Monique Wittig
Feminist novelist, activist, and theorist; born in Alsace, educated at the Sorbonne, immigrated to the US in 1976.
Monique Wittig’s first novel, L’Opoponax, was published with great crucial acclaim when she was 28 and was awarded the Prix Médicis. Her next novel, Les Guérillères, a classic of second-wave feminism, declared war on gender itself, and urged women, when lacking historical precedent or role models, to invent the history they need. As a theorist, she expanded on Simone de Beauvoir’s dictum that “one is not born a woman” to insist that she was a lesbian, not a woman, and that lesbians are not women because they live in defiance of the heterosexual “contract” that defines “woman.” The prose poems of her third work, Le Corps Lesbien, which “lesbianized” key mythic and historical figures of the Western tradition, assumed for its lesbian narrator the subject position of the lover desiring a beloved, a narrative position that has traditionally been reserved for males. Lesbian Peoples, her fourth work, written with Sande Zeig, invents a new history, presented in the form of a work of reference. And her last novel, Virgile, Non, recasts Dante’s Divine Comedy for a lesbian living in modern-day San Francisco.
Wittig died on January 3, 2003, in Tucson, Arizona. For more about her and her works, see the following:
Julia Creet, “Monique Wittig” http://www.glbtq.com/literature/wittig_m.html
L. Timmel Duchamp, “In Memoriam: Monique Wittig” http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?ed,wittig,1
Bibliography
Novels
- The Opoponox (tr. Helen Weaver)(1976)
- Les Guérillères (tr. David Le Vay)(1973)
- The Lesbian Body ([[tr. David Le Vay])(1976)
- Across the Acheron (tr. David Le Vay and Margaret Crossland) (1989)