The foundations of queer theory are, in part, built on the work of Monique Wittig even as Wittig’s work has largely been erased from the discussion. As Robyn Wiegman notes: “Judith Butler's paradigm-shifting Gender Trouble needed Wittig to make the turn that has become absolutely definitional to queer theoretical work.” But Wittig found queer theory wanting as it seemed to dismiss a more materialist perspective. Mapping the contradictions in Butler’s assessment of Wittig’s work and the straight mind at work in this contradiction, Balén argues for a return to the radical materialist vision Wittig’s work offers so that we might more fully explore, as Rosemary Hennessy suggests, what subject-effects Wittig’s work produces and what models for resistance and change this work offers.
The Straight Mind at Work at the Heart of Queer Theory:
Excavating Wittig's Radical Lesbian Materialism from Misappropriation
Julia Balén
I have not found a moral to my fable but only, like a watermark, the trace of a principle which summarizes all and that is: neither gods nor goddesses, neither masters nor mistresses.
Monique Wittig (trans. Balén, Paris-la-politique)
Monique Wittig (trans. Balén, Paris-la-politique)
More than 50 years ago Monique Wittig dared to envision a world beyond gender—not just as science fiction, but as a political movement articulated through literature and theory. Guided by a materialist analysis and a profound sense of humor that is as compassionate as it is incisive, Wittig worked language the way a welder works metal--a brilliant mind burning white-hot bending language with a worker’s materialist sensibility to make space for those it would erase.[i]
The brilliance of Wittig’s work includes a deep attention to the ways that some of the smallest details of language constrain human potential—especially pronouns and articles. Making creative use of every cultural material available from myths to science, Wittig’s work is both gender and genre-busting; the gift to readers is a creative envisioning that opens out and calls for more. Unfortunately few have dared to take up this call. The work of mining Wittig’s vision for all it has to offer readers has barely scratched the surface of this oeuvre. While the authors of what is now the field of queer theory still occasionally nod to Wittig’s work as foundational, deep analysis of Wittig’s work has too often been sidelined by the more esoteric and less materialist stances of queer theory that Wittig’s imaginings, in part, enabled.
In Rosemary Hennessy’s 1993 essay in Signs reviewing the special issue of differences alongside Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Hennessy worries over the shift articulated in the differences collection—a shift that moves away from “any solid ties between the cultural construction of difference and its consequences for the ways in which work and leisure time are allocated or state powers are exercised” to one in which “powers in any social register other than the symbolic—evaporate” (968). Hennessy goes on to argue:
"Lesbian and gay sexualities, even as they claim a marginal status as “queer,” cannot be divorced from the colonization of the unconscious, the commodification of bodies, and the recruitment of pleasure into an informatics of domination, as well as the reliance of these psychic and corporeal markets upon a global sexual division of labor and an exploited multinational workforce. At what cost to the emancipatory aims of a queer politics is this other narrative of sexuality suppressed?" (969)
Against this shift that would suppress discussion of “any social register other than the symbolic,” Hennessy poses an “alter-narrative of sexuality,” one in which “the claim that social differences always belong to an economic and political as well as a cultural/ideological order” (972) grounds the work in a manner more in keeping with that developed in Wittig’s collection of essays. As Hennessy notes, many of the most prominent queer theorists at that time had read Wittig’s works, even claimed Wittig for their own, but each had managed to erase this important aspect of maintaining connection to the material, a fact that left Wittig decrying “queer theory” in spite of the field’s claim of Wittig.
Sadly, Hennessy’s assumption about the effect of the publication of The Straight Mind and Other Essays--that it would “no doubt prompt new readings of Wittig’s work”--and Hennessy’s expectation that many of these new readings would “demonstrate history’s uneven development” and better “hone [queer theory’s] radical edge by confronting the suppressed alter-narratives in our theoretical history,” has largely not been the case. Indeed, what Hennessy[ii] came to distinguish as cultural materialism in her later work, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism, overshadowed historical materialism in queer studies supported by the work of Butler and many whose work drew on hers. In fact, many queer studies scholars, building on Judith Butler’s lead, have generally leaned in the other direction—developing the cultural within theoretical frameworks that privilege the perspectives of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan and in the process suppress or overlook more historical materialist critiques like Wittig’s. Only recently have more scholars (Heather Tapley and Kevin Floyd are examples) taken up the task of developing a queer materialism that reconnects with an historical materialist foundation. A number of scholars[iii] over the years have called out different aspects of Butler’s misreading of Wittig and called for a reconsideration of what Wittig’s works have to offer.
To Butler’s credit, Gender Trouble beautifully articulates some of the more radical elements of Wittig’s work through a reading of primarily Les Guérillères and The Lesbian Body to begin to get at the complexity of the primary impulse of Wittig’s work—annulling gender. Butler summarizes:
"Wittig’s text not only deconstructs sex and offers a way to disintegrate the false unity designated by sex, but enacts as well a kind of diffuse corporeal agency generated from a number of different centers of power. Indeed, the source of personal and political agency comes not from within the individual, but in and through the complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations." (127)
The possibilities produced through Wittig’s fiction, according to Butler, go beyond “androgyne” or “some ‘third gender’” to produce another possibility altogether: “to become a being whom neither man nor woman truly describes” via “an internal subversion in which the binary is both presupposed and proliferated to the point where it no longer makes sense.” Butler concludes that “[t]he force of Wittig’s fiction, its linguistic challenge, is to offer an experience beyond the categories of identity, an erotic struggle to create new categories from the ruins of the old, new ways of being a body within the cultural field, and whole new languages of description” (127). While the emphasis on the cultural as opposed to the historical materialism is very evident in Butler’s articulation of Wittig’s project, such uncharacteristic rhapsodizing on Butler’s part suggests the degree to which Butler’s own work was inspired by Wittig’s.
