Utopia: 1969: renversement

Caroline Kelley

Once before this time I visited Phrygia of the vineyards.
There I looked on the Phrygian men with their swarming horses,
so many of them, the people of Otreus and godlike Mygdon,
whose camp was spread at that time along the banks of Sangerios:
and I myself, a helper in war, was marshalled among them
on that day when the Amazon women came, men’s equals.[1]

As there are no grounds for establishing a discourse, but rather an arid millennial ground to break, what I say has at least two sides and two aims: to break up, to destroy; and to foresee the unforeseeable, to project.[2]

When you have buried us    told your story
Ours does not end              we stream
Into the unfinished              the unbegun
The possible.[3]

Utopia is a word invented by Sir Thomas More to mean ‘the good place that is no place’. Utopian fiction, as imagined by More, describes an ideal world through which a critique of the current social order sometimes occurs. As Krishan Kumar writes: ‘It shows the best society not as a normative or prescriptive model but as actually achieved, as already in existence. Utopia is a description of the best (or, in anti-utopia, the worst) society not as an abstract ideal, and not simply as a satirical foil to the existing society, but as a society in full operation in which we are invited vicariously to participate’.[4] This literary genre has played an important role by allowing writers to explore real and pressing social issues within the ‘structure’ of fiction. Moreover, the utopia has been of especial import for l’écriture féminine [feminine writing] as it serves a dual purpose: it is both a place to (re)invent a feminist past and/or future and a space within which to (de)construct language.

In this essay, I explore the dual significance of utopia in Les Guérillères (1969), a novel by Monique Wittig. In this story, a non-existent ‘counter-society’, as described by Julia Kristeva in her essay, ‘Women’s Time’, is imagined by Wittig in order to critique gendered language and, indirectly, women’s social inequality in the contemporary West. My aim in exploring this text is, first, to analyze Wittig’s deconstructive treatment of language as a metaphor for power, drawing on the following prototypical feminist texts for insight: Hélène Cixous’s ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’, Luce Irigaray’s ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, and Wittig’s ‘The Trojan Horse’. Secondly, I address the intermittent application of humor and violence in Les Guérillères which serves to illustrate the ludicrous terms of women’s subjugation. Related to this, I briefly discuss the genderedness of nature or the ‘natural’ in the novel as it pertains to female sexuality. Finally, I examine the significance of the feminist utopia as a transgressive mode of commenting on conventional structures—linguistic, literary, social, philosophical—taking into account the historical context in which the piece was written and its influence on feminist theory. I shall focus here on Wittig’s collective character elles who steal ‘universality’ from the masculine pronoun ils in the space of the text.[5] Establishing the omnipresence of elles at the beginning of the novel, Wittig writes her book in reverse chronology as a kind of textual strategy: ‘Why such a composition where the end of the text is the beginning of the action? Is it a device to disconcert the reader? No, it’s a matter of necessity, of textual strategy. My goal was to make elles come as a shock to the reader, as a surprise; since elles holds the whole story, a sort of disorientation should follow from it’.[6] The novel effectively rewinds as we read, starting with the aftermath of an epic battle between elles and ils, a post-patriarchal society and the ubiquity of the heroic elles. The decision to begin at the end, so to speak, is essential to the meaning of the story: ‘What guided me along [was] the hope that this elles could situate the reader in a space beyond the categories of sex for the duration of the book. (This is perhaps the utopia)’.[7]

Monique Wittig published her novel Les Guérillères in 1969, the year Jan Palach set himself on fire in Wenceslas Square in Prague to protest the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia; the Front de Libération du Québec (FLQ) bombed the Stock Exchange in Montréal; the organization Students for a Democratic Society was taken over by the Weathermen (known later as the Weather Underground); the secret US military bombing campaign in Cambodia started; Charles Manson’s cult murdered the pregnant Sharon Tate and several of her friends at her home in Los Angeles; the Woodstock Festival in upstate New York took place; John Lennon and Yoko Ono held their Bed-In at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montréal; a three-day community riot known as the Battle of the Bogside happened in Derry, Northern Ireland; over one hundred civilians were murdered by American soldiers in the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam; massive race riots took place in Malaysia; the Stonewall Riots happened in New York; and the Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. The feminist movement in France in 1969 was also gathering steam in the context of the Vietnam War, student protests and counter-culture movements across the globe. Wittig was a member of the loosely-organized Mouvement de Libération des Femmes [Women’s Liberation Movement] in France in 1968, acted a spokesperson for the Féministes révolutionnaires [Feminist Revolutionaries] and participated in the Gouines rouges [Red Dykes], a radical lesbian organization. By saying I will take into account the historical context in which the novel was written, I mean to read the work with a sensitivity to this turbulent era and the radical language that the feminist movement in France adopted at this time – exemplified by the writing of theorists like Wittig, Cixous, Kristeva and Irigaray.

