Monique wittig

“One is Not Born a Woman” (1981)

“[W]e have been compelled in our bodies and our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea of nature that has been established for us.”

“Sex…is taken as an ‘immediate give,’ a sensible given, ‘physical features,’ belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an ‘imaginary formation,’ which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as others but marked by a social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived…”

The Straight Mind and Other Essays (1992)

“Lesbians are not women.”

Butler on Wittig:

“Wittig thus does not dispute the existence or facticity of sexual distinction, but questions the isolation and valorization of certain kinds of distinctions over others. Wittig’s Lesbian Body is the literary portrayal of an erotic struggle to rewrite the relevant distinctions constitutive of sexual identity. Different features of the female body are detached from their usual places, and re-membered, quite literally. The reclamation of diverse bodily parts as sources of erotic pleasure is, for Wittig, the undoing or rewriting of binary restrictions imposed at birth.”

Feature 2

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Feature 3

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