Beautiful Soup: On the Afterlives of Monique Wittig’s Unique Utopias

Monique Wittig was a theorist of lesbianism but she was not really a theorist of sexuality. “Sexual pleasure and sexual modes are not the question,” she noted in 1989.1 For the French philosopher, who lived from 1935 to 2003 and wrote both fiction and nonfiction, heterosexuality is not a name for a kind of human desire at all. For her, pleasureful things are, by definition, not heterosexual—and heterosex may or may not entail having sex. Instead, “heterosex” is the name of a phallocentric social contract that humanity must violently overcome if it ever wants to be free—and lesbian sex (as shown in her novel The Lesbian Body, where utopia-bound dykes literally invade one another’s bodies) is probably an aspect of that violence. She wrote in 1976: “There is but sex that is oppressed, and sex that oppresses.”2 In Wittig’s oeuvre, it isn’t just heterosexualism that is unrelated to jouissance. The rubric “lesbian,” too, conjures something quite other than intrafemale eroticism: not a form of desire but a strategy toward an abolitionist end. She wrote over twenty essays (nearly all in the 1980s and ’90s) establishing her political stakes in supremely quotable machine-gun volleys, while her six fiction works (one of them coauthored with her partner Sande Zeig, one of them a short story collection, all but two of them written before 1976) allow the messy, soft texture of praxis to leak through her analytical project. In both the nonfiction and the fiction, lesbianism is a war, but in the latter texts, it can sometimes also be a gathering, a near-utopian togetherness—a picnic.

Expansive and bellicose, Wittigian lesbianism can comprise all rejections of patriarchal political economy; to be a lesbian denotes the wish for a mode of social reproduction not predicated on the category of sex/gender. Far from a matter of identity or erotic preference, the movement of lesbians is a struggle for subjectivity, for human universalism, for life itself, against the heterosexual order that amounts to the annihilation of the non-man. The straight mind is a prison administration, a cage, a slow genocide, a type of animal husbandry: to be woman in this world—the opposite of a person—is to be the slavish object of basically agricultural imperatives. “Just as one can be forcibly fattened,” her fictive 1985 narrator “Wittig” attests, “so one can similarly be made pregnant”—and routinely bred (or castrated), penned, leashed, raped, cooped, consumed. “Lesbians are not women” because—simply—women are wannabe humans.3 Lesbianism means fightback. And the lesbian artist is the maker of a “war machine” designed to destroy “Woman.”4

Feminist activists burst into the National Women’s Congress in Bern in 1975 to demand the right to abortion.

In 1982, a Paris-based group by the name of Front des Lesbiennes Radicales (Radical Lesbian Front, FLR) papered the streets with posters containing a selection of national statistics and news items concerning patriarchal violence. They proclaimed “a state of emergency” measurable in reported rapes, batterings, and femicides. The FLR’s posters expressly aped the design of national mobilization notices following the outbreak of World War II, but the alert they were sounding was not the threat posed by Nazism proper. Rather, their anti-fascist agitation targeted France’s endemic misogyny. “Rape,” after all, is “an unrecognized fascism,” or so one May Day “lesbian bloc” memorably put it in 1978.5 Citing the fact that men “assault, humiliate, rape and kill women every day,” the FLR signatories—calling themselves “lesbiennes radicales et offensives”—announced themselves personally ready to reciprocate violence in the unacknowledged “war” waged against women everywhere.6 According to the French feminist scholar Ilana Eloit, the surge of “popular justice against rapists” during these years involved public denunciations, leafleting, “spray-bombing their houses or workplaces, and (rarely) assaulting them.” In Lyon, Pau, Strasbourg, Reims, Paris, Saint-Denis, Vienne, and Bordeaux, “vigilante protests” erupted.7 This rise of “martial practices of resistance against rapists” on the “hysterical” lesbian fringes of the Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), Eloit writes, meant that French political lesbians “unbecame women” in the sense theorized by Wittig. That is to say: they briefly made thinkable a gender-abolitionist horizon, beyond the heterosexual socioeconomic system in which “women” and “men” are produced in the first place.8 In other words, the energy of Wittigian gender abolitionism made the leap from theory to praxis in France in this moment, when the MLF’s entrenched heterosexism was interrupted, and female straightness (i.e., innocence, masochism …) violently rejected. All in all, the MLF’s relation to Wittig, both in name and in spirit, can be characterized as one of indebtedness, hostility, and disavowed kinship.

