“Lesbians are not women,” the feminist theorist Monique Wittig famously pronounced. But what did she mean? According to Wittig’s theory, sexual difference is an ideology, not an ontological given. The relationship of woman to man is one of domination, determined as much by material and economic oppression as language and discourse. In other words, “there is no sex. Only sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.” By existing outside of heterosexuality, lesbians refuse the category of “woman” and break its ontological illusion of timeless difference: what Wittig calls the “heterosexual contract.” Blending the materialist rigor of the French New Left with the literary experimentations of the French New Novel, Wittig developed a theory of sexual difference that forsook both gender essentialism and cultural feminism to reveal how heterosexuality produces and naturalizes domination precisely by naturalizing sex. How, with Wittig, can we understand the possibilities of a feminism that seeks to abolish sex? What is the political role of lesbians within a heterosexual system? Can heterosexuality itself exist without producing or participating in sexed oppression, and if not, what are the alternatives?
In this course, we will use Wittig’s work to explore French theories of gender and sexual difference and track the transatlantic development of these ideas in the years before queer theory. Following the intellectual and political debates among Wittig and her contemporaries, we will probe the limits and possibilities of lesbian theory as a basis for the abolition of the “sex-class system.” How did Wittig and her fellow materialist feminists differentiate themselves from “French Feminist” theorists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray? How did Wittig’s creative experiments with gender and storytelling lay the groundwork for the emergence of queer theory in the United States? Authors will include Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Françoise d’Eaubonne, and Françoise Verges.
