"Lesbian and gay sexualities, even as they claim a marginal status as “queer,” cannot be divorced from the colonization of the unconscious, the commodification of bodies, and the recruitment of pleasure into an informatics of domination, as well as the reliance of these psychic and corporeal markets upon a global sexual division of labor and an exploited multinational workforce. In Rosemary Hennessy’s 1993 essay in Signs reviewing the special issue of differences alongside Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind and Other Essays, Hennessy worries over the shift articulated in the differences collection-a shift that moves away from “any solid ties between the cultural construction of difference and its consequences for the ways in which work and leisure time are allocated or state powers are exercised” to one in which “powers in any social register other than the symbolic-evaporate” (968).
While the authors of what is now the field of queer theory still occasionally nod to Wittig’s work as foundational, deep analysis of Wittig’s work has too often been sidelined by the more esoteric and less materialist stances of queer theory that Wittig’s imaginings, in part, enabled. The work of mining Wittig’s vision for all it has to offer readers has barely scratched the surface of this oeuvre. Unfortunately few have dared to take up this call.
Making creative use of every cultural material available from myths to science, Wittig’s work is both gender and genre-busting the gift to readers is a creative envisioning that opens out and calls for more. The brilliance of Wittig’s work includes a deep attention to the ways that some of the smallest details of language constrain human potential-especially pronouns and articles. Guided by a materialist analysis and a profound sense of humor that is as compassionate as it is incisive, Wittig worked language the way a welder works metal-a brilliant mind burning white-hot bending language with a worker’s materialist sensibility to make space for those it would erase. More than 50 years ago Monique Wittig dared to envision a world beyond gender-not just as science fiction, but as a political movement articulated through literature and theory. The Social, Cultural, and Political Necessity of Anne SextonĪ Review of Donna Prinzmetal's Snow Whiteĭue Diligence (A.K.A. "A Witch, A Cat Woman": Cat Woman's Patriarchal Roots Imagining Differently: Revisiting Radical Feminismįirst Responder Who Only Fainted During Training Videos Conversations with a Bee, a Lily, and a BearĪscension of St.
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