Ironically, the originator of the definition of lesbianism taken up on the streets in 1978—lesbianism as non-womanhood, as the political—was not actually resident in France at this time. Shunned by French feminist circles in 1971, Wittig had long since left the country to live in the United States: according to the French translator and queer trans activist Sam Bourcier, France had totally “silenced Wittig’s work.”9 Some French feminists certainly tried to silence her, yet the vast majority of her non-fiction, and even a majority of her fiction, was published after the attempt to do so.10 Her uncompromisingly abolitionist politics and surrealist dream-visions continued to pour forth for two decades in disparate guises. The exile wrote her fiction in the seventies and began to write much of her nonfiction in English in the eighties, with the uncanny result that her translator, Bourcier, had to “translate a translation”: carrying the bulk of Wittig’s 1992 essay collection The Straight Mind out of an adoptive tongue, over the water, into the author’s own native language.11 Yet Wittig’s theorizing had already found a voice on certain riotous Parisian streets at the end of the seventies. Alongside the lesbian bloc’s rape-as-fascism posters, placards from the FLR-instigated wave of anti-rape action called for an insurgency of “guérillères lesbians against the class of men”—using Wittig’s sixties coinage of a female version of the warrior word “guerrillero.”

At the time of writing, there are signs of guérillère-esque activity all over the globe—such as Black women’s gun clubs, trans self-defense networks, and migrant-led LGBTQIA+ undergrounds—whose martial-arts orientation aligns them Wittigian lesbianism even if participants may not all see themselves as “lesbians against the class of men.” The catalysts for these endeavors are all too obvious. A white-supremacist dictator who is also an avowed “grabber” of “pussy” is once again in control of the United States government, and has frozen funding to thousands of domestic violence shelters, rape crisis centers, and sexual violence prevention programs across the world, while continuing to quash reproductive freedoms domestically—shrinking abortion access especially—and unleashing genocidal policies against trans women and queer children.12 In France, ministerial statistics have reported an average of three (attempted or successful) “conjugal” femicides per day, while in Britain, an “epidemic of violence against women and girls” is worsening (particularly in the form of transmisogynistic attacks). Meanwhile, over a quarter of all women worldwide have suffered “intimate partner violence,” says the United Nations.13

In 2006, Sampat Pal Devi founded the all-female Gulabi Gang in northern India’s impoverished Bundelkhand region after reportedly witnessing a man publicly beat his wife. The gang members sport pink saris and wield bamboo lathis, which Devi and five other women used to thrash the violent husband.