Indeed, Butler’s foundational claims in Gender Trouble rely heavily on Wittig’s work. As philosopher Joanne Winning notes in “Radical inventions: Monique Wittig, 1935-2003,” Winning’s 2003 review of Wittig’s accomplishments in Radical Philosophy: “Ultimately it is Wittig’s delineation of the constructedness of the category of ‘sex’ that provides the theoretical leverage necessary to prise open normative cultural constructions of the sexed body that allows Butler to develop her own influential notions of the performativity of gender identity” (56). Winning goes on to claim that Butler “uses an exploration of the body of Wittig’s work to develop her own theoretical mapping of the relationship between societal ‘realities,’ cultural fields and the ‘fictions’ of gender identity.” But, as Winning clarifies, Butler is “ultimately critical of Wittig’s evocation of the lesbian as a coherent, unitary identity” (56). The radical disjuncture between Butler’s rhapsodic description of “the force of Wittig’s fiction” that renders the gender binary nonsense and Butler’s erroneous claim that Wittig envisions “lesbian as a coherent, unitary identity” deserves closer analysis.
Butler’s assessment of Wittig’s theorizing concludes by posing a series of questions that functionally domesticate Wittig’s thinking:
"What qualifies as a lesbian? … If a lesbian refutes the radical disjunction between heterosexual and homosexual economies that Wittig promotes, is that lesbian no longer a lesbian? And if it is an “act” that founds the identity as a performative accomplishment of sexuality, are there certain kinds of acts that qualify over others as foundational? Can one do the act with a “straight mind”? Can one understand lesbian sexuality not only as a contestation of the category of “sex,” of “women,” of “natural bodies,” but also of lesbian?" (127-8)
Butler’s move from describing Wittig’s work as offering “an experience beyond the categories of identity” to this recuperative insistence on “a lesbian” creates a shift in our understanding of Wittig’s project from one that defies gendering to one that produces a coherent, unitary lesbian identity, effectively marginalizing Wittig’s work by categorizing it with a theoretically discredited identity politics. As Robyn Wiegman notes: “Judith Butler's paradigm-shifting Gender Trouble needed Wittig to make the turn that has become absolutely definitional to queer theoretical work, but in the critical habits that shape that enduring history, Wittig has become something of an unknown” (513). More problematically, Butler’s misreading of Wittig’s provisional subject position as a unitary identity based upon particular bodies performing particular sexual acts effectively enacts the same hypersexualizing gesture on lesbian-as-subject-position as the “straight mind” performs on “homosexuals” in general. Butler’s questions reduce Wittig’s practice of taking up lesbian as a provisional-potentially-liberatory-subject-position-because-it-is-not-woman-or-man to little more than sexual acts. In this shift, Butler conflates heterosexuality--the regime--with heterosexual desire; and lesbianism--the provisional subject position--with hetero and homonormative notions of lesbian identity and desire, a strangely “straight” maneuver.
Based on these conflations, Butler performs a deconstructive reading to suggest that Wittig “constructs a gay/lesbian identity” through “exclusionary means” that “paradoxically institutes precisely the relation of radical dependency it seeks to overcome: Lesbianism would then require heterosexuality” (128). While deconstructive readings such as this display quite clearly why changing the status quo can be so difficult, it actually supports Wittig’s argument for provisional transformative subject positions in the face of persistently recuperative binaries. But the only way Butler is able to perform this deconstructive reading is by domesticating Wittig’s lesbian-as-subject-position to a more legible “gay/lesbian identity” first. This maneuver works to circumscribe Wittig’s work within the very systems of thought that Wittig resists--a resistance which Butler evidently finds inspiring in Wittig’s fiction, yet effectively dismisses in Wittig's theoretical formulation. By rendering everything text, Butler's reading ignores the challenges inherent in all work for social justice: maintaining a vision of what one can only imagine--and must continually re-imagine--in the face of constant recuperations and co-optations while, at the same time maintaining an active critique of the current material realities within which one must inevitably live.
Butler follows this indictment with a suggestion for performative action that sounds strangely similar to Butler’s own description of what Wittig’s fiction produces. Butler argues for: “a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves, not merely to contest ‘sex,’ but to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of ‘identity’ in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic” (128). Is not the creation of “complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations” (127)—what Butler claims Wittig’s fiction does—precisely what Butler is calling for? In what may be a well-intentioned attempt to translate Wittig’s vision into the de rigueur philosophical discourse of the time, Butler dismisses Wittig’s materialist foundations—that which makes Wittig’s work most radical and offers greater potential for creative political action—by eliding the “context of a dynamic field of cultural relations” to effectively privilege, even while “troubling,” the site of identity.
In attempts to get beyond identity politics, many theorists have moved to ahistorical critiques of culture and identity production that fail to integrate a materialist perspective, much less the lesbian materialism articulated by Wittig. But as Rosemary Hennessy notes in Profit and Pleasure, Butler’s work lacks historical materialism. Hennessy argues that prioritizing indeterminacy as a basic ingredient of radical democracy (via Laclau and Mouffe) Butler, and others who follow this line of thinking, make possible a proliferation of new subjects without a materialist critique that “potentially endorses any--even exploitative—social relations” (62). In contrast, Wittig’s critical stance deftly searches out a temporary space that refuses what Wittig considered arrogant--ahistorical, non or anti-materialist theories like Foucault’s and Lacan’s--while producing a radical lesbian version of liberatory materialist practices in language.
This misappropriation of Wittig’s work not only contradicts Butler’s own rhapsodic description of Wittig’s construction, disintegration, and recirculation of identity that create “whole new languages of description” (128), but ignores important passages and elides key components of Wittig’s wording throughout the theoretical essays in which Wittig both specifies and historicizes in ways that Butler’s theory fails to do. A close reading of a passage from Wittig’s “One is not born a woman” (1981) illustrates Butler’s oversimplification of Wittig’s theoretical stance. Wittig writes:
"To destroy 'woman' does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man . . . a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation, a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual." (20, my italics)
Wittig is very clear that lesbian is a “concept”—not a coherent, unitary identity—and that concepts and language have a material dimension in their effects. Moreover, it is provisional—a concept “for the moment.” It was the only one Wittig knew that had the potential in the 1970s historical context of writing this piece. Wittig assumed that other opportunities would open up. [Indeed, in our discussions on this topic in the years before Wittig’s death in 2003, we shared appreciation for the increasing plurality of gender expression, especially in our students.] In all of Wittig’s work—fictional and theoretical--lesbian is a conceptual subject position to be taken up provisionally until that time when it is no longer useful in countering oppression “economically, politically, or ideologically.” Wittig rarely, if ever, refers to “the” or “a” lesbian because lesbian is an open subject position that does not contain identity but rather opens up possibilities (a position queer theorists later claimed for queer), as Butler rightly claims, for “new ways of being a body.” The misappropriation happens in Butler’s collapsing of Wittig’s emphasis on the production of subject positions within economic, political, ideological fields into a more psychoanalytically friendly individualized cultural field.