Les Guérillères begins with a poem written in capital letters which serves to introduce the epic form of the story. Invested with images culled from the discourse of myth and war, the poem ends with two powerful lines: ‘ELLES AFFIRMENT TRIOMPHANT QUE/ TOUT GESTE EST RENVERSEMENT’ [THEY AFFIRM TRIUMPHANTLY THAT/ ALL ACTION IS OVERTHROW].[8] This affirmation of overthrow presents the war story of the guérillères, lesbian warriors who fight to undo the masculine order of language. In keeping with Cixous’s invitation to ‘put herself into the text—as into the world and into history—by her own movement’, the guérillères (re)make stories that they find in the feminaries, texts that are written by men about women.[9] They use these texts to inform their revised movement into literature, religion and mythology: ‘Que cet ordre soit rompu. Que les bons et les méchants soient abattus. Elles disent que Clémence Maïeul a souvent dessiné sur le sol l’O qui est le signe de la déesse, le symbole de l’anneau vulvaire. Elles disent qu’aussi bien n’importe laquelle d’entre elles pourrait invoquer une autre déesse du soleil, Cihuacoatl par exemple, qui est en même temps déesse guerrière’ [May this order be destroyed. May the good and the evil be cast down. They say that Clemence Maïeul often drew on the ground the O which is the sign of the goddess, symbol of the vulval ring. They say that any one of them might equally well invoke another sun goddess, Cihuacoatl, for example, who is also a goddess of war].[10] By inverting ancient symbols, myths, literary tropes, even conventional narrative chronologies, Wittig tells a fragmented tale in three parts, each part separated by a circle, an ‘O’ or a zero. The first third of the novel takes place after the heroic triumph of elles over ils and is replete with celebratory imagery. The second part sways between the future and the past, preparing us for the battle in the last part of the novel. Elles deconstruct and then destroy the feminaries, replacing them with a ‘great register’ that can be written in by all the guérillères and is never entirely ‘finished’. In the third part of the novel, elles go to war against ils, rejecting the oppressive words that have been used to ‘write’ their bodies. This tri-partite process, marked by the ensuing silences of the circles, maps the warriors’ backward movement from feminine ‘objects’ to active agents of change.

The guérillères’ transition from feminine objects, as represented in the feminaries, to agents of change underscores the utopian character of the text. The warriors literally wage battle against the masculine symbolic order. In depicting lesbian warriors who fight for linguistic freedom, Wittig tears up what she refers to as ‘committed literature’ and creates something akin to a war machine as described in ‘The Trojan Horse’; more than a battle waged by elles, it is a battle waged by language against meaning, a new territory within which words are destroyed, rearranged and subverted.[11] As Wittig writes:

What I am saying is that the shock of words in literature does not come out of the ideas they are supposed to promote, since what a writer deals with first is a solid body that must be manipulated in one way or another. And to come back to our horse, if one wants to build a perfect war machine, one must spare oneself the delusion that facts, actions, ideas can dictate directly to words their form. There is a detour, and the shock of words is produced by their association, their disposition, their arrangement, and also by each one of them as used separately.[12]

By displacing language, Wittig endeavors to produce a war machine—a utopia of sorts—and a new linguistic terrain where the guérillères are free of the meanings that have been associated with their implied humanity.

Is the feminist utopia actually a ‘good place’ that invites change or is it a simulacrum of the dominant social order? In the decade following the publication of Les Guérillères, Cixous argued that women have not yet had their turn to write their desires in this ‘libidinal and cultural—hence political and typically masculine—economy’ which is ‘all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures’.[13] This statement suggests that writing the feminist utopia, imagining a place where women’s desires are played out, creates a ‘space’ for subversive thought; and, ultimately, this subversive thinking will help to transform the status quo. Conversely, Kristeva questions the modalities of the utopia or counter-society since it is ‘based on the expulsion of an excluded element, a scapegoat charged with the evil of which the community duly constituted can then purge itself; a purge which will finally exonerate that community of any future criticism’. She goes on to explain that ‘modern protest movements have often reiterated this logic, locating the guilty one – in order to fend off criticism – in the foreign, in capital alone, in the other religion, in the other sex. Does not feminism become a kind of inverted sexism when this logic is followed to its conclusion?’[14] While Kristeva is concerned with protest movements, generally, and feminism, specifically, her criticism brings to light an important question that relates to the book at hand. Does Les Guérillères simply want to reverse one symbolic order so as to establish another? Kristeva contends that anti-establishment movements are never ‘initially libertarian’ movements that could eventually revert back to the ‘initially combated archetypes’.[15] A counter-power or counter-society is by its very essence a simulacrum of the combated symbolic order. If Kristeva is correct then who is to say that one order is any less damaging or oppressive than another? Addressing the ‘implacable violence (separation, castration, etc.) which constitutes any symbolic contract’, Wittig mocks the discursive use of symbols to oppress.[16] That is not to say that her work is immune to the concerns raised by Kristeva but it is clear that she is aware of the dangers implicit in offering an alternative: ‘In Les Guérillères, I try to universalize the point of view of elles. The goal of this approach is not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language’.[17]i Wittig implies that she is not interested in establishing a fully-realized ‘female’ counter-society but, instead, she intends to undo the structure that exists where il or ‘he’ dominates. As a materialist feminist, Wittig believes that the symbolic order is a material force in society—and is as much a political category as economics, for example. According to her logic, words and works of fiction are material objects that shape the mind as well as the social and physical bodies of human beings. Her fiction demonstrates how language maintains and perpetuates the physical exploitation of women and how it might be changed, starting with the universal elles.[18]

