by Nicholas Scott
The writing of Monique Wittig has been described as prophetic in relation to queer theory.[i] Despite predating contemporary understandings of transgender and non-binary subjects, and the troubling of sexuality they imply, Wittig offers an escape from the quagmire of categorisation queer theory can find itself in. As such, in this essay I seek to take to its logical conclusion Wittig’s utopian project to destroy the categories of sex and gender, specifically questioning its implications for the place of queer gender expressions and sexualities. This will be achieved in three distinct stages. First, I will summarise Wittig’s theory to develop an understanding of why she sees this project as necessary. This section is not intended to be comprehensive, nor is my analytic focus. Rather, it establishes a conceptual framework that provides context for the critical work of this essay. I will then argue that current and emerging queer gender expressions cannot be preserved as the final resting points for our understanding of gender and sexuality, since the strategy of their conception relies on the categories Wittig insists must be destroyed. Finally, I will offer an argument that diverges from and builds upon Wittig’s by proposing that this strategy is not merely “doomed to failure”.[ii] Rather, informed by a reading of The Lesbian Body (1986), I will argue that more work is needed on the how of the matter, and that the current queer strategy works as a demountable bridge between the world Wittig diagnoses, and the one she wishes to create.
To problematise from a queer perspective Wittig’s project to destroy the categories of sex and gender, it is helpful to first begin developing an understanding of what she calls “the straight mind”.[iii] This concept is the cornerstone between her theoretical work on the categories of sex and difference, and her political goals regarding the transformation of gender within language. The straight mind can be understood as the set of concepts and categories including “woman”, “man”, “sex”, and “difference” that form a totalising mental structure. These concepts are treated within “the discourses of the social sciences,” and in the minds of individuals more generally, as axiomatic.[iv] Wittig’s specific framing of the heterosexual relationship is key in understanding why this is the case. On this she states:
Although it has been accepted in recent years that there is no such thing as nature, that everything is culture, there remains within that culture a core of nature which resists examination . . . which is the heterosexual relationship. I will call it the obligatory social relationship between “man” and “woman”.[v]
Wittig posits that the heterosexual relationship “resists examination” because the gendered binaries associated with “man” and “woman” are treated as “primitive concepts” within contemporary sciences. Heterosexuality understood as the primacy of the relationship between these categories is taken to be so natural and necessary that it becomes an ineluctable basis for defining all human relationships. To Wittig, this effect is so pervasive that “when thought by the straight mind, homosexuality is nothing but heterosexuality.”[vi]
The argument here is not simply that homosexuality is the same as heterosexuality, but specifically that homosexuality is defined and understood only within the restricted conceptual space allowed by heterosexuality. This totalising effect of the straight mind is evident even in contemporary queer theory which, by referencing the obligatory social relationship between “man” and “woman” in constructing its categories, locates the emergence of trans and non-binary subjectivities within that same restricted space. This example signposts the challenge Wittig’s arguments pose for queer subjectivities. Her work on language, specifically her writing, will deepen the complexities of this challenge, and it is to this that my argument turns now. I will begin with a brief examination of Wittig’s materialist understanding of how women’s oppression relates to the category of sex, and then consider how gender within language works to maintain this oppression.
The heterosexual category of sex provides basis for the straight mind. It might then be assumed that the categories of sex—masculine/feminine, male/female, man/woman—exist prior to, and are the origin of, the oppression of women. Wittig rejects this, arguing instead that “it is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.”[vii] The primacy of heterosexual difference within the straight mind is posited as an ontological given, but to Wittig the expression of difference is an historically contingent act of power.[viii] This act of power works to conceptually justify the material and economic oppression imposed by men onto women, which Wittig establishes in part with the passage below.
It is the fate of women to perform three-quarters of the work of society (in the public as well as in the private domain) plus the bodily work of reproduction according to a preestablished rate. Being murdered, mutilated, physically and mentally tortured and abused, being raped, being battered, and being forced to marry is the fate of women.[ix]
The pretence of sexual difference is then used to “mask at every level the conflicts of interest” thus described that exist between men and women.[x] But this conflict is not between men and women as ontological categories of being, but between men and women as political classes, for these groups appear because of the material subjugation of one by the other. If sex is the category employed in politics, then gender is the “linguistic index of the political opposition of the sexes and of the domination of women.”[xi] As such, Wittig does not conceptualise gender in terms of identity, but rather in terms of language, as a mandatory way in which women must mark themselves as this oppressed category. It is at this point that Wittig’s project finally becomes lucid. She offers a radical solution to this situation of oppression: “we must destroy the sexes as a sociological reality.”[xii] Beyond this, she argues that language operates on the level of materiality, and in fact cannot be extricated to some disconnected realm of the ideal. This further implies that the marking of sex within language—gender—must be destroyed also. This vision thus entails a world in which the material circumstances of oppression are destroyed, along with the language and concepts which justify and perpetuate this reality.
