1While the press and the political establishment in France decry the “American” imposition of gender critique on France’s universalist ideals, I trace the cross-pollination of feminist ideas in the U.S. and France by focusing on the resurgence of the popularity of the work of one particular figure, Monique Wittig, the French activist, theorist, radical feminist, and literary giant. Improbably, 2023 marks twenty years since Wittig’s untimely death and was recognized globally as “L’Année Wittig,” with the writer celebrated in readings, dance, theatrical productions, and colloquia (“2023: année Wittig”). But for decades she was ignored by the French intellectual establishment while being widely read among feminists in the U.S. (Blackhurst). Wittig’s own activist and academic trajectory spans the two countries she claimed: she was first known as a prize-winning literary figure in France, then as a U.S.-based French materialist feminist whose theoretical essays became a cornerstone of the emerging field of queer theory, and, finally, a radical sage whose posthumous presence is ubiquitous in the post-#MeToo moment in France. Wittig’s trajectory is indicative of the unpredictable but incredibly generative flows of theory, art, and activism between the U.S. and France. I will argue, in what follows, that Wittig’s popularity now, after decades of being virtually ignored in France, is because her work is so attuned to the tragic conditions of the present—and that this popularity would not be possible if her work had not been read, discussed, and debated with such interest and dedication in the U.S. academy and among feminist and queer activists across America. Wittig’s recent popularity in France and the rise of the relevance of her work since #MeToo and #BalanceTonPorc, highlight the ways that radical “American” ideas of gender politics took their shape in relation to, and are inextricably linked to Wittig’s work specifically, and French philosophical traditions more generally. Put differently, these feminist histories of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries demonstrate that those revolutionary American ideas may have grown in the U.S., but they were born in France.
2In fall 1994, I enrolled in an undergraduate Women’s Studies class called “From Mary Wollstonecraft to Madonna: 100 Years of Feminist Thought.” As a French major, I had just come back from a year at the Université Paul Valéry in Montpellier, France. The bulk of my courses, both in the U.S. and in France, had been small French literature courses in which we studied Molière, Diderot, and Zola. The few courses I’d taken in Women’s Studies (as it was called at the time) were oriented towards a study of American women’s history and the anthropological study of women as a global group. That is to say, “women’s studies” meant the study of women, taken to be an obvious and recognizable object of ethnographic, sociological, and historical interest. But by the mid-1990s, this tradition was being challenged, and this course changed all that; it also changed me. For the first time, I learned that Women’s Studies could problematize the category “woman” in the first place, that it could challenge Western epistemological fields, that it aimed not simply to produce knowledge about women, but to question whatever we assumed to know about Woman, ontologically and physiologically. And to my surprise, at the center of this questioning was something revolutionary called French Feminism.
3It is significant that “French feminism” is a thing that we can refer to, a body of thought my professor defined for us in the syllabus no less (“also called écriture feminine: as in Wittig, Irigaray, and Cixous, language is understood as the site of political struggle; aligns rationality with the masculine and sees the feminine in forms and aspects of language marginalized or suppressed by rationalism; works against the discourse of psychoanalysis by rethinking women’s relationship to the body, writing, the family, and psychological development”). Of the other forms of feminism that were usefully defined for us in the syllabus (feminist poststructuralism, liberal feminism, radical feminism, etc.), no others were aligned specifically with a national tradition or identity. Other kinds of feminism migrated from one place to another with a murkier sense of origin and cultural fidelity; were not the British and American suffragists, for example, famously following each other’s examples? Why did the French have their own feminism, and why was it centered specifically on language? And how had I not heard of this? I was a French major; I had spent a year studying French and Francophone literature at a French university, and living with a French family, and no one had ever mentioned “écriture feminine” or the idea of feminism at all.
- 2 There are many histories of these conversations and conflicts, but among the most useful is Robyn W (...)
4In fact, I was witnessing in real time a paradox in feminist history, when French ideas about gender, language, and Western philosophy, as well as the natural and social sciences, were resonating with profound impact in university systems in the U.S. These were the days when feminist scholars at U.S. universities were establishing Women’s Studies programs, expanding such programs into departments, and debating whether they would be called “Women’s Studies,” “Gender Studies,” “Feminist Studies,” or some combination of these. And French feminist work found a ready readership and spoke with urgency to a developing sense that the conflicts of twenty years of feminist activism demonstrated that feminist theory could not take for granted the central category of Woman or universalize the experience of Womanhood anymore.2
5By the time I encountered Wittig in that classroom, she had been publishing radical feminist writing for thirty years. Wittig was a French novelist, philosopher, and activist who marked the French intellectual world with the publication of L’Opoponax in 1964, which won the Prix Médicis. The prize committee included giants of le nouveau roman, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. In it, Wittig refuses the universalization of the masculine by writing the story of a young girl using the gender-neutral pronoun “on.” She eliminates narrow references to gender and offers a vision of the childhood of its protagonist, Catherine Legrand, featuring “la résistance explicite… contre la socialisation traditionelle feminine” (Vivienne Wenzel). Marguerite Duras heralded the book as “a literary masterpiece” (Kirschen). Its publication established Wittig as a writer to watch.
