I appreciate her analytical approach in wanting to be more materially grounded. Appreciate that she dealt with the problematics of the gender essentialism of French feminists at the time and calls for a eradication of the gender binary, locating the struggle and dialectic framework of power as something that cannot be retained. For these reasons I do think she is worth reading if you are interested in that domain of feminist theory. I especially enjoy the essays "The Straight Mind" and "One is Not Born a Woman."

I would enjoy her work a whole lot more if she could stop from the easy comparisons of gendered oppression with slavery. I don't think any serious feminist of colour can read this book without sighing at those moments.

In any case, here's a quote from ' The Straight Mind':

"There is nothing abstract about the power that sciences and theories have to act materially and actually upon our bodies and our minds, even if the discourse that produces it is abstract. It is one of the forms of domination, its very expression … All of the oppressed know this power and have had to deal with it. It is the one which says: you do not have the right speech because your discourse is not scientific and not theoretical, you are on the wrong level of analysis, you are confusing discourse and reality, your discourse is naive, you misunderstand this or that science.

If the discourse of modern theoretical systems and social science exert a power upon us, it is because it works with concepts which closely touch us. In spite of the historic advent of the lesbian, feminist, and gay liberation movements, whose proceedings have already upset the philosophical and political categories of the discourses of the social sciences, their categories (thus brutally put into question) are nevertheless utilised without examination by contemporary science. They function like primitive concepts in a conglomerate of all kinds of disciplines, theories, and current ideas that I will call the straight mind… The straight mind develops a totalising interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language and all the subjective phenomena at the same time. I can only underline the oppressive character that the straight mind is clothed in its tendency to immediately universalize its production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies, all epochs, all individuals." ( )

I enjoyed some of the essays at the beginning — although I don't think "lesbians are not women" or "destroy acknowledgment of biological sex" are practical strategies in the actual world, Wittig offers a powerful critique of the "political regime" of heterosexuality and women's marked sex role — but her writing is often much too abstract for me, and especially when she delves into literary theory and Greek philosophy, it has a tendency to go entirely over my head (see the second half of the book, especially the last essay on locution and interlocution).

QUOTES

"By not questioning the heterosexual political regime, contemporary feminism proposes rearranging rather than eliminating this system. Likewise, the contemporary development of the notion of 'gender,' it seems to me, masks, or camouflages, the relationships of oppression. Often 'gender,' even as it attempts to describe the social relations between men and women, lets us ignore, or diminish, the notion of 'classes of sex,' thereby divesting these relationships of their political dimension." —Louise Turcotte, "Foreword," p. xi

"Materialist lesbianism, this is what I would call the political and philosophical approach of the first half of this collection of essays. I describe heterosexuality not as an institution but as a political regime which rests on the submission and the appropriation of women. In desperate straits, exactly as it was for serfs and slaves, women may 'choose' to be runaways and try to escape their class or group (as lesbians do), and/or renegotiate daily, and term by term, the social contract. There is no escape (for there is no territory, no other side of the Mississippi, no Palestine, no Liberia for women). The only thing to do is to stand on one's own feet as an escapee, a fugitive slave, a lesbian." —Monique Wittig, "Preface" (1991), p. xiii

"And, indeed, as long as there is no women's struggle, there is no conflict between men and women. 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. And fate supposedly cannot be changed. Women do not know that they are totally dominated by men, and when they acknowledge the fact, they can 'hardly believe it.' And often, as a last recourse before the bare and crude reality, they refuse to 'believe' that men dominate them with full knowledge (for oppression is far more hideous for the oppressed than for the oppressors). Men, on the other hand, know perfectly well that they are dominating women ('We are the masters of women,' said André Breton) and are trained to do it. They do not need to express it all the time, for one can scarcely talk of domination over what one owns." —"The Category of Sex" (1976/1982), pp. 3–4

"The category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society in which men appropriate for themselves the reproduction and production of women and also their physical persons by means of a contract called the marriage contract. Compare this contract with the contract that binds a worker to his employer. The contract binding the woman to the man is in principle a contract for life, which only law can break (divorce). It assigns the woman certain obligations, including unpaid work. The work (housework, raising children) and the obligations (surrender of her reproduction in the name of her husband, cohabitation by day and night, forced coitus, assignment of residence implied by the legal concept of 'surrender of the conjugal domicile') mean in their terms a surrender by the woman of her physical person to her husband. That the woman depends directly on her husband is implicit in the police's policy of not intervening when a husband beats his wife. The police intervene with the specific charge of assault and battery when one citizen beats another citizen. But a woman who has signed a marriage contract has thereby ceased to be an ordinary citizen (protected by law). The police openly express their aversion to getting involved in domestic affairs (as opposed to civil affairs), where the authority of the state does not have to intervene directly since it is relayed through that of the husband. One has to go to shelters for battered women to see how far this authority can be exercised." —"The Category of Sex" (1976/1982), pp. 6–7

"The category of sex is the product of heterosexual society that turns half of the population into sexual beings, for sex is a category which women cannot be outside of. Wherever they are, whatever they do (including working in the public sector), they are seen (and made) sexually available to men, and they, breasts, buttocks, costume, must be visible. They must wear their yellow star, their constant smile, day and night. One might consider that every woman, married or not, has a period of forced sexual service, a sexual service which we may compare to the military one, and which can vary between a day, a year, or twenty-five years or more. Some lesbians and nuns escape, but they are very few, although the number is growing. Although women are very visible as sexual beings, as social beings they are totally invisible, and as such must appear as little as possible, and always with some kind of excuse if they do so. One only has to read interview with outstanding women to hear them apologizing. And the newspapers still today report that 'two students and a woman,' 'two lawyers and a woman,' 'three travelers and a woman' were seen doing this or that. For the category of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be convinced of outside of it. Only they are sex, the sex, and sex they have been made in their minds, bodies, acts, gestures; even their murders and beatings are sexual. Indeed, the category of sex tightly holds women." —"The Category of Sex" (1976/1982), pp. 7–8