ABSTRACT
In the spring of 1998, during my second semester of college, I took my first course in queer literature, and there encountered, for the first time, Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, ‘the women warriors’, in English. I recall almost nothing about it, except for a foggy memory of one evening sitting down on my kitchen floor in total frustration and mystification. I had been in school just north of New York City for less than a year, and like so many young queer Americans who leave small towns for cities, I was thrilled and intoxicated to have discovered I was not alone in the world, not the only one, that there were others, that I was not despised, that I was possibly even desired. I wanted to love Les Guérillères for its violence, separatism and women warriors, but I was put off by the text itself, which felt like a hazy, drug-induced abstraction. I could not pin it down, and I was, at that moment, in love with definition.