6As she became involved in the protests of 1968, the activism of the radical Left became for her, as it was for many American feminists, a turning point; confronted with radical leaders resistant, even hostile to the interrogation of sexism, misogyny, and gender oppression, Wittig became a founding member of the M.L.F. (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes). Her writing continued to push against the epistemological constraints of gender. Les Guérillères, published in 1969, is an experimental novel that tests the French commitment to universalism by universalizing the feminine position (“elles”) and telling a fractured, circuitous origin story of a new society with different epistemological, chronological, and corporeal norms. While many have read it as a lesbian feminist utopia story, Les Guérillères could also be read as an attempt to imagine a society that has undone, or is seeking to undo, the epistemological and linguistic formations that subtend the gender binary. It pushes for a greater complexity than that of a society that simply valorizes the feminine, the lesbian, the female. It replicates none of the clichés that feminist utopian visions often have (a society without conflict or aggression, conflict and aggression being viewed in many feminist invocations of utopia as masculine traits), because Wittig was relentless in her conviction that not just feminine and masculine, but woman and man were social conditions, myths that hid under the cover of universalizing language itself.
- 3 This quote is from the back cover of the 1985 reprint of Les Guérillères by Beacon Press.
7Wittig used art as the place to explore possible political horizons that would be radically different from the present. She famously played with the very French ideal of universalism, individually insisting on her title as “un écrivain” rather than “une écrivaine,” not to claim the masculine but to claim the universal, the ungendered role of writer (which, of course, is also the masculine role). Stylistically, in those first two books and her third, Le Corps Lesbien (1973), she pushed what was possible with a gendered language; asserting that the masculine had claimed the universal for itself, and that the feminine would forever be excluded from the status of the universal, she worked against the grammatical conventions of French and then English to make gender meaningless, even obsolete. All three of Wittig’s first novels were quickly translated and published in English, first The Guérillères in 1971, which was lauded as “one of the most widely read and frequently cited feminist novels of our time,”3 then The Lesbian Body in 1975, which became a staple in feminist bookstores and women’s studies syllabi, and finally L’Opoponax in 1976.
8Wittig’s political actions were the first obvious site of collaboration and solidarity with U.S. feminist actions. On August 26, 1970, nine militant feminists, among them Wittig, lay flowers on the tomb of the unknown soldier at the Arc de Triomphe in honor of that soldier’s wife. One of their banners read “Il y a plus inconnu que le Soldat inconnu: sa femme” (There is someone more unknown than the unknown soldier: his wife) as well as “solidarité avec les femmes en grève aux USA” (solidarity with women on strike in the USA) (Dhellemmes; Marty). To the utter befuddlement of the gendarmes, Wittig’s banner read “Un homme sur deux est une femme” (one out of two men is a woman). The officials who were trying to remove the protesters are reported to have been utterly confused, suspecting that the women were saying that fifty percent of men lacked virility or were gay. That is to say, the idea that women would claim humanity on par with men was inconceivable.
9This French action was organized as a gesture of support for the Women’s Strike for Equality in the U.S., memorializing the 50th anniversary of the nineteenth amendment and taking place in Washington, D.C. the same day. This impromptu assembly at the Arc de Triomphe, shut down by the gendarmes as quickly as it began, was retrospectively considered the origin act of the MLF and its inspiration suggests the desired continuity and conversation between American and French feminisms in those first decades. Transatlantic communion was an integral part of the origin story for the MLF and French women’s liberation work that followed. Wittig’s radicalism, her attempts to make visible lesbian feminists within the emerging feminist movement in France, was met with hesitation and conflict (Eloit). Wittig moved to the United States in 1976 with her partner Sande Zeig, and she taught at numerous U.S. universities before settling at the University of Arizona.
10This leads to a second path of collaboration: In March 1980, the editors of Questions Féministes, all radical French feminists, launched an English language journal of feminist theory in order to increase awareness in the U.S. of what was happening in France. The inaugural issue of Feminist Issues contained one of Wittig’s most famous essays, “The Straight Mind,” which she had delivered the year before at the annual conference of the Modern Language Association in New York City, and which was published simultaneously in Questions Féministes as “La pensée straight.” The concluding line of the essay, “Les lesbiennes ne sont pas des femmes” (Lesbians are not women) made the mark that would stand as Wittig’s most influential assertion: “woman” is a myth perpetuated to justify her servitude; heterosexuality is a political system naturalized through the whole of Western thought (philosophical, cultural, scientific, religious) as a set of desires (Wittig, The Straight Mind 13). While “The Straight Mind” electrified American readers, “La pensée straight” exposed a schism in the French feminist community and within the editorial board over the question of sexuality. Questions Féministes was soon after dissolved, as this question proved to be irreconcilable. Wittig continued to publish groundbreaking work in English in Feminist Issues, including her remaking of Simone de Beauvoir’s famous line from The Second Sex into the pathbreaking essay “One Is Not Born a Woman.”
