ABSTRACT
The work of Monique Wittig is widely known for its original combination of literary innovations and radical lesbian politics. A prominent figure in the French feminist movement of the early 1970s, Wittig emigrated to the United States in 1976. As a writer, her main concern is to dismantle language in its patriarchal forms and to reconstruct it from a lesbian perspective. To this end, she appropriates and transforms works by male authors, conventional genres and patriarchal mythologies. Unlike the practitioners of écriture féminine, however, Wittig does not celebrate ‘the feminine’, but aims to abolish sex and gender categories, as discussed in her theoretical work The Straight Mind and Other Essays.