What then, if anything, is lost in this project Wittig wishes to enact? As alluded to previously, queer identities are often constructed with the language of gender. In the simplest sense, Wittig’s project to destroy gender thus removes this form of specification as a possibility. Leo Bersani is particularly concerned about this, insisting that “it is not possible to be gay affirmative, or politically effective as gays, if gayness has no specificity.”[xiii] Instead, Bersani contends that:
[T]he very maintaining of the couples man-woman, heterosexual-homosexual, serves to break down their oppositional distinctions. These binary divisions help to create the diversified desiring field across which we can move, thus reducing sexual difference itself—at least as far as desire is concerned—to a merely formal arrangement inviting us to transgress the very identity assigned to us within the couple.
This desiring field that Bersani envisions holds onto the categories of sexual difference, even if it pays lip service to their reduction, because without them he sees homosexuality as being inconceivable. As Garlinger notes, his clinging on to the category of homosexuality is suspect, and I would add arbitrary.[xiv] Why must this be a stopping point in our understanding of sex and desire? Contemporary queer specificity moves past this stopping point to some degree but is eventually confronted by the same problem that Wittig highlights. Namely, these specificities rely on the very categories which justify and uphold a material system of power in which the groups they represent are oppressed.
Informed by Wittig, my specific contention here is that any category of desire or identity which rests upon heterosexuality can only do so temporarily. The very strategy of queer theory, which seeks to dismantle “gender by working its weakness from within” necessarily suggests this.[xv] If queer theorists are happy to reject heterosexual notions of gender or sexuality which exclude queer subjectivities, then they must also accept that any emerging categorisations are just as socially and historically contingent. It is for this reason that Crowder describes this understanding of the queer strategy as being “doomed to failure” for Wittig.[xvi]
In opposition to this dismissal, I think it is valuable to consider how Wittig’s project manifests without the work of queer theory. When moving from a mental framework confined within the conceptual space of the straight mind, there seems to be a huge leap required to not only conceptually grasp the notion of a world without the categories of sex and gender, but to contend with how this world might come about. So, in many ways, that Wittig is writing prior to queer theory is obvious when her project is problematised in this way.
In reading The Lesbian Body it becomes apparent that Wittig sees this gap as something which must be overcome with a violent destruction of heterosexuality. That this is enacted in the form of writing is consistent with Wittig’s earlier claim that gender is the linguistic index of sex within language. More specifically, she argues:
[E]ven abstract philosophical categories act upon the real as social. Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it . . . For there is a plasticity of the real to language: language has a plastic action upon the real.[xvii]
This plasticity of the material world in response to language is the mechanism by which the linguistic categories of the straight mind work to maintain and uphold hetero-patriarchal oppression. This analysis, lying at the crux of Wittig’s analytical work, informs the political goal of her writing: namely, the destruction of gender within language.
In The Lesbian Body, Wittig performs a violent deconstruction of the heterosexual body, apprehending eroticism and desire from the restricting clutches of heterosexual thought. In describing the novel’s subjects, you and I, Wittig does not shy away from their “female” anatomy. Both have vulvas, labia, vaginas, breasts, and clitorises, but these physical features are given no more or less attention than any other bodily tissue or organ, external or internal. The writing so effectively distances these from any imagination of heterosexual desire because “the lovers devour, penetrate, rip apart, and reassemble each other in ways that the straight world, in its normative hypocrisy, finds grotesque.”[xviii] In fact, interleaved throughout the body of the novel are bold blocks of text listing bodily tissues, functions and excretions of which those privileged by the straight mind as the basis for difference and oppression are just few amongst many. In doing this, Wittig further works to destabilize heterosexuality as the locus of desire and of subjectification.
Reflecting on her own writing, Wittig describes the italicized I as representing an “exalted” subject capable of performing this attack on the order of heterosexuality.[xix] However, it is her use of the second person in describing this I’s lover, you, that I wish to turn to specifically. Consider the passage below, taken from the beginning of the text.