- 4 For a more detailed discussion of the theoretical debates in French feminist activism, see Elaine M (...)
11To provide further context, there were a few important avenues of overlap and cross-fertilization happening between the feminist movements in the U.S. and in France. Feminist movements everywhere were confronted immediately with a central conflict between a liberal/bourgeois and a radical/revolutionary feminist camp. The former defined its goal as opening up already-existing institutions to women, focusing on questions of reproductive rights, employment rights, and greater access to institutions of power. This mainstream camp was represented in the U.S. by figures like Betty Freidan, organizations such as the National Organization of Women (NOW), and publications like Ms. Magazine. In France, organizations like the MLAC (Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception), pioneering figures such as Simone Veil, and groups like Choisir, which advocated for legal reforms, stood in conflict with revolutionary or radical feminisms like Les Gouines Rouges that took aim at the linguistic and philosophical traditions that defined “woman” through a binary system, as well as at the systems of capitalism, organized religion, and the nuclear family that subordinated women by naturalizing their exploitation.4 As we will see, this conflict continues to animate resistance to radical change and feminist equality in France today.
12A second problem was the degree to which feminism could, or should, include men’s participation or reject it (Jacquemart and Caslet 221–223). One of the early moments of cross-fertilization was Emmanuèle de Lesseps’s decision to translate Valorie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto (1968), publishing it in France in 1971. The manifesto’s first line tells us much of what we need to know: “Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex.” Solanas’s reputation as the woman who shot Andy Warhol has since overshadowed the effect of the manifesto, which galvanized feminist readers in the U.S. and in France and which put her in conversation with a number of radical feminists whose goal was not integration into bourgeois society but a complete reordering of the social itself. As contemporary readers will no doubt appreciate, Solanas’s call to “overthrow the government” and “destroy the male sex” did nothing to endear her to mainstream feminists working to integrate the halls of government and whose primary fear was that they might alienate men or be regarded as unreasonable, angry, or even un-womanly (Fahs). Lesseps’s decision to publish a French translation made the question of separatism inescapable. Many U.S. radical feminists openly advocated versions of emotional and sexual refusal: they asserted that “feminism is the theory, lesbianism is the practice” and argued that women’s entry into feminist consciousness would make heterosexuality undesirable, or that feminists could choose to become lesbians for political reasons, the idea of the “political lesbian” being a feminist who would refuse, as they said, “to sleep with the enemy” (Koedt 247; Echols 211). In France, Les Guérillères had anticipated this, as Wittig’s conceptual work would continue to make the case, philosophically and economically, that lesbian existence represented an ontological separation from the heterosexual contract and the social worlds that went with it. This proved to be a tricky bargain for mainstream feminist organizations who worried about alienating the organized Left. Members of the MLF felt they had to justify their desire to organize among women, saying “Make no mistake, we have nothing against husbands” and “you shouldn’t think that MLF women have anything against the male sex” (Jacquemart and Masclet 222). Despite their concerns about being accused of misandry, it was misogyny that turned out to be the bigger problem; when the MLF formed in Paris in 1970, many of the participants had experienced misogyny and sexism during the left organizing of the May and June 1968 period of protest and transformation and now noted hostility from the men who attended the first meetings of the MLF. They quickly made the decision to bar men from participating in the MLF, writing that “[men] benefit objectively from their position as oppressors. Only the oppressed woman can analyze and theorize her own oppression, and then choose the means to combat it” (“Quelques militantes” 5). The French journal Partisans devoted a double issue in 1970 to “year zero” of the “liberation des femmes” and opened the issue with a recap and comparison of progress of the women’s liberation movements in France and in the United States. It included previously published essays from American feminist magazines, translated into French. Readers, they surmised, would be hungry for additional perspectives, and in any case, what happened in the U.S. helped form in many ways the planning and articulation of goals in feminist organizing in France. As we will see, this fear that articulating feminist principles alienates men, and the warning that feminists should at all costs not appear angry, was a powerful silencing weapon that has continued into the present and that French feminists continue to call out and reject today, fifty years later.
- 5 The essays collected in Notes from the First Year and Notes from the Second Year give ample evidenc (...)
13Sexuality was a third point of contention between feminist organizers in both countries. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, accused lesbian activists of undermining the feminist movement by “distracting” attention from issues she deemed most pertinent to all women: economic and social equality. She voiced concern about what she termed the “lavender menace” at a NOW meeting in 1969, to the outrage of lesbian activists who participated in the mainstream feminist political group and insisted that sexuality was a central site of women’s oppression. If “the personal is political,” they argued, then an analysis of heterosexuality would be central to feminist success.5 Several radical lesbians who had participated or held positions in NOW resigned, forming their own group Lavender Menace in 1970. They disrupted NOW’s Second Congress to Unite Women in May 1970, wearing t-shirts with “Lavender Menace” written in all caps and holding signs that read “The women’s movement is a lesbian plot!”, a paranoid fear that Friedan had expressed (Kahn). It is this audience who was first poised to be particularly attentive to Wittig’s radical argument that heterosexuality was a political system.