Anti-fascist feminist martial-arts training gyms like Stonewall Self Defense in the US and Solstar in the UK have self-organized in response to these femicidal trends in the last decade. Many of them explicitly hearken back to les guérillères or, more generally, to seventies lesbian principles of collective bodily autonomy and DIY mutual aid. The spirit—and sometimes the letter too—of Wittigian insurrectionism subtly haunts the present age: feminists need not consciously apply Wittig’s thought to be practicing the guérillèrism Wittig that has been introduced into the groundwater of the collective unconscious. From Costa Rica to Iceland to South Korea, trans women and sex workers are attempting to propagate feminist self-defense skills in feminized populations. In India, a number of armed all-women anti-rape neighborhood patrols and vigilante cells, such as the Uttar Pradesh–based Gulabi Gang, have spread since 2006.14 In Wisconsin, the anarchafeminist collective Jane’s Revenge set an antiabortion organization’s offices on fire in response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, graffitiing the message “If abortions aren’t safe, then you aren’t either,” while issuing a communiqué eerily similar to the French one from 1982: “This is not a declaration of war. War has been upon us for decades.”15 In Paris, a transfeminist antifa affinity group claimed responsibility for a physical attack on a book event for the self-described “femalists” (femellistes), anti-trans campaigners and authors of Transmania (2024), Marguerite Stern and Dora Moutot. The group wrote: “We are violent and dangerous because we experience the violence of transphobia, sexism, heterosexuality, and capitalism deep in our flesh.”16 The translator and theorist Shuli Branson’s manifesto “For a Tranarchist Feminism,” written in New York in 2023, holds that “transness itself must be abandoned, along the lines of Monique Wittig’s struggle of women as a class to end Woman as a class.”17

Still, Wittig’s standing in the field of trans theory is (to put it diplomatically) complex. While a number of insurrectionist transfeminists today describe themselves as Wittigians, so do Moutot and Stern—the aforementioned femalists—who imagine that Wittig’s legacy supports their fascistic cissexism.18 For Moutot, Wittig’s famous line from “The Category of Sex” (1976)—“There is but sex that is oppressed, and sex that oppresses”—means, shorn of its context, that trans women are actually men. At the Paris Gay Pride parade at the end of June 2021, an anti-trans group calling itself Résistance Lesbienne temporarily took over the front of the march; they had quoted Wittig on their Facebook page, apparently thinking her work legitimated their transmisogynistic “gender-critical” antics.19 Elements of the original guérillère’s oeuvre have been mined by trans-exclusionary “radical” feminist—TERF—actors today: like all complicated ideas, Wittig’s concepts can be wielded like blunt instruments when stripped of context. Just as undeniable, though, is how unconvincing their necessarily superficial and abrogated appropriation is: by attempting to wield Wittig quotes to exclude trans women from women’s spaces and struggles, TERFs display a grasp of Wittigian abolitionism so poor as to constitute outright misinterpretation. Indeed, TERFism desires the “sex war” in order to securitize and ontologize sex, not, à la Wittig, to positively supersede it. The misrepresentation may even be a conscious choice. Wittig’s line that comes right before Moutot’s favored sentence (but which she omits)? “There is no sex.”20

At the same time, as we have already seen, it is eminently possible, as the American scholar Blase Provitola contends, to “harness Wittigian lesbianism to combat transphobia and transmisogyny” in sustained and substantial ways.21 This appropriation of her work toward anti-cis ends, I submit, is especially true when decolonial scholars inaugurate comradely critiques of Wittig’s work regarding her inattention to questions of coloniality and racialization. On this front we have lately seen critical, creative efforts to combine her abolitionist heuristics with other, race-critical feminist materialisms that are attentive to processes of “ungendering” and non-cis modes of maternality, such as those of Hortense Spillers, María Lugones, Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, and C. Riley Snorton. In anglophone critical theory, the scholars Alyson Escalante and Alyosxa Tudor undertake a version of this project of decolonizing Wittig in their essays “On Women as a Class” and “Im/possibilities of Refusing and Choosing Gender,” respectively.22 Other notable transfeminist engagements with Wittig have been offered in recent years by the Marxist theorist Jules Joanne Gleeson, who painstakingly shows why the goal of abolition, as defined by Wittig, would assuredly “be furthered by inclusion of trans women in that category as currently constituted.”23

Greer Lankton is standing in front of her ‘Birthday Party’ scene at the opening of Greer Lankton and Anne Jepsen at Civilian Warfare, November 1985.