To answer Butler’s “straight” questions: yes, people who claim lesbian identity “can do the act with a ‘straight mind.’” Indeed, Wittig’s conceptualization of the straight mind as the product of particular socio-historical material conditions means that one can perform any act with a straight mind. Conversely, Wittig’s lesbian-as-provisional-subject-position-that-resists-the-categories-of-sex, leaves open sex acts between ANY two people who refuse the subject positions of “man” or “woman” in relations of any sort. As Wittig made clear in many conversations, men can be lesbians insofar as they work to subvert the privilege of their own gender marking (or more accurately, their freedom from gender marking), refusing to take up any social position that requires that someone else be a woman or a man--economically, politically, or ideologically. Lesbianism, as Wittig deploys it, engages all the qualities that queer theorists later claimed for queer, but with an emphasis on the economic, political, and ideological (rather than privileging the psycho-cultural) dimensions of such a subject position. Does this use of lesbian change its meaning? No more so than the taking up of the epithet queer changes its meaning once again. One could argue that lesbian-as-subject-position was already occupied by some who did not share Wittig’s use of it, in a way that queer perhaps was not so much at the time it was taken up as a theoretical term. But even the terms “woman” and “man” are forever contestable, as evidenced in questions such as those about whether one is a “real” woman/man. It is most important to remember that language is the material of Wittig’s literary workshop.
Just as Butler struggles against misreadings of Gender Trouble, especially of the concept of performativity, Wittig worked to address misconceptions about lesbian as subject position. Butler has attempted in later, more mature works to clarify earlier claims, interestingly over the areas where Butler’s work most overlaps Wittig’s—troubling concepts of identity and subjectivity. Both work to renegotiate the power of language/meaning systems to allow for ways of being that are foreclosed by those meaning systems, but while Wittig’s fiction, as Butler notes, creatively proliferates possibilities for “becom[ing] a being whom neither man nor woman truly describes” (128) with a clear political agenda, Butler--in the role of academic philosopher--effectively privileges the position of skeptic to the detriment of articulating possibilities for political action. While this position may at times be appropriate and useful and certainly gains one prestige within the institution, it seems important to be clear about the possibilities and limitations of every subject position we engage—including scholar. How are we taking it up, to what end, and what effect? For scholars working for social justice, how do we most effectively make use of the power inherent in our own positions in order to create greater social justice? To what degree is our work constrained by such positions? There are prices scholars pay for being “too political.” One might argue that the disciplining of disciplines produces these effects, so that this is just one example of many that call for greater analysis and socio-political materialist critique. In what ways are scholars encouraged to dismiss those who come before us--those who may well have been inspiring to us, but in order to take up the stance as the skeptic, we might feel pressed to push aside? What kind of “othering” does such a scholarly subject position produce? What kind of more social-justice-producing position might a different ethic and practice produce?
Interestingly, at the points in Butler’s work where discussions of the political arise—mostly in interviews—Butler returns to Wittig. For example, from Butler’s interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal in London in 1993: “In that sense I'm still in sympathy with the critique of ‘sex’ as a political category offered by Monique Wittig. I still very much believe in the critique of the category of sex and the ways in which it's been constrained by a tacit institution of compulsory reproduction.” Indeed, even as Butler goes on to articulate the problems with political action generally, when describing what seems most important to effective action, Butler is describing (without reference) exactly what Wittig’s work with language does:
"What I worry about are those acts that are more immediately legible. Those are the ones that I think are most readily recuperable. But the ones that challenge our practices of reading, that make us uncertain about how to read, or make us think that we have to renegotiate the way in which we read public signs, these seem really important to me." (http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm)
Wittig’s work consistently challenges the reader’s practice of reading, insisting that the reader renegotiate the signs. And when pondering the problems of political action Butler notes:
"Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the moments of degrounding, when we're standing in two different places at once; or we don't know exactly where we're standing; or when we've produced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That's where resistance to recuperation happens. It's like a breaking through to a new set of paradigms." (http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm)
Wittig’s work does this brilliantly—producing for readers a provisional “place” beyond the constraints of sex/gender meaning systems while at the same time grounding the work in the material realities of those marked by oppressive meaning systems. By pulling back the curtain on the operations of subjectivity in different ways in each text, Wittig enacts the both/and thinking necessary to resist recuperation. It is more than Wittig’s aesthetic practice that “shakes the ground.” Resistance to injustice at every level requires a counter-disciplining that calls for at least double-duty—knowing hegemonic discourse better than it knows itself, and choosing paths of resistance that are always already provisional because there is no outside. Butler’s emphasis on the site of the cultural without clear connection to the economic, ideological, and political explains why Butler rhapsodizes about Wittig’s fiction but stumbles on the theory.