14May 1970 also saw a demonstration at the University of Paris, Vincennes, where protesters distributed an essay that Wittig co-authored entitled “Combat pour la liberation de la femme.” This event inspired the August 1970 rally at the Arc de Triomphe, leading to the founding of the MLF. Two years later, Claude Servan-Schrieber would recount the co-inspiration of French and American feminist actions in an essay that asserted that the publication of “Combat pour la liberation de la femme” was met with disdain in France, as most mainstream media outlets dismissed the feminist movement as an “American phenomenon” fueled by wives who were neglected by their workaholic husbands. The mainstream French press characterized the four authors of the essay as “a handful of discontented militants” (Servan-Schrieber 30). But while many of the participants in the MLF were lesbians, the question of heterosexuality remained unasked, unarticulated in their political strategies. As Alice Coffin, dyke activist and author of Le Génie Lesbien (The Lesbian Genius) attests, it was a remarkable discovery, in late adolescence, to find out that many of her feminist heroes from the MLF were lesbians. France, she argues, continues to be a country where “ça ne se fait pas” (that kind of thing isn’t done) (Hird). As in the U.S., French lesbian feminists found that their concerns went unrecognized in mainstream feminist groups; eventually Wittig and others left the MLF and started a radical lesbian feminist group, Les Gouines Rouges. As Marie Le Corre recounts, political lesbianism “le lesbianisme politique” emerged as an idea in the 1970s, largely from American feminists who claimed lesbianism as a strategy for undermining the patriarchy. But feminist texts from France and Quebec in the 1970s affirm that lesbian feminists hardly dared to out themselves at first, with the end result that the most recognizably feminist goals were articulated according to the concrete problems of heterosexual women: “Elles voyaient les hétéros confrontés à des problèmes très concrets de vie conjugale, de taches ménagères, d’éducation des enfants, de vie sexuelle” ([Lesbian feminists] saw heterosexual women confronted by concrete problems of married life, household tasks, child-raising, and sex life). Mainstream feminist work remained committed to making for more egalitarian heteronormative relationships, not questioning the basis of heterosexuality itself (Lagrave; Eliot; Le Corre).
15These elements interweave to underscore Wittig’s radicality, giving some clarity to her move to the U.S. and to her energetic reception there. Her insistence on the radical universality of a lesbian subjectivity was at odds with mainstream feminist organizing in France, but in keeping with a sizeable radical arm of the American feminist movement. By her move in 1976, her first three texts had been translated into English, and her work was a regular feature in feminist consciousness-raising groups and on Women’s Studies syllabi (Zimmerman 22–28). Her peripatetic existence included a commitment to opening up further lines of communication between French and American feminist groups. Thus, the radical feminists of Questions Féministes began work on an English-language journal, Feminist Issues. The inaugural issue of Feminist Issues (1980) opens with an essay entitled “Variations on Some Common Themes,” in which the editors of Questions Féministes describe the goals of the journal and its urgency in clear terms: the “new feminism” needs a place dedicated to theoretical debate. “Theoretical,” they are careful to describe, is not a code name for “obscure,” but a tool “to explain the causes and the functioning, the why and the how, of the oppression of women in general or of one of its particular aspects.” It is a tool to effectuate the total de-naturalization of the system of gender. The issue defines their approach, a radical feminism (formerly called revolutionary feminism) that uses a Marxist lens to understand women as a socially constructed class and to focus on the material conditions of women’s existence while understanding those material conditions to be the product of a social, political, and economic system. They also take aim at the versions of feminism that uphold the gender binary and call upon women’s essentialism to validate women’s experience. They call for a “feminist science” because “there is no such thing as a ‘neutral’ science; all knowledge is produced from given social positions. Thus, a feminist science is that approach to knowledge which is grounded in the experience of patriarchal oppression” (4, 21).
- 6 For this transition in France, see Stewart, Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ’68 to Mitt (...)
16To conceptualize the radicality of Wittig’s formulations and their urgency for the present, let us remember that in the early 1970s, to the degree that feminisms in France and in the U.S. were legible to the general public, they were concerned primarily with reproductive rights. The 1971 “Manifeste des 343” published in Le Nouvel Observateur, was a call to legalize abortion and an avowal “Je me suis fait avorté” (I had an abortion), signed by 343 writers, celebrities, and artists who risked criminal penalties for their public statement. This action was followed by the formation of the Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception (MLAC) in April 1973. This was three months after Roe v. Wade legalized abortion in the U.S. and one year after the widely publicized Bobigny trial (in which a mother helped her minor daughter obtain an abortion and both were prosecuted) galvanized the French public (Stewart 351). After the decriminalization of abortion in France in 1975, mainstream feminist work turned to address sexual violence, as it did in the U.S.6 These focus points—reproductive rights and sexual violence—took at face value that a feminist politics had to focus on issues that confronted women as women, which is to say, women’s bodily autonomy. Wittig’s radical intervention was to put into question the entire philosophical, epistemological, and scientific apparatuses that constituted sex and gender, thus undoing the very premise of “woman” as a body whose interests the law could define and protect. In the U.S., this critique of “woman” as a category is usually attributed to a range of poststructuralist feminist theorists writing in the late 1980s and early 1990s, most notably Judith Butler, whose groundbreaking book Gender Trouble (1990) would help launch the field of study that would come to be known as Queer Theory. Butler writes, in a posthumous tribute collection on Wittig, that in 1979 “I would secretly go into those bookstores in Paris where Wittig was considered a pariah and buy as many copies of Questions féministes as I could, securing the books in the original, even though my French was hardly good enough to understand all that she wrote” (Butler, “Wittig’s Material Practice” 528).
