Wittig, Monique
▶ Watch on YouTubeCoverage note: full (a reading of the paper plus the first questions; the transcript is a speech-to-text of a live room, so some audience remarks are garbled and the recording ends abruptly in the middle of the question period)
Core ideas
The moderator introduces Wittig as the author of Les Guérillères (about to be reissued by Beacon), Le Poponax, The Lesbian Body (transcribed "Lesbian with"), Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary (co-authored with Sande Zeig), the play The Constant Journey and the new novel Virgile, non. Wittig begins by saying she will not talk about experimental writing but about "French feminism": she says what is usually presented under that label (the "feminism of difference") is not what she represents; she belongs to a current she calls materialist feminism, which treated feminism as a political theory starting from Marxism, rejecting the idea that class struggle was only men's struggle and pushing the notion of materialism further.
She then reads her paper, framed by three epigraphs: the passages from the preface to Story of O ("happiness in slavery"; the Barbados freed slaves who supposedly begged to be taken back), and a Turgenev dialogue on why a man would marry ("a woman is a worker"). Her argument is that sex is a political category, not a natural fact: "there is no sex, there is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses; it is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary." The ideology of sexual difference masks the social opposition between men and women "on the ground of nature," as master/slave categories were naturalized. She argues that before struggle there are only "differences," and that oppositions (and dialectical change) appear only once the oppressed rebel. She quotes Marx and Engels' The German Ideology (the ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class) to claim that the thought of "difference" (metaphysical, scientific or Marxist "natural division of labour") is the thought of domination.
Wittig claims that the category of sex founds society as heterosexual and concerns relationships, not being: "the making of women is like the making of eunuchs or the breeding of slaves." She describes compulsory reproduction as a system of exploitation (appropriation of women's reproductive and domestic work, comparable to the appropriation of workers' labour), the marriage contract as a lifelong contract assigning unpaid work and sexual availability (illustrated by police reluctance to intervene in domestic violence), and the category of sex as "totalitarian" (with its "inquisitions, courts, laws, terrors, tortures, executions"). Women are visible as sexual beings and invisible as social beings, she says, comparing sex to the colour line for black slaves; she argues that the declaration of sex in civil status, like that of colour, should be abolished: "I say it's about time to do so." Pleasure in sex, she notes in a footnote, is no more her subject than "happiness in slavery."
In the questions, one audience member defends avant-garde writing against what she sees as academic literary criticism's dominance (structuralism, deconstruction), speaking from the African-American women writers' community; Wittig replies that avant-garde art is not opposed to this, and that good writers "universalize" a point of view that is always particular at the start. Another participant criticizes postmodern theory and urges that women's experience be considered with other forms of oppression (race, disability, religion). A mother asks whether stressing the "obligation to reproduce" removes mothering from any possibility of authenticity; Wittig answers that she was speaking of the category of sex as a concept, not of the experience of being a mother, and that one could well be happy to be a mother.
Excerpts
“There is no sex, there is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause, the origin of oppression, is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes pre-existing or outside of society.”
“The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual. As such, it does not concern being, but relationships. For women and men are the result of relationships. [...] The making of women is like the making of eunuchs or the breeding of slaves.”
“We must not accept that the universality of the point of view always comes from the same side. What a good writer is doing, in avant-garde or in other writing, is universalizing the point of view. The point of view of a writer is always particular at the start.”