Monique Wittig

Monique Wittig (Dannemarie, 1935 – Tucson, 2003) was a French materialist philosopher, novelist and feminist activist, a key figure in radical feminism and lesbian feminism. Her thought belongs to the French materialist tradition, and her importance lies in arguing that the category of sex is socially constructed rather than natural or biological, and in treating heterosexuality as a political regime that shapes how the world is understood.

She was born into a devout and conservative Catholic family. After Germany annexed Alsace, the family moved several times before settling in the Île-de-France region, where Monique and her sister Gille, a painter who shared her feminist commitments, attended an experimental secondary school. She later earned a degree in literature at the Sorbonne and studied Chinese at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations. Her first novel, L'Opoponax, appeared in 1964 and won the Prix Médicis; its unusual structure follows children through the experiences of childhood. Her second novel, Les Guérillères (1969), became a landmark of lesbian feminist writing: women warriors overthrow the patriarchal world and build a sovereign state of their own. In 1971 she co-founded the Gouines rouges, Paris's first lesbian group. Around 1976, after tensions with sectors of the women's liberation movement, she left France with her partner, Sande Zeig, and moved to the United States, where she taught at several universities, including Berkeley, Vassar and Arizona. Her doctoral thesis on writing, «Le Chantier littéraire», was supervised by Gérard Genette and was published posthumously in 2010.

Her best-known essay, The Straight Mind, presents sex as a political category. Women form a class defined by their dependence on men, and if that relation ended, both categories would disappear. Wittig argued that language reproduces this hierarchy, since the masculine passes for neutral and universal. For this reason she called for breaking with the heterosexual framework, which she believed much contemporary feminism left unquestioned, and she held that the lesbian stands outside the category of woman as heterosexuality defines it.

Her influence has been wide. Judith Butler acknowledges her as a major reference for Gender Trouble, though she criticised Wittig for presupposing a subject prior to discourse. Teresa de Lauretis drew on her ideas to shape lesbian theory and parts of queer theory. Scholars still debate whether she should be read as a precursor of queer theory or as a distinct voice, separated from it by her materialism.