17Wittig as “pariah,” out of step with the mainstream French feminist organizations for her radical insistence that the question of sexuality be understood as a political one—this sets the backdrop for Wittig’s relevance in the American academy. In fact, Butler devotes a whole chapter of Gender Trouble to Wittig, with Irigaray and Foucault, citing several of the foundational essays from Feminist Issues as indicative of a formidable theory of lesbian universalism and the deconstruction of gender through language. Let us start with a central claim, one that closes Wittig’s first essay from Feminist Issues, “The Straight Mind”:
What is woman? Panic, general alarm for an active defense. Frankly, it is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective, and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women. (32)
18Among her numerous theoretical contributions to feminist and queer theory, Wittig’s commitment to deconstructing, undoing the categories not just of gender but of sex, had a lasting and profound impact. Butler recalls hearing Wittig deliver this essay as a presentation in New York in 1979, and recalls that, “I felt my own categories dissolve, a sense of epistemic gravity lifted” (“Wittig’s Material Practice” 529). I have a similar origin story, though the academic career that follows it is much less remarkable. I was in an undergraduate seminar in 1994 when we read The Straight Mind and Other Essays and I was riveted by her assertion that “lesbians are not women.” I felt, in that moment, that an entire new world had opened and invited me to peek inside. To this day, I know of few more radical or compelling statements. Butler circles back to that same assertion: “If ‘a lesbian is not a woman,’ then a lesbian is something else. And to say that the lesbian ‘is’ is to destroy a sense of reality, one that depends upon the difference between the two sexes and a heterosexual presumption. How could a copula do so much work?” (Butler, “Wittig’s Material Practice” 529).
- 7 For examples of these manifestos, see Notes from the First Year and Notes from the Second Year.
19I take this claim to be the most revolutionary and the most resonant of Wittig’s rich, compelling work. She echoes so much of the work that had been emerging from feminist consciousness-raising groups in the U.S., appearing in manifestos by the Radicalesbians and other radical feminist groups, but she writes it in the language of a philosopher, with the tools of Marxist class analysis and universalizes it from a testimony of women’s experience to a condemnation of Western society’s multi-faceted institutional marginalization and exploitation of women.7 Wittig announces from this first essay that “woman” is a fiction, a category she defines in more detail in her second published essay, “One Is Not Born a Woman”:
However, most of the feminists and lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of women’s oppression is biological as well as historical …. Not only is this conception still imprisoned in the categories of sex (woman and man), but it holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth (biology) is what defines a woman …. By doing this, by admitting that there is a ‘natural’ division between women and men, we naturalize history, we assume that ‘men’ and ‘women’ have always existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible. (10–11)
20For Wittig, there is no “nature” outside of culture; the culture being resolutely heterosexist and patriarchal, there is no “natural” woman to celebrate that derives its legitimacy from a women’s (biological, emotional) superiority. Rather, “man” and “woman,” the sex binary, serves heterosexuality as a political system, designed to subordinate “woman,” to compel her to enter into motherhood (“birth as a forced production,” as she puts it), and to make her the “slave” to her father, her husband, her male children.
21Wittig launches a refusal of any feminist politics that would emerge from the celebration of the female, or stem from an assertion of something essentially feminine. Wittig takes to task a feminist essentialism grounded in any biological or natural claim, thus rejecting utopian visions of matriarchy or biologically based female solidarity. Rather, she articulates the difficulty of organizing a feminist politics outside of the realm of the defense of, or celebration of “women.” She argues that:
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark imposed by the oppressor: the ‘myth of woman,’ plus its material effects and manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus, this mark does not predate oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an ‘immediate given,’ a ‘sensible given,’ ‘physical features,’ belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation,’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (Wittig)
22Instead, lesbian is an iteration of refusal, of escape, and thus of freedom. Wittig reminds us that:
Lesbians should always remember and acknowledge how ‘unnatural,’ compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive being ‘woman’ was for us in the old days before the women’s liberation movement. It was a political constraint, and those who resisted it were accused of not being ‘real’ women. But then we were proud of it, since in the accusation there was already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by the oppressor that ‘woman’ is not something that goes without saying, since to be one, one has to be a ‘real one.
23Finally, Wittig puts this in the realm of consciousness and political action: “The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role ‘woman.’ It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man” (11–13).
- 8 These are ideas that we find throughout Wittig’s essays, but Butler is specifically referring to “T (...)