Wittig criticizes an ideology that tends toward the belief that: ‘The rest of the world, which I define as the other, has meaning only in relation to me, as man/father, possessor of the phallus’.[19] The supposition that the phallus is central to foundational precepts in Western philosophy, religion and language is ridiculed throughout Les Guérillères. Whereas Erica Ostrovsky argues that Wittig uses the ‘O’ throughout her story as a symbol of the vulval ring which ’emphasizes the power to recreate even symbols that have transhistoric and transcultural interpretation’, I would argue that she invokes the ‘O’ to mock the conventional use of symbols to represent women’s bodies.[20] Rather than reinventing this symbol, she twists it. As Cixous writes: ‘It is not a question of appropriating their instruments, their concepts, their places for oneself or of wishing oneself in their position of mastery. Our knowing that there is a danger of identification does not mean we should give in […]. Not taking possession to internalize or manipulate but to shoot through and smash the walls’.[21] In this sense, Wittig is ‘smashing the walls’ in the utmost sense as she pokes fun at the use of symbols to order language and, hence, society:

Elles ne disent pas que les vulves dans leurs formes elliptiques sont à comparer aux soleils, aux planètes, aux galaxies innombrables. Elles ne disent pas que les mouvements giratoires sont comme les vulves. Elles ne disent pas que les vulves sont des formes premières qui comme telles décrivent le monde dans tout son espace, dans tout son mouvement. Elles ne créent pas dans leurs discours des figures conventionnelles à partir de ces symboles.

They do not say that vulvas in their elliptical forms are to be compared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies. They do not say that gyratory movements are like vulvas. They do not say that vulvas are the original form which as such describe the world in its entirety, in all its movement. They do not create conventional figures in their discourses that are derived from these symbols.[22]

The guérillères also use laughter to deride patriarchal symbols. In this regard, I agree with Ostrovsky’s assessment that ‘laughter is perhaps the most arresting renversement to occur in regard to this myth… it is the ultimate expression of freedom and of the true liberation of ‘women’—a spontaneous sign of strength and vitality’.[23] The power of laughter can be seen in several passages in the story; most striking are the depictions of laughter in battle: ‘Il leur dit en redressant la tête avec orgueil, pauvres malheureuses, si vous le mangez, qui ira travailler dans les champs, qui produira la nourriture les biens de consommation, qui fera des avions, qui les pilotera, qui fournira des spermatozoïdes, qui écrira les livres, qui gouvernera enfin? Elles alors rient en découvrant leurs dents le plus qu’elles peuvent’ [He says to them [elles] throwing his head back with pride, poor unfortunate ones, if you eat him who will work in the fields, who will produce the food and the consumer goods, who will make the airplanes, who will pilot them, who will provide the spermatozoa, who will write the books, who in fact will govern? Then they laugh, baring their teeth to the fullest extent].[24] The use of laughter to assert power and to mock the dominant social order, represented in language, is an effective tool. It is reminiscent of Cixous’s ‘Castration or Decapitation’ in which the unsettling nature of women’s laughter is examined: ‘It’s a question of submitting feminine disorder, its laughter, its inability to take the drumbeats seriously, to the threat of decapitation’. [25] Cixous relates the ancient tale of General Sun Tse who attempts to train the Chinese King’s 180 wives as soldiers. When the women fail to take the military exercises seriously, the General convinces the unhappy King that their inattentiveness represents a form of treason. The two most senior wives are executed. The wives’ mutinous laughter is read by Cixous as a feminine disruption of the masculine order. Laughter ‘breaks out, overflows’ from within the bodies of the women.[26]

Although Wittig is not married to images that bind elles to their bodies she does look to the body and descriptions of bodily functions to disrupt notions of passive femininity. By linking verbs like rire [to laugh], uriner [to urinate], tuer [to kill], courir [to run], sauter [to leap], nager [to swim], chasser [to hunt], and even dire [to speak] to the pronoun elles, Wittig writes a war machine with words; her assault is a textual one. As she states: ‘I would be totally satisfied if every one of my words had on the reader the same effect, the same shock as if they were being read for the first time. It is what I call dealing a blow with words’.[27] By writing of lesbian warriors who mock, laugh at and kill men, Wittig imagines a terrain where elles take up their weapons and go to battle and, moreover, she uses words that were once reserved exclusively to record men’s physical actions. The words must be ‘heavy’ and ‘rude’. The words are selected for their ‘sound’ and the way they ‘behave once they are associated. Indeed, this arrangement can be at the origin of the effect of shock, of surprise’.[28] Even the neologism in the title of her book, Les Guérillères, defies certain literary tropes by feminizing the masculine word guérilla/s [guerrilla/s]. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines the ‘guerrilla’ as ‘one who engages in irregular warfare especially as a member of an independent unit carrying out harassment and sabotage’.[29] As guerrilla fighters, elles use their bodies to semiotically sabotage the master-warrior-speaker as defined by Jean-François Lyotard: ‘The master-warrior-speaker […] needs a frontier to conquer and savages to civilize. Let us free him instead from his armour of words and death; let us temper him in a large patchwork of affective elements that must be intensified. One should not attack him head-on but wage a guerrilla war of skirmishes and raids in a space and time other than those imposed for millennia by the masculine logos’.[30]

