ABSTRACT
Of all the battles—old, new, yet to come—one battle is as old as the hills, a war that has never ceased, that continues to rage, and whose infinite losses have never been enumerated, tabulated, archived for posterity. These are the ‘spoils’ of patriarchy, violence, rape, and injustice towards women, and language is the primary ‘game’ through which they have been and continue to be accomplished.
War is, has been and will continue to be most detrimental, indeed most deadly, for women and children—its spoils and its most vulnerable victims. Feminism, war, and game thus seems more a violation than a provocation.
Haven’t we feminists always been at war? Are we not now? Haven’t we for centuries been quite literally embattled in and through the ways our very language plays out? This paper re-invokes from the work of Monique Wittig, one of feminism’s most radical writers and thinkers, an explicit call to arms against a deeply patriarchal language whose ‘rules are no game’ (Wilden 1987)—as women continue to war politically, socially, at home, work, on the streets, in and out of bedrooms and boardrooms and bathrooms—refusing intelligibility to the very idea of a feminist war game.
