-making. Lesbian is thus understood not to imply a complete break from the dominant subjectifying structures—as if it could exist completely outside the terms of heterosexuality—but exists in a critical deconstructive relationality with those subjectifying systems at the limits of which it exists.Footnote ²⁸

Despite establishing a distance between Wittig's lesbian and a pre-/postheterosexual subject position, it is important to recognize that Wittig's lesbian-feminist vision remains utopian. The lesbian societies of Le corps lesbien and Les guérillères depict peoples and communities who exist beyond categorization by sex/gender/sexuality—they are clearly postsex worlds (though, notably, this does not imply they are in any sense free of conflict, difference, and struggle—both at the subjective and intersubjective levels). Beyond questions of whether a society beyond (hetero)sexual classification is desirable, there remains a strong inclination that such a society may not even be possible. Feminist utopias have, for some time, fallen out of fashion in the face of an overwhelming symbolic hegemony of heterophallic structures and, perhaps more crucially, important questions of political practicality.

Yet, despite these concerns, Wittig reminds us that the history of political philosophy is rife with utopian elaborations and directions. Indeed, when ancient philosophers deliberated on government and the ideal state, there was always a utopian dimension (and limitation) to their elaborations (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 36). Wittig sees in Plato's Republic this struggle toward utopianism in an exchange between Socrates and Glaucon:

As a political and deconstructive orientation, lesbian society might be seen, like Socrates's city, as a possibility to be embodied and lived toward, rather than concretely built or founded. In parallel, then, just as lesbian itself is seen as a process, so too should this utopia.

We had previously noted the utopianism of Les guérillères and Le corps lesbien, and on further examination we can see that the worlds presented therein are also processual. In Les guérillères, the text's modus operandi is (literally) symbolized in the figure of a circle (appearing alone on a page three times throughout). The text's chronological end—the establishment of a society of elles following the war with the ils—appears as the start of the text's action and narrative. Elles of the text's beginning have succeeded in tearing down the social hegemony of the ils and now “make [their] way across a labyrinth of a dead culture of ancient signs, of representations” (Wittig Reference Wittig and Shaktini2005a, 41). By the text's narrative end we have come to the chronological beginning: elles prosecuting their war against ils. The intermediate sections of the text vacillate between these two textual poles (often including sections whose ambiguity might chronologically align them with either). References are made to the war that has yet to take place narratively (but already occurred chronologically) and descriptions are given of “the modification of naïve conceptions the guérillères have such as they were just after the war” (42), which is to say, the narrative start of the text but its chronological end. The narrative action of the novel also performs this cyclicality, as Blencowe argues (Blencowe Reference Blencowe2011, 17). Battles within the text are not cast as “wins” or “losses” but are rather viewed as transformative for their participants; thus, though the novel narratively ends with “peace,” such stability is not conclusive. The text can thus be read back to front, or front to back, but in either instance “turns on itself to rejoin” at the opposite end (Wittig Reference Wittig and Shaktini2005a, 41), indicating a utopianism that describes not an end goal to be finally reached, but a de/reconstructive cycle. In this way, the utopianism of Wittig's “utopia” is perpetual change itself. Blencowe writes:

An emphasis on process, cyclicality, and becoming also appears in Le corps lesbien, whose j/e and tu act out their lesbian intersubjectivity through a vacillation of destruction and rebirth, life and death. In a stark counterpart to the desire of heterophallic domination, which leaves its Other dead in the wake of the intersubjective encounter, “when the lovers of The Lesbian Body kill, they resuscitate” (Wittig Reference Wittig and Shaktini2005b, 47). The process of utopian lesbian-ization (of discourse, language, thought, of subject and self) mirrors this lack of closure. Lesbian proceeds, but not (linearly) toward an end state. Deconstruction is followed by reconstruction (and so on in turn) because speaking writing, or being desire, j/e, or lesbian in the social contract we have now means suffering what Cope calls “contamination by other discursive mobilizations” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 90). Cope continues, the textual bodies of Wittig's work are war machines and “the battle (corps à corps) to which it enjoins you is endless and never pure” (90). One coup must be followed by another.