24This idea of refusing to become, or to remain, heterosexual is a key point in Wittig’s theorization of heterosexuality as a political system. Readers of Butler will recognize how much Gender Trouble works from this idea. Butler’s pathbreaking and detailed articulation of how binary sex does not precede heterosexuality but follows from it, clearly builds on Wittig’s critical foundation. Butler’s critique of “a return to biology as the ground of a specific feminine sexuality,” their insistence that “woman” is a process of becoming, not a biological fact, and their unpacking of the “heterosexual matrix” all draw from, play with, and expand upon Wittig’s assertions in these essays. Butler draws explicitly on Wittig’s understanding that “the binary restriction on sex serves the reproductive aims of a system of compulsory heterosexuality.” They assert that “Wittig provides an alternative critique by showing that persons cannot be signified within language without the mark of gender. She provides a political analysis of the grammar of gender in French. According to Wittig, gender not only designates persons, ‘qualifies’ them, as it were, but constitutes a conceptual episteme by which binary gender is universalized.”8 This is a fundamental piece of Butler’s foundational notion of gender performativity, central to Butler’s assertion that gender’s performativity is not intentionally chosen but compulsory, and to their assertion that “there is no recourse to a ‘person,’ a ‘sex,’ or a ‘sexuality’ that escapes the matrix of power and discursive relations that effectively produce and regulate the intelligibility of those concepts for us” (Butler, Gender Trouble 26, 28, 32).
- 9 Teresa de Lauretis, in an essay that argues that Butler’s reading of Wittig is fundamentally a misr (...)
25It seems likely that without Butler’s extensive readings of and careful engagement with Wittig in Gender Trouble, Wittig’s influence would not have extended much beyond the radical feminist press of the 1980s in the U.S.9 Certainly Feminist Issues’s readership was no match for the reception that Gender Trouble received. Her collection of essays, La pensée straight, was not published until 2001. Queer theorist and trans writer Paul B. Preciado recounts that
C’est un peu fou mais, en 1999, je suis venu en France en grande partie pour Wittig, qui me passionnait, et dont j’avais découvert les idées aux Etats-Unis… Quand je suis arrivé à Paris, j’ai été très surprise de discuter avec des féministes qui parlaient tout le temps de Foucault mais ne connaissaient pas La Pensée straight. (It’s a little crazy but in 1999 I came to France in large part because of Wittig, who I was passionate about and whose ideas I’d discovered in the United States. When I arrived in Paris, I was very surprised to talk with feminists who spoke all the time about Foucault but didn’t know The Straight Mind.) (qtd. in Kirschen)
26This has meant, I would posit, that Wittig has re-entered French consciousness as an outsider, or perhaps rather as a barometer. Those who cherish her ideas “re-discover” her as a groundbreaking French feminist, while her critics dismiss her as a symptom of the Americanization of French universalism. For their part, Butler’s importance in France can be registered most recently by the invitation to be honored as the intellectual guest of the Centre Pompidou for the 2023–2024 year. Le Monde described Butler’s reception at a recent talk in Paris: “The audience present on the premises of the organization Relais Solidaires gave the academic a welcome worthy of a ‘rock star.’” The article notes that “Butler’s prestige extends beyond the academic world to left-wing and feminist activist circles. Their 1990 book Gender Trouble is now widely referenced and remains a seminal moment in feminist and queer theory” (Bherer). And yet, it is significant that Gender Trouble was translated into French only in 2005, a curious time lag in that its eventual appearance followed the French translations of less well-known books. By the time Gender Trouble appeared in France as Trouble dans le genre, the timing of its interventions was such that Butler’s engagement with Wittig, Irigaray, and Foucault was less regarded as a timely engagement with three of France’s most important philosophers, and more as a specifically American feminist intervention in the field of French philosophy.
27The temporal distance in some ways demonstrated how much the field of study had already been changed by Butler’s and Wittig’s work. Their mutual engagements in text and in person around the time of The Straight Mind and Gender Trouble were timely, urgent even, and if they confirmed some fundamental disagreements, there was no doubt as to how profoundly Wittig influenced Butler’s seminal work. Butler recalled that
In 1995 Wittig was awarded the Kessler Prize from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York, a prize given in honor of her outstanding contribution to gay and lesbian studies. I was asked to give one of the introductory remarks. I wrote something brief, even though I could not attend the event, and afterward she called to thank me. We did speak a few times during that year. It was clear that she had serious disagreements with me, but I was heartened by the contact and felt that she was glad for the recognition. (“Wittig’s Material Practice” 529)
- 10 See also Lisa Disch, “French Theory Goes to France: Trouble dans le genre and “materialist” feminis (...)
28This anecdote not only recognizes how early Wittig was honored as a seminal figure in gay, lesbian, and queer studies, but it marks Butler and Wittig as peers whose engagement could be sustained over a series of lively disagreements. In contradistinction, Wittig was honored in France as an experimental writer but largely ignored as a feminist theorist tout court, and if anything, the association with Butler seems to have contributed to her misreading. Wittig’s theoretical work was regarded in France, paradoxically, as an American invention: “French intellectuals regard the book as typically American. Gender Trouble stands as an exemplary work of what they have taken to calling ‘French Theory’, a moniker they leave in English, capitalize and put in quotes to signal that it is ‘a creation ex nihilo of the American university’” (Cusset 36).10
- 11 For an example of the activation of panic over “American ideologies” being introduced in France, se (...)