If Butler had done a close reading in Gender Trouble that stayed truer to what Wittig actually wrote, Butler may well still have contested Wittig’s specific form of voluntarism, but that would require a more careful and complex reading of Wittig’s works than Butler performs. Gender Trouble articulates feminism via the hottest theories of the time, particularly Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. While these theories offer some interesting insights (not the least of which is articulating why it can be so very difficult to create social change on the large scale), together the work of these theorists via Butler produce a focus on the individual with little sense of the material socio-historical circumstances that produce the possibilities for being a body in any given time or place. Butler’s eschewal of Wittig’s lesbian materialist analysis contains the reader and the subject within in the world of the ideal while Wittig’s work spans the visionary to the activist material realities. (Indeed, the question of agency is the point on which Butler’s own work remains most muddy.[iv]) Butler’s other option would have been to be much more critical of the directions taken by the majority of the hot theorists of the day whose work Wittig openly contested, but such a direction may not have been so well-received in the philosophical field at that time. Indeed, work for social justice on the larger scale had certainly turned increasingly conservative during the time of Butler’s writing Gender Trouble. And at the same moment that queer theory was taking root in academe, the public conversation about sexuality in the U.S. grew increasingly assimilationist—focusing on the rights to marry and serve in the military instead of sexual/religious freedom.[v] While queer theorists generally eschew such assimilationist moves, to what degree did/does an emphasis on Foucauldian, Derridian, and Lacanian theoretical frameworks allow the political left in general to retreat into more esoteric realms in the face of post-sixties backlash?
Wittig was nothing if not resistant. Working closely with Wittig—students, colleagues, friends—knew that any task we took on together would be labor-intensive because we would be questioning everything, especially language. Wittig let nothing go without saying in order to call out the many ways oppression marks us and to resist that oppression through creative interventions at every turn. Wittig always functioned on the periphery, refused the assumptions, the status quo, sacrificing the comfort of fitting the norms even in small ways—especially in institutional settings—for the greater goal of changing them. And while there is an element of reinvestment in the very thing one resists, in the process of materially resisting we learn the contours, find the limits of both the resistance and that which went without saying by calling it out. Doing so with humor, as Wittig does so powerfully, destabilizes the categories--even the ones of our own making. Wittig practiced faith in the plasticity of words as a material rather than in a discipline, refusing to be disciplined except in radical lesbian materialist terms. The dark humor of Wittig’s later works--Virgile, non and Paris-la-politique--leaves no one, including Wittig, unchallenged. This radical questioning which became more pointed with time characterizes all of Wittig’s work, encouraging readers to join in rooting out anything that goes without saying—to leave nothing so privileged that it can go without saying, to materialize and thereby counter such privileging through language. This is no small challenge and not always a comfortable way to live, but it is Wittig’s ethical practice.
In this vein, Paris-la-politique et autres histoires explores the dark side of work for social justice. Its vignette/parables are based on the trials and tribulations of lesbian feminist organizing, particularly in late 1960s/early 70s Paris. As Wittig described it, the title work consists of the pieces that fell away in the writing of Virgile, non. Each vignette in the collection develops different challenges of organizing against the grain of social norms, detailing the ways in which the work of those fighting for social justice is often thwarted, diminished, contained, and/or recuperated by the perversions of internalized oppression. The collection offers a creative materialist vision of what Wittig articulated as “the straight mind” in relationship to sex/gender oppression, but in the many ways that the straight mind becomes internalized by the very people who are most oppressed by it. This materialist analysis applies more generally to the many ways those fighting oppression seem to frustratingly recreate injustice in the name of work for greater justice, the ways in which the best efforts of activists are too easily coopted. Expanding from the gender/sexuality focus to creative articulations of the operations of oppressive practices as the incessant reproduction of differences, chapters like “Les Tchiches et les Tchouches” exemplify the potential of Wittig’s strategies for articulating that-which-goes-without-saying for grappling with every form of oppression—strategies that have begun to be mapped by critics such as Dominique Bourque and Linda Zerelli, but that have yet to be fully explored or deployed.
While Virgile, non can be read, in part, as a darkly playful spoof on the heavy-handed tactics of a well-intentioned but righteously radical activist determined to fight for justice, Paris-la-politique can be read in part as an even darker critique of the other side of that coin—the many variations of internalized oppressions that would contain or dismiss the radical elements of any work for social justice—internalizations like the one at work in Butler’s misappropriation of Wittig’s work. Perhaps more than any of Wittig’s other works, these two texts complement the essays by offering a creative materialist analysis of the oppressing straight mind and the many ways its internalizations muddle our best efforts to transform it—a muddling that confounds feminist and queer organizing, indeed any organizing for social justice that must challenge the status quo.
Wittig’s work offers us some of the material to dream that-which-is-not-yet while living with the current material conditions. It is imbued with a sense that we can’t know who we will be until we go there—and Wittig’s fiction consists of imaginings in that direction. Following up on Hennessy’s questions and concerns, we need to ask what keys to resisting deadening identities does Wittig’s work offer? What radical subject-effects does Wittig’s work produce? What models for resistance and change does this work offer? What clues to articulating revolutionary love? Answering these kinds of questions would not only move us toward developing a more radical theoretical framework for a queer studies that Wittig might have supported, but would offer creative frameworks for challenging oppression of all kinds. Perhaps almost ten years after Wittig’s passing, almost fifty years after the publication of L’opoponax, with the academic field of queer theory beginning to make moves back toward materialist thinking, we might be ready to return to the Wittigian well.
Special thanks to Dominique Bourque for her always helpful and incisive insights in editing this essay.
Notes
[i] See Wittig’s Le Chantier litteraire for more on language as material.
[ii] For more on Wittig’s genre/gender-busting moves see Dominique Bourque’s “Un Cheval de Troie nommé dé-marquage.”
[iii] In addition to Hennessy, Wiegman, and Winning noted in this text, Stevi Jackson and Clare Hemming have also noted problems with Butler’s reading of Wittig.
[iv] Critics of Butler’s positions on agency, idealism, and performativity include: as already noted, Rosemary Hennessy; also Geoff Boucher’s, “The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler;” Chris Brickell’s "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal;" R.G. Dunn’s “Self, Identity and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists;” Adam Green’s “Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies;” and Moya Lloyd’s "Performativity, Parody, Politics.”
[v] See Janet Jakobsen and Anne Pelligrini’s Love the Sin for a particularly interesting articulation of problems with this conservative turn.
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---. Virgile, non. Paris: Minuit, 1985. Across the Acheron. Trans. Margaret Crosland and David LeVay. London: Peter Owen, 1987.
Zerilli, Linda M. G. “A New Grammar of Difference: Monique Wittig’s Poetic Revolution.” In On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays. Ed. Namascar Shaktini. Urbana and Chicago, IL; University of Illinois Press, (2005): 87-114.
