Monique Wittig
relbastr Feminist novelist, activist, and theorist; born in Alsace, educated at the Sorbonne, immigrated to the US in 1976.
Monique Wittigâs first novel, LâOpoponax, was published with great critical 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 Beauvoirâs dictum that âone is not born a womanâ to insist that she was a lesbian, not a woman, and that lesbians are not women because they live in defiance of the heterosexual âcontractâ that defines âwoman.â The prose poems of her third work, Le Corps Lesbien, which âlesbianizedâ 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 Danteâs Divine Comedy for a lesbian living in modern-day San Francisco.
Monique Wittig died on January 3, 2003, in Tucson, Arizona.
Bibliography
Novels
- The Opoponox (1966) (tr. Helen Weaver, (1976)) (Daughters Inc., Plainfield, Vt., 1966)
- Les Guérillères (1969) (tr. David Le Vay, (1973))
- The Lesbian Body ([[tr. David Le Vay])(1976)
- Across the Acheron (1985) (tr. David Le Vay and Margaret Crossland, (1989); Peter Owen, London, 1987)
Nonfiction
External Links
For more about Wittig and her work, see the following:
- Julia Creet, âMonique Wittigâ http://www.glbtq.com/literature/wittig_m.html
- L. Timmel Duchamp, âIn Memoriam: Monique Wittigâ http://www.fantasticmetropolis.com/show.html?ed,wittig,1
- Liz Henry, "Building a Digital Feminary: Notes on the names in Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères" http://www.darkshire.net/lizhenry/annotatrix/