29Butler’s most famous concept, that of gender performativity, is now well known in France, as are the fields of gender studies and queer theory. Butler’s name is often invoked to reference the field, and it has been a useful tactic of French detractors of gender studies to invoke Butler’s work as a symbol of an ideological framework that the U.S. is imposing on the rest of the world. Indeed, gender studies is among the categories of analysis that have come under fire for disrupting the French ideal of universalism; as Norimitsu Onishi put it in The New York Times, “Politicians and prominent intellectuals say social theories from the United States on race, gender, and post-colonialism are a threat to French identity and the French republic” (“Will American Ideas”).11 The French ideal of universalism is a major point of contestation, as calling for a political analysis of the specific experience of racialized, gendered, or othered individuals is often met with the accusation of undermining the Republic’s commitment to equality without regard to difference. So when the Academie Francaise is asked to consider gender-inclusive pronouns such as “iel” or a revision to the writing of masculine and feminine versions of French words (which would have, under French grammatical rules, used the masculine form as the universal, but now would include both masculine and feminine forms combined), the Academy signaled that “the promoters of inclusive writing violate the rhythms of language development according to a brutal, arbitrary and uncoordinated injunction” (Dalton). The irony, of course, is that Wittig’s project was a foundational part of the very changes that now boomerang back to France as “American”—the contestation of universalisms, the deep desire to rewrite language to reorder a new society beyond the gender binary, the un-gendering of language are debts we owe to Wittig.
30That said, of late there is a new interest in Monique Wittig in France. Wittig’s assertion that heterosexuality is a political system designed to oppress women has become an important theoretical perspective for people looking to understand the pervasiveness and persistence of sexual violence, sex oppression, and misogyny in a country formally committed to universality. Rachel Donadio wrote in The Atlantic that
the fact that the #BalanceTonPorc hashtag has taken off here—the country where the wild life of Dominique Strauss Kahn, the once presidential-contender and managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was something of an open secret before his political career was destroyed by allegations he had sexually assaulted a hotel maid in New York—marks a shift. It’s the flip side of an old dynamic: The French may still consider Americans too moralistic when it comes to sex, but when it comes to sexual harassment, it took an American scandal—and good, old-fashioned investigative reporting—to open a debate France has needed to have for some time. (“#BalanceTonPorc”)
31#MeToo has exposed a fierce divide in France between an older feminist generation that has worked to prove that women are just like men and a new generation interested in pushing for more radical changes in the balance of power. Members of the French press regularly characterize #MeToo as “an example of runaway American ideology,” and Pascal Bruckner, a well-known public intellectual, characterized the legal charges against celebrity sexual predators as “neo-feminist McCarthyism” (Smith). Echoing the fears voiced by mainstream feminists of the 1970s and 1980s, some feminists worry that, “in a deeply patriarchal society, the pointed attacks against [Christophe] Girard will fuel a backlash among men. They also see the denunciation of powerful men as an American-inspired strategy deeply alien to their vision of feminism, one that has sought, in France’s universalist tradition, equality for women by insisting that they were no different from men” (Onishi, “How Should Feminism Target Sexual Abuse?”). And so it is perhaps #MeToo, or #BalanceTonPorc, and the backlash those movements have drawn, that have set the stage for Wittig’s reclamation as a powerful feminist thinker.
32When actress Adèle Haenel spoke out about her abuse as a child by a movie director, she electrified a French public long accustomed to excusing or shrugging away the sexual predation of powerful men (Turchi; Onishi, “A Pedophile Writer”; Méheut). She also exposed deep conflicts between a new generation of feminists not afraid to disrupt a patriarchal system and an older feminist generation that minimized the political importance of sexual behavior in favor of a “universalist feminism” that sought “equality for women by insisting that they were no different from men” (Onishi, “How Should Feminism Target Sexual Abuse?”). Indeed, #MeToo met with resistance in France not just on the part of an older white male political establishment, but a celebrity culture of France’s most famous women; Catherine Deneuve famously signed onto an open letter decrying a “new feminism” that espoused a “hatred of men,” and argued that France’s cultural politics required a sexual liberty that defended “une liberté d’importuner” (a freedom to annoy/pester), thereby minimizing the claims that harassment constituted harm (“Nous defendons”; see also Breeden and Peltier; Donadio, “Where #MeToo Becomes”). Haenel, one of the most well-known of France’s feminists who are pushing for greater attention to the pervasiveness of sexual violence, has expressed her dismay that France has “missed the boat” with #MeToo (Peltier).