Addressing the constitution of ‘woman’ as a sign in the masculine logos, Wittig focuses on the age-old association between women and nature. As Judith Butler states in her collection of essays, Gender Trouble, feminists have occasionally been drawn to the idea of ‘origin’, a time that pre-dates what some would call ‘patriarchy’, that would provide an alternative perspective on which to argue the temporality of women’s oppression.[31] In search of this origin, feminists across disciplines have debated women’s subordination from different but not mutually exclusive perspectives; namely, whether gender should be seen as a symbolic construction or as a social relationship.[32] A popular proposition is that women’s inferior status is a symbolic construction which is in some ways linked to reproduction and thus to her consequent association with the construct of nature. Beauvoir famously postulates on the origins of the woman-nature relationship in The Second Sex: ‘Among the nomads procreation seemed hardly more than accidental, and the wealth of the soil remained unknown; but the husbandman marveled at the mystery of the fecundity that burgeoned in his furrows and in the maternal body; […] the land is woman and in woman abide the same dark powers as in the earth […]. In woman was to be summed up the whole of alien Nature’.[33] While the guérillères are described in pastoral scenes, their relationship to the construct of nature is exceedingly ambiguous—sometimes they are in direct conflict with it while at other times they revel in their ‘natural’ setting. For example, in one passage of the book elles are threatened and ravaged by wolves while in another they terrorize small animals and burn down trees. Nevertheless, the guérillères’ ultimately refuse to be associated with ‘nature’ as we see in the following passage:

Elles disent, non je ne me coucherai pas, non je ne reposerai pas mon corps fatigué avant que cette terre à qui je fus si souvent comparée, bouleversée de fond en comble, soit à jamais incapable de porter des fruits. Elles allument les pins les cèdres les chênes-lièges les oliviers. L’incendie se propage avec une extrême rapidité. Il y a d’abord comme un grondement lointain. Puis c’est un ronflement qui enfle et qui finit par couvrir leurs voix. Elles alors plus rapides que le vent s’enfuient, portant de toutes parts le feu et la destruction. Leurs cris et leur fureur luttent avec le bruit de l’incendie.

They say, no, I will not lie down, no, I will not rest my tired body before this earth to which I was so often compared, turned upside down, forever incapable of bearing fruit. They light the pine trees cedars cork oaks olives. The fire spreads with great rapidity. At first it is like a distant rumble. Then it is a roar that swells and finally drowns their voices. Then they flee, faster than the wind, carrying fire and destruction everywhere. Their cries and their fury compete with the noise of the fire.[34]

Repudiating the woman-nature connection, the guérillères attempt to free themselves from the discursive binds of biological reproduction, maternity, and submissive femininity. Wittig thus challenges the link that other feminists of her generation, particularly ecofeminists, have regularly accentuated. In ‘Split Culture’, Susan Griffin explores the Western binaries of ‘men and women’, ‘civilization and nature’, ‘subject and object’, ‘mind and body’ and, finally, ‘reason and matter’. According to Griffin, we look at the world through a dichotomous lens, dividing it into oppositional categories: ‘Through the words masculine and feminine, which we use to designate two alien and alienated poles of human behavior, we make our sexuality a source of separation. We divide ourselves and all that we know along an invisible borderline between what we call Nature and what we believe is superior to Nature’.[35] By disrupting these dichotomies, these poles of difference, through the inversion of gendered signs, Wittig creates an opportunity for us to imagine an alternative: ‘It [Les Guérillères] is, I suggest, utopian in its function because, by rendering previous conceptual structures, divisions and borders unnecessary, it creates the potential for new ways of conceptualizing and thinking’.[36] In contrast to theories insisting on women’s ties to the Goddess and Mother Earth, outlined in radical ecofeminist Mary Daly’s work, for example, Wittig seeks to dismantle essentialist frameworks by questioning their semiotic foundations.[37]

The binary of sexual difference which has led to the false alliance of women and nature is destroyed during the epic battle of elles and ils in the third part of Les Guérillères. In the final passages of the story, some of the men renounce their power and join elles to bury their weapons:

Elles s’adressent aux jeunes hommes en ces termes, jadis vous avez compris que nous nous sommes battues pour vous en même temps que pour nous. A cette guerre qui a été aussi la vôtre vous avez pris part. Aujourd’hui, ensemble, répétons comme un mot d’ordre, que toute trace de violence disparaisse de cette terre, alors le soleil a la couleur du miel et la musique est bonne à entendre. Eux applaudissent et crient de toutes leurs forces. Ils ont apporté leurs armes. Elles les enterrent en même temps que les leurs en disant, que s’efface de la mémoire humaine la guerre la plus longue, la plus meurtrière qu’elle ait jamais connue, la dernière guerre possible de l’histoire […]. Quelqu’une se met à chanter, semblables à nous/ ceux qui ouvrent la bouche pour parler/ mille grâces à ceux qui ont entendu notre langage/ et ne l’ayant pas trouvé excessif/ se sont joints à nous pour transformer le monde.