The brilliance of Wittig’s work includes a deep attention to the ways that some of the smallest details of language constrain human potential—especially pronouns and articles. Making creative use of every cultural material available from myths to science, Wittig’s work is both gender and genre-busting; the gift to readers is a creative envisioning that opens out and calls for more. Unfortunately few have dared to take up this call. The work of mining Wittig’s vision for all it has to offer readers has barely scratched the surface of this oeuvre. While the authors of what is now the field of queer theory still occasionally nod to Wittig’s work as foundational, deep analysis of Wittig’s work has too often been sidelined by the more esoteric and less materialist stances of queer theory that Wittig’s imaginings, in part, enabled.
In Rosemary Hennessy’s 1993 essay in Signs reviewing the special issue of differences alongside Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Hennessy worries over the shift articulated in the differences collection—a shift that moves away from “any solid ties between the cultural construction of difference and its consequences for the ways in which work and leisure time are allocated or state powers are exercised” to one in which “powers in any social register other than the symbolic—evaporate” (968). Hennessy goes on to argue:
"Lesbian and gay sexualities, even as they claim a marginal status as “queer,” cannot be divorced from the colonization of the unconscious, the commodification of bodies, and the recruitment of pleasure into an informatics of domination, as well as the reliance of these psychic and corporeal markets upon a global sexual division of labor and an exploited multinational workforce. At what cost to the emancipatory aims of a queer politics is this other narrative of sexuality suppressed?" (969)
Against this shift that would suppress discussion of “any social register other than the symbolic,” Hennessy poses an “alter-narrative of sexuality,” one in which “the claim that social differences always belong to an economic and political as well as a cultural/ideological order” (972) grounds the work in a manner more in keeping with that developed in Wittig’s collection of essays. As Hennessy notes, many of the most prominent queer theorists at that time had read Wittig’s works, even claimed Wittig for their own, but each had managed to erase this important aspect of maintaining connection to the material, a fact that left Wittig decrying “queer theory” in spite of the field’s claim of Wittig.
Sadly, Hennessy’s assumption about the effect of the publication of The Straight Mind and Other Essays--that it would “no doubt prompt new readings of Wittig’s work”--and Hennessy’s expectation that many of these new readings would “demonstrate history’s uneven development” and better “hone [queer theory’s] radical edge by confronting the suppressed alter-narratives in our theoretical history,” has largely not been the case. Indeed, what Hennessy[ii] came to distinguish as cultural materialism in her later work, Profit and Pleasure: Sexual Identities and Late Capitalism, overshadowed historical materialism in queer studies supported by the work of Butler and many whose work drew on hers. In fact, many queer studies scholars, building on Judith Butler’s lead, have generally leaned in the other direction—developing the cultural within theoretical frameworks that privilege the perspectives of thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan and in the process suppress or overlook more historical materialist critiques like Wittig’s. Only recently have more scholars (Heather Tapley and Kevin Floyd are examples) taken up the task of developing a queer materialism that reconnects with an historical materialist foundation. A number of scholars[iii] over the years have called out different aspects of Butler’s misreading of Wittig and called for a reconsideration of what Wittig’s works have to offer.
To Butler’s credit, Gender Trouble beautifully articulates some of the more radical elements of Wittig’s work through a reading of primarily Les Guérillères and The Lesbian Body to begin to get at the complexity of the primary impulse of Wittig’s work—annulling gender. Butler summarizes:
"Wittig’s text not only deconstructs sex and offers a way to disintegrate the false unity designated by sex, but enacts as well a kind of diffuse corporeal agency generated from a number of different centers of power. Indeed, the source of personal and political agency comes not from within the individual, but in and through the complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations." (127)
The possibilities produced through Wittig’s fiction, according to Butler, go beyond “androgyne” or “some ‘third gender’” to produce another possibility altogether: “to become a being whom neither man nor woman truly describes” via “an internal subversion in which the binary is both presupposed and proliferated to the point where it no longer makes sense.” Butler concludes that “[t]he force of Wittig’s fiction, its linguistic challenge, is to offer an experience beyond the categories of identity, an erotic struggle to create new categories from the ruins of the old, new ways of being a body within the cultural field, and whole new languages of description” (127). While the emphasis on the cultural as opposed to the historical materialism is very evident in Butler’s articulation of Wittig’s project, such uncharacteristic rhapsodizing on Butler’s part suggests the degree to which Butler’s own work was inspired by Wittig’s.
Indeed, Butler’s foundational claims in Gender Trouble rely heavily on Wittig’s work. As philosopher Joanne Winning notes in “Radical inventions: Monique Wittig, 1935-2003,” Winning’s 2003 review of Wittig’s accomplishments in Radical Philosophy: “Ultimately it is Wittig’s delineation of the constructedness of the category of ‘sex’ that provides the theoretical leverage necessary to prise open normative cultural constructions of the sexed body that allows Butler to develop her own influential notions of the performativity of gender identity” (56). Winning goes on to claim that Butler “uses an exploration of the body of Wittig’s work to develop her own theoretical mapping of the relationship between societal ‘realities,’ cultural fields and the ‘fictions’ of gender identity.” But, as Winning clarifies, Butler is “ultimately critical of Wittig’s evocation of the lesbian as a coherent, unitary identity” (56). The radical disjuncture between Butler’s rhapsodic description of “the force of Wittig’s fiction” that renders the gender binary nonsense and Butler’s erroneous claim that Wittig envisions “lesbian as a coherent, unitary identity” deserves closer analysis.