What we find in this literary exemplification of process is the emphasis on language and the creation of textual worlds. The utopian worlds imagined by Wittig in Les guérillères and Le corps lesbien find “no spot on earth where [they] exist,” yet are built up textually and linguistically to indicate social-subjective possibilities. As Allen argues, “Wittig claims poetry as a catalyst for transformation in women's lives . . . [she is] a poet of desire and hope” (Allen Reference Allen1988, 113). In the symbolic prohibition of nonheterosexual society, Wittig's literature develops for us textual worlds in which the idealism of the lesbian—the utopia of nondominating subjectivity—is played out and becomes possible. In this way, Wittig's literature “speaks the fortunes of a people in such a way that that fortune might be real” (107). Or, in Chisholm's words, the textual body of Wittig's work does not come to represent a real physical or political body (separate from the current social contract), but rather “acts as a body-metaphor: a catachresis” to create a radically different textual world (Chisholm Reference Chisholm, Neuman and Stephenson1993, 204). Thus, responding in kind with Socrates to those who bemoan the impossibly of such utopian procession, Wittig writes: “Then I will stay with Socrates's view and also Glaucon's: If we are ultimately denied a new social order, which therefore can exist only in words, I will find it in myself” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 45). Wittig's utopianism is neither naïve, nor easy; the work of it is the point.

Polysemy

Thus we come to the third major theme of Wittig's work: her focus on polysemy within language and the importance of the free elaboration of meaning within individual subjectivity as part of the lesbian gesture.Footnote ²⁹ The efficacy of this gesture remains suspect, however, for Wittig's critics. Butler writes that Wittig's split between homo- and heterosexuality “replicates the kind of disjunctive binarism that she herself characterizes as the divisive philosophical gesture of the straight mind” (Butler Reference Butler1990, 121).Footnote ³⁰ Butler goes on to assert that lesbianism, even as a “full-scale refusal of heterosexuality . . . constitutes an engagement and, ultimately, a radical dependence on the very terms lesbianism purports to transcend” (124; see also Fuss Reference Fuss1989, 40). Blencowe provides a similar critique in different terms, questioning the viability of the Wittigian lesbian as a form of negative critique, “in the sense of being a critique that sets itself up in opposition to its target” and thereby grounding the term in that oppositionality (Blencowe Reference Blencowe2011, 9).

Wittig's process of working toward changes in the social contract, however, takes seriously the question of individual subjectivity (as opposed to focusing solely on “class” consciousness) to avoid reinstituting the very structure of oppression she is working against. The movement away from categories of sexual difference and domination comes because of a plurality of meaning opened up to the individual subject, allowing for an elaboration of the self beyond the closure of meaning insisted upon by heterophallic system of categorization. For Wittig, this is achieved through an elaboration of subjectivity at the level of a violence performed on language, such that one textually generates a simulacrum of a universal subject without disinvesting such an elaboration of its particularity. To act, write, speak, and live lesbian is to make one's point of view appear as both universal and particular.

Given what we have seen of Wittig thus far, Cope is correct in asserting that lesbian is “not a question of ‘achieving domination’ in the world, of remaking the old ‘universal’ subject into a new improved universal lesbian subject” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 79). Integral to understanding this shift in “universal” subject(s), however, is Cope's further assessment that lesbian is “a dispersal and differentiation of subjectivity, of multiple kinds and occasions of revolt against the status quo” (79). This status quo, as we have seen, is a naturalizing and self-justifying social-symbolic system, predicated on the domination of and denial of full subjectivity to certain social classes at the gain of others. Heterophallic domination and denial proceed not only through material means (the control of women's bodies, sexual violence, medical and legal discourses, and so on), but also through a constriction of the possible meanings one is permitted to articulate (in a culturally intelligible manner) in and through oneself as a subject. This focus is not a new one within the history of feminism. It describes the continuing tension between the idealized sign of Woman as (re)inscribed through a heteronormative and phallocentric system, and the individual experiences of the class of women (and those excluded from that class) and understandings of themselves as full subjects. Wittig's materialist understanding of women as a class is tempered by an emphasis on the individual subject in her work. This dual focus results in a double movement toward effecting lasting social change. On the one hand, class consciousness, more than alienated individuals, is required to form real subjects (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 16–19). On the other hand, recognition and affirmation of individual subjectivity is necessary for real class struggle and transformation to occur, as “one needs to know and experience the fact that one can constitute oneself as a subject (as opposed to an object of oppression)” (16). This realization, like the rest of Wittig's work, happens on the level of language, with a focus on pronouns.Footnote ³¹