They address the young men in these terms, now you understand we have been fighting as much for you as for ourselves. In this war, which was also yours, you have taken part. Today, together, let us repeat our slogan that all traces of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun was the color of honey and music was good to listen to. They applaud and shout with all their might. They brought their arms. They bury them at the same time as their own saying, let there be erased from human memory the longest most murderous war it has ever known, the last possible war in history […]. One of them begins to sing, like unto ourselves/ those who open their mouths to speak/ a thousand thanks to those who have understood our language/ and not having found it excessive/ have joined with us to transform the world.[38]

Wittig alludes to the formation of a new language that the guérillères create and their male allies agree to use—a language that negates categories of oppositional thinking. In heralding a new language, the style of narration shifts to the first-person plural: ‘Mues par une impulsion commune, nous étions toutes debout pour retrouver comme à tâtons le cours égal, l’unisson exaltant de l’Internationale’ [Driven by a common impulse, we all stood to seek, uncertainly, an even ground, the exultant unanimity of the International].[39] We immediately read nous [we] as feminine here, fulfilling Wittig’s hope to topple the masculine universal and to ‘situate the reader beyond the categories of sex for the duration of the novel’.[40] On the next page, the female narrator of Les Guérillères describes elles singing at the termination of the war—which is also the end of the novel: ‘La guerre est terminée, la guerre est terminée, dit à mes côtés une jeune ouvrière. Son visage rayonnait. Et lorsque ce fut fini et que nous restions là dans une sorte de silence embarrassé, quelqu’une au fond de la salle cria, camarades, souvenons-nous de celles qui sont mortes pour la liberté’ [The war is over, the war is over, says a young female worker at my side. Her face shone. And when it was finished and we remained there in a kind of embarrassed silence, someone at the end of the hall cried, Comrades, let us remember those that died for liberty].[41] The narrator is a guérillère and one of elles. Despite their victory the mood is somber as elles gather to mourn the fallen in a grand Funeral March. The conventional nature of the scene, recalling the final passages of other tales of epic battle, suggests that the scene constitutes a rupture as the guérillères break with the ancient culture. Read in this way, the Funeral March is a swan song before we enter the era of the feminine plural.[42] This analysis is buttressed by the use of the past tense in the final passages—a contrast to use of the present tense in the rest of the novel, emphasizing the end of the old symbolic order.

In order to render the categories of sex obsolete in language, Wittig is critical of the words ‘woman’ and ‘women’. The guérillères are rarely described as ‘women’—instead she uses the third-person pronouns elle/s and quelqu’une/s [someone; somebody; anybody]. In her essay ‘One is Not Born a Woman’, she pulls apart words like ‘woman’ and ‘women’ and questions their meanings. Appropriating Beauvoir’s famous statement as its title, she explores the claim that ‘one is not born but rather becomes a woman’ from a materialist feminist perspective.[43] She writes: ‘Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate “women” (the class within which we fight) and “woman”, the myth. For “woman” does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary formation, while “women” is the product of a social relationship’.[44] In Wittig’s view, the feminist movement should be a political movement not in support of ‘womanhood’ but, rather, for the eradication of the socio-economic class of ‘women’. In this regard, she is in agreement with Kristeva who obfuscates any definition of ‘woman’ saying: ‘To believe that one “is a woman” is almost as absurd and obscurantist as to believe that one “is a man”‘.[45] Kristeva opposes notions of ‘natural’ gender categories much like Wittig does.[46] In contrast, Irigaray and Cixous write about an irreducible ‘feminine essence’ and ‘sexual difference’. Irigaray, especially, celebrates female physiology when she writes of ‘this sex which is not one’, denying the subject-object parameters of phallic writing since one cannot distinguish a binary construct in the autoeroticism of the two labial lips.[47] Irigaray argues that due to the alienation of women from their desires and their bodies, and the failure of language to describe the female experience, women must speak a different language than men—a language that surpasses the singular, hierarchical logic of structural linguistics. According to Irigaray, men are scopic and women are tactile. Similarly, Cixous describes a kind of femininity that draws on long-established attitudes about women’s bodies. As Toril Moi writes: ‘Cixous’s vision of feminine/female writing as a way of re-establishing a spontaneous relationship to the physical jouissance of the female body may be read positively, as an utopian vision of female creativity in a truly non-oppressive and non-sexist society’.[48] Although Cixous’s jouissance may be utopian, it affirms dichotomies of masculinity and femininity. Irigaray and Cixous accept the ‘natural’ or biological characteristics of ‘women’ and the ‘feminine’ established by a masculine logos. In contrast, Wittig and Kristeva renounce these terms:

