Monique Wittig

Lore & Background

Monique Wittig was born in 1935 in Dannemarie, Haut-Rhin, France. She moved to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. In 1964, she published her first novel, L'Opoponax, which won the Prix Médicis. She was one of the founders of the Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF).

In 1969, she published Les Guérillères, considered a founding event of French feminism. Wittig earned her PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, completing a thesis titled "Le Chantier littéraire" under Gérard Genette. In 1971, she was a founding member of the Gouines rouges, the first lesbian group in Paris. She was also involved in the Féministes Révolutionnaires.

She published Le Corps lesbien (1973) and Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976), coauthored with her partner Sande Zeig. In 1976, Wittig and Zeig left France due to resistance from certain MLF members and moved to the United States, where Wittig focused on developing gender studies. She worked as a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Vassar College, and the University of Arizona in Tucson. She died of a heart attack on January 3, 2003.

Reader's Guide

Wittig had a materialist approach in her works, evident in Les Guérillères, and a critical theoretical approach, evident in her essay "One Is Not Born a Woman." She emphasized the role of language in shaping reality, using innovative techniques such as split pronouns (e.g., "j/e" in Le Corps lesbien) to challenge the binary logic of gender. Wittig was a theorist of materialist feminism, arguing that women are a class defined in materialist terms and that the categories of "woman" and "man" are political and economic categories that will disappear with the destruction of the heterosexual system. She defined herself as a radical lesbian and posited heterosexuality as a political regime to be overthrown. Her work has influenced feminist and queer theory, though her relationship to these fields is complex.