- Born
- 13 July 1935Dannemarie, France
- Died
- 3 January 2003Tucson, Arizona, USA · aged 67
Monique Wittig
“Lesbians are not women”: the French writer turned lesbian existence into a radical challenge to the idea of gender itself.
Monique Wittig grew up in Alsace and studied in Paris. Her first novel, “L’Opoponax” (1964), about the childhood of a girl, won the Prix Médicis and was praised by Marguerite Duras and Claude Simon.
In 1970 she was one of the founders of the French women’s liberation movement. With other women she laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris for the “unknown wife of the soldier” – an action regarded as the birth of the movement. Her novels “Les Guérillères” (1969), about an army of women, and “The Lesbian Body” (1973) became classics of lesbian literature.
In her essays, collected in “The Straight Mind”, she argued that “woman” is a political category that only exists in relation to men within a heterosexual system. Lesbians, she said, were not women, because they escaped this system. These ideas strongly influenced later queer theory, among others Judith Butler.
In 1976 she moved to the United States with her partner Sande Zeig and taught at universities, most recently in Arizona. She died of a heart attack in Tucson in 2003, aged 67.