Instead of seeing birth as a forced production, we [meaning ‘society’] see it as a ‘natural’, ‘biological’ process, forgetting that in our societies births are planned (demography), forgetting that we ourselves are programmed to produce children, while this is the only social activity ‘short of war’ that presents such a great danger of death. Thus, as long as we will be ‘unable to abandon by will or impulse a lifelong and centuries-old commitment to child-bearing as the female creative act’, gaining control of the production of children will mean much more than the mere control of the material means of this production: women will have to abstract themselves from the definition ‘woman’ which is imposed upon them.[49]

Wittig goes on to assert that the rejection of the term ‘woman’ and its associated roles will allow women to forge an/other class for themselves, to escape the class of women. For Wittig, the antithesis of ‘woman’ is the ‘lesbian’ or ‘companion lover’. She reasons that because lesbians do not identify themselves in opposition to men they are not ‘women’: ‘For a lesbian this goes further than the refusal of the role “woman”. It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man’.[50] As we see in Les Guérillères, the warriors are companion lovers, living in an amazonian-esque community in the aftermath of patriarchal society. They never refer to themselves as women. While their community might be free of men, in the sense that we cannot perceive them in the text after the victory of elle/s, it is possible that there are men living amongst the guérillères. Towards the end of the war, once the masculine symbolic order is defunct, there are portrayals of affection and submission between captured men and the guérillères.[51] Examples of male submission, especially, illustrate the possibility that gender and gender roles are no longer of use to this fictional counter-society; the implication is that structural linguistics, or language that organizes along categories of opposition, is a discourse of war. When the guérillères’ battle is over, phallogocentric dichotomies are superfluous, and ils is assimilated by the universal elles.

Nevertheless, Wittig’s use of words like ‘lesbian’ or ‘companion lover’ has been criticized—since these words are understood to rely on sexual desire for their meaning. Butler, especially, has questioned Wittig’s so-called ‘uncritical’ or ‘prefeminist’ approach to gender:

The unproblematic claim to “be” a woman and “be” heterosexual would be symptomatic of that metaphysics of gender substances. In the case of both “men” and “women,” this claim tends to subordinate the notion of gender under that of identity and to lead to the conclusion that a person is a gender and is one in virtue of his or her sex, psychic sense of self, and various expressions of that psychic self, the most salient being that of sexual desire. In such a prefeminist context, gender, naively (rather than critically) confused with sex, serves as a unifying principle of the embodied self and maintains that unity over and against an “opposite sex” whose structure is presumed to maintain a parallel but oppositional internal coherence among sex, gender, and desire.[52]

Butler illustrates the problems—as she sees them—with Wittig’s attempt to imagine an alternative to ‘woman’ based on sexual desire. Furthermore, she underlines the confusion between gender identity and sexuality that is implicit in terms such as ‘lesbian’ and ‘companion lover’. If one is to approach the construct of gender from this perspective it follows that gender is not a set of attributes rather it is performative: ‘In this sense, gender is always doing, though not a doing by a subject who might pre-exist the deed […]. There is no gender identity behind expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very “expressions that are said to be its results”‘.[53] However, Wittig does not base her definition of ‘lesbian’ on sexual desire as Butler claims. She repeatedly refers to the lesbian as one who has demolished the heterosexual social contract. Lesbians avoid the category of ‘woman’ by refusing heterosexuality: ‘The situation of lesbians here and now in society, whether they know it or not, is located philosophically (politically) beyond the categories of sex. Practically they have run away from their class (the class of women), even if only partially and precariously’.[54] Lesbians are escapees from the class of women. It is not sexual desire that defines a lesbian, but ‘a political, social, economic, and symbolic action of refusing the myriad institutions that comprise heterosexuality’.[55] Wittig maintains that human beings are fundamentally social, and that there is no such thing as humanity outside society.[56] All sexual categories are situated within historical and political structures. According to Wittig there is no innate lesbian ‘essence’ but, instead, ‘lesbianism provides for the moment the only social form in which we can live freely. Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically’.[57] Insofar as Butler’s criticism relates to Les Guérillères, we note that Wittig’s definition of lesbianism avoids gender-based sexual desire as its criteria, for which she is mistakenly critiqued by Butler, instead, constructing lesbianism as a form of revolt.

