ABSTRACT
Monique Wittig builds on de Beauvoir's idea that our culture constructs what it means to be a "woman" and a "man," extending her argument to suggest that people need to undermine the very categories of sex and gender. Gender and sex are social constructions, not givens. Wittig insists that "Our first task, it seems, is to always thoroughly dissociate 'women' and 'woman,' the myth". "Woman" refers an idealized person who has certain essential qualities, what Wittig calls "an imaginary formation". Wittig notes that "Lesbian is the only concept she know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically". For Wittig, our culture invents and defines the categories "woman" and "man" because the web of economic, legal, and social institutions constructs gender and sexual identity.
