Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-04-23
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Ilana Eloit, Professor in Gender Studies, University of Geneva
A few days before Lesbian Visibility Day, on April 26, a look back at the work of Monique Wittig (1935–2003). An icon of lesbianism, this writer and intellectual was long forgotten after being sidelined by the French feminist movement. In recent years, her thought has made a spectacular comeback in the feminist landscape. A theorist of political lesbianism, she analyzes heterosexuality as a political regime of domination subordinating women to men, from which lesbianism allows escape.
In 2014, when I was starting adoctoral thesis dedicated to the political history of lesbianism in France in the 1970s, Monique Wittig was still little known. A major figure ofWomen’s Liberation Movement (MLF), she was nevertheless at the origin of a lesbian thought that profoundly disrupted the history of feminist ideas.
Nearly a decade later, her presence has asserted itself with dazzling clarity. References to her work pepper feminist events; her books are prominently displayed at the front of bookstores; conferences and study days are multiplying at the university; somestage productionsmakes his thinking come alive again by giving it a new actuality – to mention just a few forms of this Wittigian “cultural moment.”
How can we explain the forgetting and erasure of its critique, then the enthusiasm it generates four decades later? Why does it resonate so much today? A look back at the history and current relevance of lesbian thought.
Revolutionary feminist
It was at 29 years old that Monique Wittig became publicly known with the publication of her first novel,Opoponax, who receives the Médicis prize in 1964. From this work, she begins toeradicate genderGender categories – or sex categories – in the language. The “gender mark,” according to her, is a stratagem by which “sex is imposed on its users” and women are assigned to a subordinate category that deprives them of access to the universal.
She continues this political-literary enterprise with the publication, in 1969, of her epic poemthe Guerrilla Fighters, in which she uses the pronoun “they” (feminine plural) to designate a group of women fighters, thus granting the feminine plural the force of the generic, which she takes away from the pronoun “they” (masculine). A few months later, in the autumn of 1970, she is counted among the founding figures of the MLF in Paris and participates in the collective of the Red Dykes as well as in theRevolutionary Homosexual Action Front.
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It contributes, notably alongsideChristine Delphyor fromColette Guillaumin, with the emergence of materialist feminism. Inspired by Marxism, this movement holds that the division of individuals into ‘men’ and ‘women’ is not a natural given but the product—the ‘mark’—of a relationship of oppression, whose naturalization in return serves to justify the domination of one group over another.
For materialist feminists, this division of individuals into “sex classes” is based on a domestic exploitation relationship, that is, on the appropriation by the class of men of the unpaid labor of women within the household.
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Thus, since the categories of sex – like social classes – are the product of a relationship of exploitation, the goal of feminism must be, for these theorists, the abolition of this relationship, the immediate consequence of which will be the elimination of the categories of sex – a project that aligns, within the field of feminist theory, with Wittig’s project of abolishing gender in language.
“Lesbians are not women”: politicizing lesbianism
It is in the continuity of this reflection that Wittig develops a specifically lesbian political thought, from the United States where she settles in 1976 in response toresistance from French feminists to her desire to politicize lesbianism. In her two major texts, “Straight Thought” and “One is not born a woman” (1980), Wittig highlights a blind spot of materialist feminism: heterosexuality as a political regime, or a constraining social system, which institutionalizes the appropriation of women by men.
Above all, she states that it is through this regime that the difference between sexes is produced, thus linking patriarchy and heterosexuality, sex (or gender) classes and sexuality. It is in this light that her most famous phrase must be understood, according to which “lesbians are not women” because “what makes a woman is a particular social relation to a man […] a relation that lesbians escape by refusing to become or remain heterosexual.”
From then on, lesbians embody, for Wittig, this beyond of sex categories that materialist feminism desires. While the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) was based on collective identification with the category “women,” Wittig’s political lesbianism is based on disidentification with sex categories, as a cornerstone of the naturalization of heterosexuality.
In Paris, feminists discredit this thought by accusing it of being“separatist”, “dogmatic,” “sectarian,” even “terrorist” and “totalitarian,” in that it politicizes heterosexuality — and no longer just patriarchy — as an oppressive norm, and substitutes the subject “women” with the subject “lesbians” as a figure of resistance: a violence from which Wittig would never recover and which contributed to permanently erase political lesbianism from the French feminist intellectual landscape.
Late rediscovery thanks to the 4th feminist wave
The wave of disqualification of his thought in France as well as his departure across the Atlantic explain why his collection of theoretical essays,The Straight Mind, was first published in the United States in 1992, before being the subject of a first French translation in 2001 (under the titlela Pensée straight).
But it is especially since the beginning of the 2020s that his thought has regained a leading position. In addition to the republication of his complete works and the publication ofunpublished writings, the public space is now irradiated with the spectral presence of Wittig – a Monique-Wittig garden was notably inaugurated in Paris in 2021.
In 2023,l’Humanitédedicated its front page to Wittigwith the title: “Monique Wittig, return in grace”, following other portraits published inle MondeorLibérationOn the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of his passing. The same year, I organized with colleagues a doubleinternational conferenceAt the University of Geneva and the University of Berkeley on the relevance of her work. Artists, intellectuals, and scholars also find in Wittig a major source of inspiration,making a thunderous work resonate on stage.
This late but stunning rediscovery is undoubtedly due to the current political context:that of a fourth wave of feminism, in the wake of #MeToo. This placed at the heart of reflection the structural dimension of sexist and sexual violence and, by extension, gave new impetus to political lesbianism, which questions the political and social function of coercion towards heterosexuality under a patriarchal regime, as well as the benefits of exiting the heterosexual regime from a feminist perspective.
Other reasons can be invoked: the challenge to white dominance within feminism, strongly disrupted byafrofeminism, contributes to the exhaustion of the universalist paradigm and promotes the visibility of minorities.
In this regard, the non-mixing of political lesbianism and that of Afrofeminism strongly echoes each other, as does the hostility they provoke in response. It is no coincidence that the lesbians of yesterday and the Afrofeminists of today face the same accusations of “separatism,” used to better discredit groups that question naturalized regimes of oppression, including within feminism: therace and heterosexuality.
Finally, it is clear that the visionary proposal of a feminism not based on the category “women” and aimed at the destruction of the binary epistemology of sex difference today finds its audience among individuals who refuse to identify as “men” or “women” — categories which, as Wittig wrote, “contribute to the maintenance of heterosexuality” — and prefer to identify as non-binary, queer, or trans.
Ilana Eloit does not work for, advise, hold shares in, receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than her research institution.
–ref. From Oblivion to Light: Monique Wittig, Theorist of Political Lesbianism –https://theconversation.com/de-loubli-a-la-lumiere-monique-wittig-theoricienne-du-lesbianisme-politique-280474