Nevertheless, the guérillères‘ transition from feminine objects, as illustrated in the feminaries, to lesbian warriors and destroyers/inventors of language is not completely successful in out-maneuvering certain semiotic precepts. They continue to be defined in relation to patriarchal constructs of subjectivity; undoing power structures through modalities like war. Wittig also writes from the perspective that ‘one becomes a woman’; ‘women’ are made by society but are originally invested with the subjective power to act. The guérillères thus reject the terms of their womanhood and seek an/other social form, however precarious. A converse approach to subjectivity requires that women are the ‘sex which is not one’; this position, which is Irigaray’s position, stands in marked opposition to the belief that women are invested with subjective power. As Butler notes in regards to this argument: ‘Within language pervasively masculinist, a phallogocentric language, women constitute the unrepresentable. In other words, women present the sex that cannot be thought, a linguistic absence and opacity. Within a language that rests on univocal signification, the female sex constitutes the uncontrollable and undesignatable. In this sense, women are the sex which is not “one”, but multiple’.[58] In this framework, women are not representable in symbolic language since men are both the signifier and the signified. The guérillères‘ claim to a lesbian class—as escapees of the class of women—that is free of phallogocentric language is problematic since all meaning is imbued with masculinism.

In conclusion, Wittig drafts a semiotic as well as a social utopia. As readers, we are confronted with a challenge to familiar modes of reading and writing as she starts at the end of her story and moves backwards, rearranging and changing words, pronouns and syntax along the way. We are faced with a text in which lesbian warriors fight men to destroy the linguistic and social order. Of course, there are problems with the production of an alternative; it goes without saying that obstacles emerge when imagining any utopian or counter-society, especially one that questions the foundations of language itself. As Adrienne Rich declares in her essay, ‘Toward a Woman-Centered University’: ‘Even minds practiced in criticism of the status quo resist a vision so apparently unnerving as that which foresees an end to male privilege and a changed relationship between the sexes’.[59] If anything, Les Guérillères is a radical vision of a ‘changed relationship between the sexes’—going so far as to advocate the annihilation of sexual categories. However, in envisioning a new social contract, it stops short of completely deconstructing masculine language as noted by Butler. Nevertheless, Wittig thoughtfully inverts patriarchal symbols, creating what she refers to in ‘The Trojan Horse’ as a war machine. In keeping with Cixous’s feminist challenge, Wittig puts herself into the literary mix in order to give face to an/other perspective. As a result, Les Guérillères is an ambiguous utopia not of the usual sort—it is a best society which is not prescribed but, rather, in the act of achievement. It is a utopia of language whereby the warriors ‘write and thus […] forge […] the antilogos weapon […] become at will the taker and the initiator, for her own right, in every symbolic system, in every political process’.[60] By way of the violence and humor of her writing, Wittig illustrates the process of ‘becoming’ which, in many ways, is as utopian as the achieved society. The notion of ‘becoming’ is prescient for the era in which she wrote her novel, a time when other radical artists and theorists were exploring the power of the ‘process’ or the ‘idea’ as more significant than the end result. For example, I am thinking of the ‘happenings’ of conceptual artists like Lawrence Weiner and Allan Kaprow or the theories on ‘becoming’ and the ‘nomad’ developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.[61] By challenging conventional notions of femininity through the invention of the feminaries—i.e., the women-nature connection and symbols of femininity like the ‘O’ or the zero—Wittig challenges the ways in which we write ourselves; and at the time she wrote her novel her challenge was a radical one. Only one symbol remains at the end of the story: the ‘O’. It has been stripped of its feminine connotations and reconstituted as a weapon with which to destroy the language of men: the ospah.[62] Perhaps it is retained to remind us of the power of symbols as well as to mock its mythic connotations. In keeping with the image of the circle, the ‘O’, the zero, the novel ends with the conclusion of the epic poem and the repetition of the emphatic phrase: ‘GESTE RENVERSEMENT’ [ACTION OVERTHROW].[63]

