Abstract

In both her fiction and her essays on writing and feminist theory, Monique Wittig takes up and redeploys traditional themes and genres as well as recent theories of language, literature, and writing in order to force change in and through the dominant categories of thought and language. She has announced her project as one which would “do away with the category of sex” by way of reconfiguring the grammatically and conceptually enforced compulsory heterosexual order. I examine the specific linguistic mechanisms by which Wittig accomplishes this abolition of “sex” and the political/philosophical/ linguistic consequences of her “lesbianization” of language. Throughout, I aim to suggest what the political importance of The Lesbian Body as a diversified and written corpus is.