ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Monique Wittig, a feminist thinker. While a student in Paris, Wittig became deeply involved in the radical worker and student movements associated with May 1968. Although Wittig shared some views of the older generation of famous feminist philosophers and writers, including Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras, her literary and political voice developed in ways that were radically unprecedented and uniquely her own. A central concern that Wittig shares with feminists of Beauvoir's generation is how to make visible and critique the widely accepted view that "men" and "women" are natural categories of gender identity as they are given in the biology of sex difference. Like Beauvoir, Wittig recognizes that "man" and "human being" have an equivalent status that, far from gender neutral, relegates women qua females to the sexed body and thus to the "particular".