Butler’s assessment of Wittig’s theorizing concludes by posing a series of questions that functionally domesticate Wittig’s thinking:
"What qualifies as a lesbian? … If a lesbian refutes the radical disjunction between heterosexual and homosexual economies that Wittig promotes, is that lesbian no longer a lesbian? And if it is an “act” that founds the identity as a performative accomplishment of sexuality, are there certain kinds of acts that qualify over others as foundational? Can one do the act with a “straight mind”? Can one understand lesbian sexuality not only as a contestation of the category of “sex,” of “women,” of “natural bodies,” but also of lesbian?" (127-8)
Butler’s move from describing Wittig’s work as offering “an experience beyond the categories of identity” to this recuperative insistence on “a lesbian” creates a shift in our understanding of Wittig’s project from one that defies gendering to one that produces a coherent, unitary lesbian identity, effectively marginalizing Wittig’s work by categorizing it with a theoretically discredited identity politics. As Robyn Wiegman notes: “Judith Butler's paradigm-shifting Gender Trouble needed Wittig to make the turn that has become absolutely definitional to queer theoretical work, but in the critical habits that shape that enduring history, Wittig has become something of an unknown” (513). More problematically, Butler’s misreading of Wittig’s provisional subject position as a unitary identity based upon particular bodies performing particular sexual acts effectively enacts the same hypersexualizing gesture on lesbian-as-subject-position as the “straight mind” performs on “homosexuals” in general. Butler’s questions reduce Wittig’s practice of taking up lesbian as a provisional-potentially-liberatory-subject-position-because-it-is-not-woman-or-man to little more than sexual acts. In this shift, Butler conflates heterosexuality--the regime--with heterosexual desire; and lesbianism--the provisional subject position--with hetero and homonormative notions of lesbian identity and desire, a strangely “straight” maneuver.
Based on these conflations, Butler performs a deconstructive reading to suggest that Wittig “constructs a gay/lesbian identity” through “exclusionary means” that “paradoxically institutes precisely the relation of radical dependency it seeks to overcome: Lesbianism would then require heterosexuality” (128). While deconstructive readings such as this display quite clearly why changing the status quo can be so difficult, it actually supports Wittig’s argument for provisional transformative subject positions in the face of persistently recuperative binaries. But the only way Butler is able to perform this deconstructive reading is by domesticating Wittig’s lesbian-as-subject-position to a more legible “gay/lesbian identity” first. This maneuver works to circumscribe Wittig’s work within the very systems of thought that Wittig resists--a resistance which Butler evidently finds inspiring in Wittig’s fiction, yet effectively dismisses in Wittig's theoretical formulation. By rendering everything text, Butler's reading ignores the challenges inherent in all work for social justice: maintaining a vision of what one can only imagine--and must continually re-imagine--in the face of constant recuperations and co-optations while, at the same time maintaining an active critique of the current material realities within which one must inevitably live.
Butler follows this indictment with a suggestion for performative action that sounds strangely similar to Butler’s own description of what Wittig’s fiction produces. Butler argues for: “a thoroughgoing appropriation and redeployment of the categories of identity themselves, not merely to contest ‘sex,’ but to articulate the convergence of multiple sexual discourses at the site of ‘identity’ in order to render that category, in whatever form, permanently problematic” (128). Is not the creation of “complex cultural exchanges among bodies in which identity itself is ever shifting, indeed where identity itself is constructed, disintegrated, and recirculated only within the context of a dynamic field of cultural relations” (127)—what Butler claims Wittig’s fiction does—precisely what Butler is calling for? In what may be a well-intentioned attempt to translate Wittig’s vision into the de rigueur philosophical discourse of the time, Butler dismisses Wittig’s materialist foundations—that which makes Wittig’s work most radical and offers greater potential for creative political action—by eliding the “context of a dynamic field of cultural relations” to effectively privilege, even while “troubling,” the site of identity.
In attempts to get beyond identity politics, many theorists have moved to ahistorical critiques of culture and identity production that fail to integrate a materialist perspective, much less the lesbian materialism articulated by Wittig. But as Rosemary Hennessy notes in Profit and Pleasure, Butler’s work lacks historical materialism. Hennessy argues that prioritizing indeterminacy as a basic ingredient of radical democracy (via Laclau and Mouffe) Butler, and others who follow this line of thinking, make possible a proliferation of new subjects without a materialist critique that “potentially endorses any--even exploitative—social relations” (62). In contrast, Wittig’s critical stance deftly searches out a temporary space that refuses what Wittig considered arrogant--ahistorical, non or anti-materialist theories like Foucault’s and Lacan’s--while producing a radical lesbian version of liberatory materialist practices in language.
This misappropriation of Wittig’s work not only contradicts Butler’s own rhapsodic description of Wittig’s construction, disintegration, and recirculation of identity that create “whole new languages of description” (128), but ignores important passages and elides key components of Wittig’s wording throughout the theoretical essays in which Wittig both specifies and historicizes in ways that Butler’s theory fails to do. A close reading of a passage from Wittig’s “One is not born a woman” (1981) illustrates Butler’s oversimplification of Wittig’s theoretical stance. Wittig writes:
"To destroy 'woman' does not mean that we aim, short of physical destruction, to destroy lesbianism simultaneously with the categories of sex, because lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, politically, or ideologically. For what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man . . . a relation which implies personal and physical obligation as well as economic obligation, a relation which lesbians escape by refusing to become or stay heterosexual." (20, my italics)
Wittig is very clear that lesbian is a “concept”—not a coherent, unitary identity—and that concepts and language have a material dimension in their effects. Moreover, it is provisional—a concept “for the moment.” It was the only one Wittig knew that had the potential in the 1970s historical context of writing this piece. Wittig assumed that other opportunities would open up. [Indeed, in our discussions on this topic in the years before Wittig’s death in 2003, we shared appreciation for the increasing plurality of gender expression, especially in our students.] In all of Wittig’s work—fictional and theoretical--lesbian is a conceptual subject position to be taken up provisionally until that time when it is no longer useful in countering oppression “economically, politically, or ideologically.” Wittig rarely, if ever, refers to “the” or “a” lesbian because lesbian is an open subject position that does not contain identity but rather opens up possibilities (a position queer theorists later claimed for queer), as Butler rightly claims, for “new ways of being a body.” The misappropriation happens in Butler’s collapsing of Wittig’s emphasis on the production of subject positions within economic, political, ideological fields into a more psychoanalytically friendly individualized cultural field.
