ABSTRACT
In an early scene in Monique Wittig’s Across the Acheron the hero, Wittig, walks into a laundromat.1 There she is met by a tirade of homophobic invective in which lesbians are described variously as ‘repulsive dykes’ and ‘stinking creatures’ (p. 12). Within the text it is obvious that the speaker is rehearsing the views of the other women in the laundromat. It is also evident that the words she mouths are second-hand, the received wisdom of the patriarchal ideology which informs the culture of the laundromat.2 Her words are no less resonant for this, however. For the stereotypes she employs, the lies she propounds are the stuff of cultural mythology and thus take on the semblance of social hegemony. Hence, in the women’s eyes Wittig becomes inseparable from the cultural image of the lesbian as dirty, lustful and rapacious; she becomes, as another speaker later puts it, one of ‘those monsters with hair all over their bodies and scales on their chests’ (p. 90).