The significance of the personal pronoun, for Wittig, is that it lays claim to the universal: “For each time I say ‘I,’ I reorganize the world from my point of view and through abstraction I lay claim to universality” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 81). It is the very speaking of “I” that posits the speaker as an absolute subject. However, given that under phallocentrism, “the universal is coextensive with the masculine” it means that “woman has been the victim of a veritable universal theft” (Schor Reference Schor1995, 23). As a result, while Woman speaks “I,” she is stripped of her claim to subjectivity and forced to enter into language “in a crablike way, particularizing themselves and apologizing profusely” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 81). The experience of speaking in a language that forbids your speaking, “to be poisoned by a language not one's own,” is not a “psychological” or “individual” dilemma; neither is the difference one attempts to circumvent between that language that imposes itself and the language of the self one seeks to speak a mere matter of “autobiographical confession” (Allen Reference Allen1988, 113). Woman is deprived of the power of language to construct oneself as subject, and subsequently denied any claim to abstract, philosophical, and political discourse that shapes the social. Emphasizing the necessity of each subject to be able to speak themselves, to assume subjectivity through and in language and in so doing create their own language, breaks down binarism and oppositionality by opening the field of possible meanings available to subjects.Footnote ³² The class of women, then, must reclaim their right to the position of speaking subject “and overthrow both the category of sex and the system of compulsory heterosexuality” that denies them that right (Butler Reference Butler1990, 115). This overthrow, however, cannot take place through the current linguistic modes through which oppression is reinforced. Discourse functions oppressively by requiring that the speaking subject participate in the terms of oppression to speak—that they “take for granted the speaking subject's own impossibility or unintelligibility” (116). To speak the language of the system, then, is to be deprived of the ability to speak as subject.

Thus, for Wittig, articulating individual subjectivities must come through a violent transformation of language freed from the shackles of difference such that “any form of scriptural specificity, including a homosexual one, is rejected” (Schor Reference Schor1995, 24).Footnote ³³ It is for this reason that Wittig's three major novels focus on a transformation of pronouns (to an increasing degree of intensity). In L'Opoponax, the formation of the protagonist's subjectivity through language is subverted in the novel's use of “one” (on), creating a textual reality where the ungendered narrator (and thus reader) comes into conflict with heterosexist discourse.Footnote ³⁴ On is transformed to an “I” (a j/e?) only in the final moments of the novel through the mal-appropriation of (masculine) poetry to express the narrator's (lesbian) desire for a peer.Footnote ³⁵ In Les guérillères, the (feminine) third-person plural elles is universalized against the (masculine and neutral) ils to attack the “neutrality” of “he-they.” And in Le corps lesbien, je is split to enact a nongendered (lesbian) subject and j/e's cyclical, nondominating (lesbian), relation to tu. In each of these instances, the subject(s) constructed through re-articulation of the personal pronoun is one that strives to describes itself beyond the calcifications of meaning that arise through heterophallic appropriation of universalizing language. The effort at “universalization” serves to undermine the “naturality” of the masculine/neutral/universal and, in doing so, open the possibilities of articulating oneself as a subject without necessary recourse to heterophallic implications of meaning. This is an articulation that can (and should) be performed by all individuals, regardless of their position within the closed system of meaning generated by the classes of sex (and their concomitant categories). Thus, the theoretical-political work of revealing the classes of sex as classes is supplemented by the textual work of deconstructing heterophallic appropriation of language, and pluralizing language (subjectivities) beyond the restrictions on meaning imposed by heterophallic signifying structures.

Wittig's emphasis on pluralization—as opposed to re-inscription of hierarchy—within lesbian results in what Cope describes as “a form of discursive insurgency”: a desire for legitimacy (subjectivity), but not by means of silencing other subjectivities, “other discursive modalities” (Cope Reference Cope1991, 80). The lesbian is not instituting a new hegemony: “it is not in the business of quelling oppositions, of controlling or subtracting from discourse the numbers and sorts of things that may be said” (80). We see this clearly at play in Le corps lesbien. J/e and tu always remain interchangeable and multiple: “There is no hierarchy from ‘I’ to ‘you’ which is its same. . . . One could consider that in each fragment they are different protagonists” (Wittig Reference Wittig and Shaktini2005b, 47). This plurality reiterates in Le corps lesbien's and Les guérillères’ listed presentations of the lesbian body and the names of lesbian warriors, in which we find a “proliferation of images, in excess,” a “polymorphous symbolism” (Chisholm Reference Chisholm, Neuman and Stephenson1993, 199), but no ultimate member around whom others are hierarchized. The lesbian is that flattening of hierarchy, a refusal of domination, a refusal of one meaning, of one subject (phallocentric and heterosexist), and of the subjugation, denial, and silencing of all others. Lesbian-ization, like language, is multiplicative, generative; it “confers on meaning its full meaning . . . bring[ing] out in most cases—rather than one meaning—polysemy” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 67).Footnote ³⁶