… I arrive under your hair, m/y fingers traverse its thickness, I touch your skull, I grasp it with all m/y fingers, I press it, I gather the skin over the whole of the cranial vault, I tear off the skin brutally beneath the hair, I reveal the beauty of the shining bone traversed by blood-vessels, m/y two hands crush the vault and the occiput behind, now m/y fingers bury themselves in the cerebral convolutions, the meninges are traversed by cerebrospinal fluid flowing from all quarters, m/y hands are plunged in the soft hemispheres, I seek the medulla and the cerebellum tucked in somewhere underneath, now I hold all of you silent immobilized every cry blocked in your throat your last thoughts behind your eyes caught in m/y hands, the daylight is no purer that the depths of m/y heart m/y dearest one.[xx]
Just as the I reaches into her lover’s mind, so too does Wittig into yours. By confronting her reader directly with the savage eroticism on the page, she stamps into their mind her vision of a world in which the heterosexual body is destroyed. This then is a violent attempt to destroy the structures of the straight mind that take root there. The power of Wittig’s writing in resisting oppression, at least in part, is thus its ability to reach into our mind and prod at these restricting beliefs in a way that is tangibly uncomfortable and confronting. In doing this, she allows the possibility for new thought. For Wittig, the gap between the straight mind and her vision of a world without the categories of sex and gender is so large that if the former is to be challenged, it must be done violently.
Wittig might reject my use of a spatial analogy, insisting that any “gap” necessarily implies these worlds exist on the same plane, and thus that reference to heterosexuality is again inevitable. Yet, in a world where the restrictions of the straight mind are continuously being pushed and expanded, where assumptions are challenged, structures are weakened, and holes are exposed, Wittig’s work in language becomes easier. The conceptual space between the world she is to destroy, and the world she wishes to create, shrinks. The move from a rigid binary to Wittig’s utopia is aided by a multiplicity of subjectivities as constructed by the queer strategy. This is a push towards singularity, where category distinctions are so specific, so disparate from heterosexuality, that they no longer need to exist as a means of classification at all. In this process, to say that queer category distinctions are merely subsumed by the straight mind is to ignore the shifts in the ontology of gender they imply, and the changes in language that construct and legitimise them. It is to this end that the propagation of queer subjectivities works towards the same end as Wittig’s work in writing to destroy the categories of sex and gender in language.
Wittig’s overarching argument is that dismantling sexual difference is necessary to overcome the material oppression of women. The role of language in this process is significant, because for Wittig the real, material world is shaped and constructed by language. The writing Wittig employs to enact this dismantling is violent and destructive, implying the force required to work at dismantling the straight mind and the categorisations it upholds. In their rejection of the strict couplings of sex, gender, and desire required by the straight mind, queer subjectivities work to move us towards the kind of world Wittig envisions: one in which these categories are absent.
Nicholas is a final year student of philosophy and computer science at the University of Queensland. His love for philosophy was rekindled while studying feminist philosophy, and he is grateful for the publication opportunity this has now resulted in. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he loves science-fiction films—particularly those that question what it is to be human, and the effect technology has on our answers to that question. One day he hopes to contribute to that discussion.
ENDNOTES
[i] Diane Griffin Crowder, “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory: Implications for Political Movement,” GLQ 13, no. 4 (2007): 489-503, https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-004.
[ii] Crowder, “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory,” 496.
[iii] Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 27.
[iv] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 27.
[v] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 27.
[vi] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 28.
[vii] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 2.
[viii] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 5.
[ix] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 5.
[x] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 29.
[xi] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 60.
[xii] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 6.
[xiii] Leo Bersani, Homos (Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 61.
[xiv] Patrick Paul Garlinger, “”Homo-Ness” and the Fear of Femininity,” Diacratics no. 29 (1999): 59, https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.1999.0003.
[xv] Crowder, “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory,” 496.
[xvi] Crowder, “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory,” 496.
[xvii] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 78.
[xviii] Crowder, “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory,” 494.
[xix] Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, 87.
[xx] Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 17.
WORKS CITED
Bersani, Leo. Homos. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.
Crowder, Diane Griffin. “From the Straight Mind to Queer Theory: Implications for Political Movement.” GLQ 13, no. 4 (2007): 489–503. https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-2007-004.
Garlinger, Patrick Paul. “”Homo-Ness” and the Fear of Femininity.” Diacritics 29, no. 1 (1999): 57–71. https://doi.org/10.1353/dia.1999.0003.
Wittig, Monique. The Lesbian Body. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.
Wittig, Monique. The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.
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