To answer Butler’s “straight” questions: yes, people who claim lesbian identity “can do the act with a ‘straight mind.’” Indeed, Wittig’s conceptualization of the straight mind as the product of particular socio-historical material conditions means that one can perform any act with a straight mind. Conversely, Wittig’s lesbian-as-provisional-subject-position-that-resists-the-categories-of-sex, leaves open sex acts between ANY two people who refuse the subject positions of “man” or “woman” in relations of any sort. As Wittig made clear in many conversations, men can be lesbians insofar as they work to subvert the privilege of their own gender marking (or more accurately, their freedom from gender marking), refusing to take up any social position that requires that someone else be a woman or a man--economically, politically, or ideologically. Lesbianism, as Wittig deploys it, engages all the qualities that queer theorists later claimed for queer, but with an emphasis on the economic, political, and ideological (rather than privileging the psycho-cultural) dimensions of such a subject position. Does this use of lesbian change its meaning? No more so than the taking up of the epithet queer changes its meaning once again. One could argue that lesbian-as-subject-position was already occupied by some who did not share Wittig’s use of it, in a way that queer perhaps was not so much at the time it was taken up as a theoretical term. But even the terms “woman” and “man” are forever contestable, as evidenced in questions such as those about whether one is a “real” woman/man. It is most important to remember that language is the material of Wittig’s literary workshop.
Just as Butler struggles against misreadings of Gender Trouble, especially of the concept of performativity, Wittig worked to address misconceptions about lesbian as subject position. Butler has attempted in later, more mature works to clarify earlier claims, interestingly over the areas where Butler’s work most overlaps Wittig’s—troubling concepts of identity and subjectivity. Both work to renegotiate the power of language/meaning systems to allow for ways of being that are foreclosed by those meaning systems, but while Wittig’s fiction, as Butler notes, creatively proliferates possibilities for “becom[ing] a being whom neither man nor woman truly describes” (128) with a clear political agenda, Butler--in the role of academic philosopher--effectively privileges the position of skeptic to the detriment of articulating possibilities for political action. While this position may at times be appropriate and useful and certainly gains one prestige within the institution, it seems important to be clear about the possibilities and limitations of every subject position we engage—including scholar. How are we taking it up, to what end, and what effect? For scholars working for social justice, how do we most effectively make use of the power inherent in our own positions in order to create greater social justice? To what degree is our work constrained by such positions? There are prices scholars pay for being “too political.” One might argue that the disciplining of disciplines produces these effects, so that this is just one example of many that call for greater analysis and socio-political materialist critique. In what ways are scholars encouraged to dismiss those who come before us--those who may well have been inspiring to us, but in order to take up the stance as the skeptic, we might feel pressed to push aside? What kind of “othering” does such a scholarly subject position produce? What kind of more social-justice-producing position might a different ethic and practice produce?
Interestingly, at the points in Butler’s work where discussions of the political arise—mostly in interviews—Butler returns to Wittig. For example, from Butler’s interview with Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal in London in 1993: “In that sense I'm still in sympathy with the critique of ‘sex’ as a political category offered by Monique Wittig. I still very much believe in the critique of the category of sex and the ways in which it's been constrained by a tacit institution of compulsory reproduction.” Indeed, even as Butler goes on to articulate the problems with political action generally, when describing what seems most important to effective action, Butler is describing (without reference) exactly what Wittig’s work with language does:
"What I worry about are those acts that are more immediately legible. Those are the ones that I think are most readily recuperable. But the ones that challenge our practices of reading, that make us uncertain about how to read, or make us think that we have to renegotiate the way in which we read public signs, these seem really important to me." (http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm)
Wittig’s work consistently challenges the reader’s practice of reading, insisting that the reader renegotiate the signs. And when pondering the problems of political action Butler notes:
"Some people would say that we need a ground from which to act. We need a shared collective ground for collective action. I think we need to pursue the moments of degrounding, when we're standing in two different places at once; or we don't know exactly where we're standing; or when we've produced an aesthetic practice that shakes the ground. That's where resistance to recuperation happens. It's like a breaking through to a new set of paradigms." (http://www.theory.org.uk/but-int1.htm)
Wittig’s work does this brilliantly—producing for readers a provisional “place” beyond the constraints of sex/gender meaning systems while at the same time grounding the work in the material realities of those marked by oppressive meaning systems. By pulling back the curtain on the operations of subjectivity in different ways in each text, Wittig enacts the both/and thinking necessary to resist recuperation. It is more than Wittig’s aesthetic practice that “shakes the ground.” Resistance to injustice at every level requires a counter-disciplining that calls for at least double-duty—knowing hegemonic discourse better than it knows itself, and choosing paths of resistance that are always already provisional because there is no outside. Butler’s emphasis on the site of the cultural without clear connection to the economic, ideological, and political explains why Butler rhapsodizes about Wittig’s fiction but stumbles on the theory.
If Butler had done a close reading in Gender Trouble that stayed truer to what Wittig actually wrote, Butler may well still have contested Wittig’s specific form of voluntarism, but that would require a more careful and complex reading of Wittig’s works than Butler performs. Gender Trouble articulates feminism via the hottest theories of the time, particularly Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. While these theories offer some interesting insights (not the least of which is articulating why it can be so very difficult to create social change on the large scale), together the work of these theorists via Butler produce a focus on the individual with little sense of the material socio-historical circumstances that produce the possibilities for being a body in any given time or place. Butler’s eschewal of Wittig’s lesbian materialist analysis contains the reader and the subject within in the world of the ideal while Wittig’s work spans the visionary to the activist material realities. (Indeed, the question of agency is the point on which Butler’s own work remains most muddy.[iv]) Butler’s other option would have been to be much more critical of the directions taken by the majority of the hot theorists of the day whose work Wittig openly contested, but such a direction may not have been so well-received in the philosophical field at that time. Indeed, work for social justice on the larger scale had certainly turned increasingly conservative during the time of Butler’s writing Gender Trouble. And at the same moment that queer theory was taking root in academe, the public conversation about sexuality in the U.S. grew increasingly assimilationist—focusing on the rights to marry and serve in the military instead of sexual/religious freedom.[v] While queer theorists generally eschew such assimilationist moves, to what degree did/does an emphasis on Foucauldian, Derridian, and Lacanian theoretical frameworks allow the political left in general to retreat into more esoteric realms in the face of post-sixties backlash?