Maintaining polysemy is an integral consideration for Wittig in the articulation of new subjectivities (and in affording these articulations both a universality and particularity)—being reduced to one meaning means to be subjugated again under a category of difference already established by dominant discourse. Similarly, to enforce or privilege only one meaning—that is, to claim universality as only one's own—is to restrict language and (possible) subjects in the same manner as heterophallic discourse. Wittig's “subject” is not a return to “an ontological right of speech” or a “pre-discursive fiction” (Zerilli Reference Zerilli1990, 162). Rather, her use of the universal functions as “a simulacrum of [phallic] Being and the [masculine] universal” that serves to effect a “radical decentering of the subject as it has been conceptualized by the straight mind” (162). Maintaining polysemy thus proceeds through a process of universalizing the meaning(s) of the particularized individual, or what Wittig refers to as “the minority point of view,” against the dominant form of universalization.Footnote ³⁷ Polysemy, acted out on the practical level of language, is also to be undertaken at the conceptual level: “one must assume both a particular and a universal point of view . . . That is, one must work to reach the general, even when starting from an individual or from a specific point of view” (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, 67). Importantly, though, the universalization of a minority point of view “does not pretend to describe anyone else's perspective and interests” (Butler Reference Butler2007, 521). To “universalize” the minority position is not to establish a new hegemony. The universal subject of the minority position serves to undermine the dominant subjectivity, but the recognition of plurality on the level of polysemy means that each individual lays claim to subjectivity—the universal—in their own way, such that “there speaks not one for all, but each for herself” (Allen Reference Allen1988, 108). The minority point of view, universalized in language, “effectively assaults the taken-for-granted conceptualization of things,” bringing about a new textual reality, “and, in that positing, helps facilitate its possibility” (Butler Reference Butler2007, 521). Like Pascal's circle, this new universalism does not place any one subjectivity at its center—it has no center, and its circumference, the limit placed on meaning, is infinite—unlimited.

Difference (Again)?

The rereading of Wittig's work through themes of domination, utopia, and polysemy presented here does not mean to imply that Wittig's theorization of lesbian is without fault; significant critiques remain to be addressed. Chiefly, throughout her work Wittig makes frequent reference to the structural similarities between “woman-hood” and “slavery” that are, at best, insensitive to the differences between sexual and racial difference (Wittig Reference Wittig1992, xv, 12, 30, 45, 86). Furthermore, her tendency to privilege sexual difference as a structure of domination over other forms of social oppression leads her to ignore the significant ways in which categories of race as well as class, coloniality, and so on are themselves always already sexed in particular ways—and vice versa.Footnote ³⁸ Wittig's silence on the intersection between heterophallic and racist systems of oppression leads, in the best case, to a problematic gap in theorizing the political possibilities of her theory for women of color, and, at worst, a refusal to recognize the interconnectedness of heterosexist and racist systems of meaning that can only serve to perpetuate the latter. Re-interpreting subjectification furthermore carries with it the problematic of a decentered subjectivity. Although I argue Wittig does not refer to a presocial subject position, the political efficacy of establishing a “neutral” field of signification has historically come under criticism from feminists such as Alice Jardine and Rosi Braidotti. They argue that there is an inherent risk in orienting toward a sexual “neutrality” of re-establishing a phallocentric structure of subjectification: the refusal of the feminine speaking position may very well lead to its appropriation by the decentered masculine subject in establishing a new androcentric subject (merely phallocentrism under a new name) (see Jardine Reference Jardine1985; Braidotti Reference Braidotti and Guild1991). Rather than opening the possibilities of meaning-making to women-as-subject, this would lead to an effective silencing of the class of women—a deprivation of a speaking position only recently and tenuously recognized.

Finally, it is worth considering Wittig's anti-essentialist position in the context of the “strategic” difference. Denise Riley, Diana Fuss, and Naomi Schor have all maintained a strong social-constructionist stance toward the categories of sex and the heterosexual structuring of society—like Wittig—and yet maintain the politically strategic possibility (and perhaps inevitability) of deploying “essentialist” conceptions of “women” (Fuss Reference Fuss1989; Riley Reference Riley1995; Schor Reference Schor1995). In Am I That Name?, Riley argues that fluctuations between denying and developing the category of “women” may, in fact, be part of the normal historical operation of feminism (Riley Reference Riley1995). As the category “women” changes historically alongside the development of other concepts in the Western context, so too does feminism shift to meet the political needs of those oppressed persons within that context. Such criticisms as these emerge, however, only by returning to Wittig's lesbian-feminism and reading past reductions of her theory to essentialism or separatism.Footnote ³⁹ They indicate the importance of rereading Wittig's works (theoretical and literary), evaluating her place within feminist and queer theory, and considering the possibilities of bringing lesbian into conversation with current debates surrounding sex/gender/sexuality: categories that have come under increasing suspicion, but remain strong determinants of subjectivity and material status in heterosexualized culture.