33In such an atmosphere, it is little wonder that Wittig’s revolutionary words resonate so powerfully. In September 2020, Adèle Haenel was invited to read a selection of her choosing on the RadioFrance program “Boomerang.” Haenel chose an excerpt from Le corps lesbien. The introduction to the reading states that the 1973 experimental novel “évoque la sexualité, dont l’homosexualité et sa dimension politique comme remise en cause de l’hétérosexualité” (evokes sexuality, including homosexuality and its political dimension as a challenge to heterosexuality). Haenel has made it something of a calling to bring Wittig to the consciousness of the French public, or at least the French queer and feminist public. She offered in a profile in the New York Times that “Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation” (Vincentelli). A feature article on Wittig in the popular culture news site Les Inrockuptibles began with Haenel’s desire to “make Wittig heard,” writing that Haenel is no longer alone in this wish:
Faire entendre Wittig ? Adèle Haenel n’est pas la seule, ces dernières années, à avoir envie que retentissent ses mots. Il y a comme un sentiment d’injustice : pendant longtemps, Monique Wittig a été bien peu célébrée par le pays qui l’a vue naître en 1935 – contrairement aux États-Unis, où elle incarne un incontournable des études féministes et littéraires. Nul·le n’est prophète en son pays ? (Make Wittig heard? Adèle Haenel is not the only one, these past few years, to want to echo these words. There is a sense of injustice: for a long time, Monique Wittig was little celebrated in the country where she was born in 1935—unlike in the United States, where she is a cornerstone of feminist and literary studies. No one can be a prophet in their own country, perhaps?). (Kirschen)
- 12 For instance, Wendy Delorme, Viendra le temps du feu, Paris: Cambourakis, 2021 and Juliet Drouar, S (...)
34Since the eruption of #BalanceTonPorc pushed these conversations into the foreground, Wittig is ubiquitous. Her publisher, Les Éditions de Minuit, announced a steep rise in sales since 2018, and has begun to reissue her literary works. Books by more recent authors cite her or reference her influence.12 In 2020, Wittig was honored by the opening of a public garden in her name in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement. Jardin Monique Wittig is marked by a plaque that names her “écrivaine,” then “militante lesbienne féministe.” The wall of the garden features quotes from Les Guérillères (1969). Also that year, queer graphic artist Roxanne Maillet called on “flaming trans and cis dykes, angry dykes and camp feminists” to participate in a collective graphic screen-printing workshop, to create t-shirts from logos of major brands hijacked by the artist. My favorite, appearing on Instagram later, was the Nike swoosh remade with the name MONIKE wittig (Maillet; Garzanti and Maillet). Journalist Camille Regache laments Wittig’s disappearance in her podcast Camille, noting that Wittig “ait disparu de notre histoire féministe française alors qu’elle a quelque part été la première gouine de France” ([Wittig] disappeared from French feminist history when she was, in a way, the first dyke in France)” (“Sexy Wittig”; see also Regache, “Contraint•e•s à l’hétérosexualité”). Journalist Clémence Allezard produced a documentary about Wittig, released on France Culture in 2018 (Monique Wittig (1935–2003), écrivaine et lesbienne révolutionnaire). In 2022, Émilie Notéris published her biography of Wittig, focusing on Wittig’s life and afterlife, which is to say, the way her work circulates now, twenty years after her death. Notéris asserts that “Nous n’avons pas fini avec Wittig. Cela ne fait que (re)commencer“ (We aren’t done with Wittig. We’ve barely begun).
35This new interest is increasingly generative. Creatively, a new generation of feminists is using Wittig to launch their own critique of capitalism and heteropatriarchy. I saw one such production in 2022 when I attended a “lecture musicale” at the Maison de la Poésie in Paris, where Nadège Beausson-Diagne, Adèle Haenel, Caroline Géryl, and Suzette Robichon performed a dramatic reading of Le Voyage Sans Fin, a feminist restaging of Cervantes’s Don Quixote created by Wittig and her companion Sande Zeig. The musical interludes, the participatory gesture for the audience to chant and shout, the mise-en-scène drew a direct line from Wittig’s work to the trauma, anger, and hope infusing our collective reckoning with sexual violence as a constant reality. Wittig understood the play to require the active participation of the audience. In replacing Don Quixote and Panza with two women, in replacing several male characters with nurse, sisters, and other women, but otherwise faithfully recreating Cervantes’s play, she understood that the audience would use their recognition of a familiar fable to create something new with her (Wittig and Godard 156.). And this year, feminist and queer arts festival in Lyon, France will host Voir Clair avec Monique Wittig, putting the words from La pensée straight to music and performance by Dame Chevalier, a partnership between actor Adele Haenel and musician Caro Geryl. The publicity materials announce that “20 ans après sa disparition, Monique Wittig éclaire avec tout autant de pertinence nos luttes actuelles: ses mots redonnent un sens à l’universel, libèrent le langage, inventent les futurs vivables pour toustes” (Twenty years after her disappearance, Monique Wittig illuminates with as much relevance our current struggles: her words offer a sense of the universal, liberate language, and invent livable futures for all). In the hands and from the mouths of a new generation of feminists, galvanized by #BalanceTonPorc and the increasing success of the far-right Rassemblement National or National Rally, Wittig is once again necessary, lending her voice to art that imagines new forms of collective refusal and freedom.