Wittig was nothing if not resistant. Working closely with Wittig—students, colleagues, friends—knew that any task we took on together would be labor-intensive because we would be questioning everything, especially language. Wittig let nothing go without saying in order to call out the many ways oppression marks us and to resist that oppression through creative interventions at every turn. Wittig always functioned on the periphery, refused the assumptions, the status quo, sacrificing the comfort of fitting the norms even in small ways—especially in institutional settings—for the greater goal of changing them. And while there is an element of reinvestment in the very thing one resists, in the process of materially resisting we learn the contours, find the limits of both the resistance and that which went without saying by calling it out. Doing so with humor, as Wittig does so powerfully, destabilizes the categories--even the ones of our own making. Wittig practiced faith in the plasticity of words as a material rather than in a discipline, refusing to be disciplined except in radical lesbian materialist terms. The dark humor of Wittig’s later works--Virgile, non and Paris-la-politique--leaves no one, including Wittig, unchallenged. This radical questioning which became more pointed with time characterizes all of Wittig’s work, encouraging readers to join in rooting out anything that goes without saying—to leave nothing so privileged that it can go without saying, to materialize and thereby counter such privileging through language. This is no small challenge and not always a comfortable way to live, but it is Wittig’s ethical practice.
In this vein, Paris-la-politique et autres histoires explores the dark side of work for social justice. Its vignette/parables are based on the trials and tribulations of lesbian feminist organizing, particularly in late 1960s/early 70s Paris. As Wittig described it, the title work consists of the pieces that fell away in the writing of Virgile, non. Each vignette in the collection develops different challenges of organizing against the grain of social norms, detailing the ways in which the work of those fighting for social justice is often thwarted, diminished, contained, and/or recuperated by the perversions of internalized oppression. The collection offers a creative materialist vision of what Wittig articulated as “the straight mind” in relationship to sex/gender oppression, but in the many ways that the straight mind becomes internalized by the very people who are most oppressed by it. This materialist analysis applies more generally to the many ways those fighting oppression seem to frustratingly recreate injustice in the name of work for greater justice, the ways in which the best efforts of activists are too easily coopted. Expanding from the gender/sexuality focus to creative articulations of the operations of oppressive practices as the incessant reproduction of differences, chapters like “Les Tchiches et les Tchouches” exemplify the potential of Wittig’s strategies for articulating that-which-goes-without-saying for grappling with every form of oppression—strategies that have begun to be mapped by critics such as Dominique Bourque and Linda Zerelli, but that have yet to be fully explored or deployed.
While Virgile, non can be read, in part, as a darkly playful spoof on the heavy-handed tactics of a well-intentioned but righteously radical activist determined to fight for justice, Paris-la-politique can be read in part as an even darker critique of the other side of that coin—the many variations of internalized oppressions that would contain or dismiss the radical elements of any work for social justice—internalizations like the one at work in Butler’s misappropriation of Wittig’s work. Perhaps more than any of Wittig’s other works, these two texts complement the essays by offering a creative materialist analysis of the oppressing straight mind and the many ways its internalizations muddle our best efforts to transform it—a muddling that confounds feminist and queer organizing, indeed any organizing for social justice that must challenge the status quo.
Wittig’s work offers us some of the material to dream that-which-is-not-yet while living with the current material conditions. It is imbued with a sense that we can’t know who we will be until we go there—and Wittig’s fiction consists of imaginings in that direction. Following up on Hennessy’s questions and concerns, we need to ask what keys to resisting deadening identities does Wittig’s work offer? What radical subject-effects does Wittig’s work produce? What models for resistance and change does this work offer? What clues to articulating revolutionary love? Answering these kinds of questions would not only move us toward developing a more radical theoretical framework for a queer studies that Wittig might have supported, but would offer creative frameworks for challenging oppression of all kinds. Perhaps almost ten years after Wittig’s passing, almost fifty years after the publication of L’opoponax, with the academic field of queer theory beginning to make moves back toward materialist thinking, we might be ready to return to the Wittigian well.
Special thanks to Dominique Bourque for her always helpful and incisive insights in editing this essay.
Notes
[i] See Wittig’s Le Chantier litteraire for more on language as material.
[ii] For more on Wittig’s genre/gender-busting moves see Dominique Bourque’s “Un Cheval de Troie nommé dé-marquage.”
[iii] In addition to Hennessy, Wiegman, and Winning noted in this text, Stevi Jackson and Clare Hemming have also noted problems with Butler’s reading of Wittig.
[iv] Critics of Butler’s positions on agency, idealism, and performativity include: as already noted, Rosemary Hennessy; also Geoff Boucher’s, “The Politics of Performativity: A Critique of Judith Butler;” Chris Brickell’s "Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal;" R.G. Dunn’s “Self, Identity and Difference: Mead and the Poststructuralists;” Adam Green’s “Queer Theory and Sociology: Locating the Subject and the Self in Sexuality Studies;” and Moya Lloyd’s "Performativity, Parody, Politics.”
[v] See Janet Jakobsen and Anne Pelligrini’s Love the Sin for a particularly interesting articulation of problems with this conservative turn.
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About the author
Professor and Faculty Director for the Center for Multicultural Engagement at California State University Channel Islands, Julia Balén has a Ph.D. in Comparative Cultural and Literary Studies with a focus on issues of embodiment and power relations and has published on feminist, lesbian, and queer theory and practice in an anti-racist/classist context. Some representative publications include: “Erotics, Agency, and Social Movement: Communities of Sexuality and Musicality in LGBT Choruses” in The Queer Community: Continuing the Struggle for Social Justice, ed. Richard G. Johnson III, (San Diego, CA: Birkdale Publishers, 2009) and “Practicing What We Teach” in Women’s Studies for the Future: Foundations, Interrogations, Politics, ed. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Agatha Beins (Rutgers University Press, 2005).