This paper is dedicated to the memory of Elizabeth Fallaize

[1] Homer. The Iliad of Homer, trans. Andrew Lang, Walter Leaf and Ernest Meyers (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 182-190.
[2] Cixous, Hélène. ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, in Marks, Elaine and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.). New French Feminisms (New York: Schocken Books, 1981), 245.
[3] Rich, Adrienne. ‘Phantasia’ in Keyes, Claire. The Aesthetics of Power: The Poetry of Adrienne Rich (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986, 2002), 166.
[4] Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-utopia in Modern Times (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 25.
[5] Wittig uses the feminine plural, third-person pronoun elles and the masculine plural, third-person pronoun ils frequently throughout her novel. Since there is no gendered equivalent to these words in English I will translate both elles and ils ‘they’ in my essay. I have provided the original French so the reader may see whether the pronoun is masculine or feminine. My decision to use ‘they’ without any notation about gender is also informed by Wittig’s statement that she would have preferred that elles was translated simply as ‘they’ in the English translation of Les Guérillères. See Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 71.
[6] Wittig, Monique. ‘Some Remarks on Les Guérillères‘, in Shaktini, Namascar (ed.). On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 41.
[7] Ibid.
[8] In the course of translating passages of Les Guérillères for the purpose of this essay, I consulted the English translation by David Le Vay. Since I found Le Vay’s translation helpful I have used parts of it in my essay. The Le Vay translation generally captures the intent of the author; however, he mistakenly translates elles as ‘women’. I will also cite this text next to the original when appropriate. Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 7; Wittig, Monique. Les Guérillères, trans. David Le Vay (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), 1.
[9] Cixous, 1981, 245.
[10] Wittig, 1969, 35; Wittig, 1985, 27.
[11] Wittig, 1992, 69.
[12] Ibid., 72.
[13] Cixous, 249.
[14] Kristeva, Julia. ‘Women’s Time’, in Moi, Toril (ed.). The Kristeva Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 202.
[15] Ibid., 203
[16] Ibid.
[17] Wittig, 1992, 85.
[18] See Crowder, Diane Griffin. ‘Universalizing Materialist Lesbianism’, in Shaktini, Namascar (ed.). On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 64.
[19] Jones, Ann Rosalind. ‘Writing the Body: Toward an understanding of l’écriture féminine’, in Newton, Judith and Deborah Rosenfelt (eds.). Feminist Criticism and Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture (New York: Methuen, 1985), 87.
[20] Ostrovsky, 44.
[21] Cixous, Hélène and Catherine Clément. The Newly Born Woman (London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd, 1996), 96.
[22] Wittig, 1969, 86; Wittig, 1985, 61.
[23] Ostrovsky, 54.
[24] Wittig, 1969, 140; Wittig, 1985, 97.
[25] Cixous, Hélène. ‘Castration or Decapitation’, trans. Kuhn, Annette, in Ferguson, Russell, Martha Gever, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cornel West (eds.). Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1990), 346.
[26] Ibid., 356.
[27] Wittig, 1992, 72.
[28] Wittig, Monique. ‘Some Remarks on Les Guérillères‘, in Shaktini, Namascar (ed.). On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literary Essays (Urbana-Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 40.
[29] Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, 11th Edition (Merriam-Webster, Inc, 2003), 1503.
[30] Lyotard, Jean-François. ‘One of the Things at Stake in Women’s Struggles’, in Benjamin, Andrew (ed.). The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd., 1989), 118. Original emphasis.
[31] Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1990), 45.
[32] See Moore, Henrietta L. Feminism and Anthropology (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988), 12.
[33] Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 68-69.
[34] Ibid., 182.
[35] Griffin, Susan. ‘Split Culture’, in Plant, Judith (ed.). Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism (London: Merlin Press, 1989), 7-8.
[36] Sargisson, 138.
[37] See Daly, Mary. Gyn/ Ecology: The Metaphysics of Radical Feminism, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990).
[38] Wittig, 1969, 184; Wittig, 1985, 128.
[39] Ibid., 207-208; see Ibid., 144.
[40] Wittig, 2005, 41.
[41] Wittig, 1969, 208; Wittig, 1985, 144.
[42] See Escarnot, Catherine. L’Écriture de Monique Wittig (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), 66.
[43] Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, 2nd ed., trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 267.
[44] Wittig, 1992, 15.
[45] Kristeva cited in Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics (London: Routledge, 1985), 163.
[46] However, Kristeva was not a ‘materialist feminist’ in the same sense as Wittig. See Jardine, Alice. ‘Theories of the Feminine: Kristeva’ in Enclitic 4, No. 2 (Fall 1980), 7-15.
[47] See Irigaray, Luce. ‘This Sex Which Is Not One’, trans. by C. Reeder, in Warhol, Robin and Diane Price Herndl (eds.). Feminisms. Rutgers: Rutgers University Press, 1993.
[48] Moi, 121.
[49] Wittig, 1992, 11.
[50] Ibid., 13.
[51] See Wittig, 1969, 202-206; Wittig, 1985, 140-143.
[52] Butler, 29.
[53] Butler, 33.
[54]> Wittig, 1992, 47.
[55] Crowder, 71.
[56] See Wittig, 1992, 5.
[57] Ibid., 20.
[58] Butler, 14.
[59] Rich, Adrienne. ‘Toward a Woman-Centered University’, in Howe, Florence (ed.). Women and the Power to Change (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1975), 153.
[60] Cixous, 1980, 250. Original emphasis.
[61] See Alberro, Alexander and Lawrence Weiner. Lawrence Weiner (London: Phaidon Press, 1998); Kelley, Jeff and Allan Kaprow. Childsplay: The Art of Allan Kaprow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, Milles Plateaux (Paris: Minuit, 1980)
[62] Os means ‘bone’ and oser means ‘to dare’ in French.
[63] Wittig, 1969, 205; Wittig, 1985, 143.

Caroline Kelley is an artist-scholar currently based in New York. She has a D.Phil. in Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and studied in the MFA Program at the New York Academy of Art. She recently completed a research fellowship at the Humanities and Technology Laboratory at Umea University in Sweden. Some of her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-century francophone fiction; women’s self-portraiture, life-writing and autobiography; feminist and queer theory; the feminist movement in the US and France; electronic literature and new media; open source and open access initiatives; info-activism; language and languages in art; art and social change; and post- and interdisciplinary methodologies and practices. She is also an editor at /thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture/.