For a whole new cohort of materialist transfeminists—Maja Pan, Nsambu Za Suekama, and Friederike Beier, to name a few more—Wittig’s framework is a generative toolkit for making incisions into capitalist sexuo-political economy. Wittig’s was always already a “queer-trans-feminism.”24 One of her central propositions, as I have already intimated, is that sexuation doesn’t precede patriarchy: “It is oppression that creates sex, and not the contrary.”25 Conversely, among today’s so-called “gender-critical” or TERF cisfeminists, it is a central tenet, and meme, that “sex is why women are oppressed.”26 In short, there is much to celebrate in the reclamation of materialism, the renewed refusal to “throw the materialist baby out with the TERF bathwater,” even if—as Provitola cautions—there is no need to make this body of work’s “true” stance toward trans people the terrain of battle in the first place. Provitola: “Instead of poring over Wittig’s writings for evidence that she was either definitively a TERF or transfeminist, let us instead ask what her work can do.”27

One thing Wittig’s work can do is show that utopia is immanent even within the dystopian present, even as the route to that utopia remains heartbreakingly elusive. In particular, it is her novel Across the Acheron (1985) that wrestles with this difficulty—of knowing what to do, where to go, how to win, even as a life worth living is already here, hiding in the body. It is her last novel, and could be mistaken for her bitterest. Wittig’s earlier so-called “pronominal trilogy” (novels innovating three different neo-pronouns)—L’Opoponax (1964), Les Guérillères (1969), and Le Corps Lesbien (1973)—features plentiful scenes of blood swallowing, carotid spurting, and “blood on the chairs and brains sticking to the wood of the tables.”28 L’Opoponax chronicles the righteous revolt of a girl in a convent school, Les Guérillères describes the revolutionary war of a tribe of lesbians, and Le Corps Lesbien details the dismembering love-acts practiced by a mythic lesbian island society. The subsequent slim experimental anti-Virgilian pastiche Across the Acheron (in French: Virgile, Non) is not any less violent and carnal than these predecessors: indeed, it brims with stomach-turning gore. Rather, this time the violence is often senseless, and only rarely insurrectionary. This turn telegraphs a shift in Wittig’s attitude to insurgent militancy: her view of it had become more ambivalent, complicated, and somber.

The scene is set in 1980s San Francisco, on a tour led by a lesbian through a many-circled queer hell akin to Dante’s Inferno—one interspersed with sites of purgatory and paradise. Brutal flayings, “chunks of bodies,” and “piles of corpses” await in this hell, but whereas visceral crimsons made up the core palette of Wittig’s novels from the beginning, what is newly prominent in this final literary offering is the icy color of despair. For all that bleakness, this does not bespeak an abandonment of utopianism.

Wittig’s predominantly despairing tone in Across the Acheron is connected in large part with women’s complicities and investments in male supremacy. In the world of this novel, the class of Women is mired in a passive torpor, totally acquiescent to its woman-ization, meaning dehumanization. How can a radical lesbian like “Wittig” (Wittig’s alter ego inside the novel, purpose-built for the occasion) wake them up? Madness, rage, confusion, and hopelessness stalk Across the Acheron, for this is a tour of San Francisco, a legendary bastion of sexual radicalism and progressivism, here portrayed as a microcosm of Western patriarchy at its most insidious.

To interpret a famously leftist countercultural landscape as a hellish prison house overflowing with nightmares is an outlandish, sometimes downright ridiculous, perhaps even pointedly sarcastic endeavor, as Wittig’s self-mocking tone frequently seems to acknowledge. The chivalric self-importance of the women’s liberationist inquisitor teeters constantly on the brink of bathos. Who can fathom it? Nobody wants to hear the lesbian truth! “Many buckets of water are poured over my head in the middle of San Francisco,” proclaims the narrator-wanderer, martyr-like. Local residents are oddly uncharmed—surely not unmoved?!—by the consciousness-raising songs that the self-liberated “runaway slave” sends forth “under the closed windows” of the hip American city. Why do they spurn her, when they know she is right? Maybe they can’t hear her properly? “The women are behind walls,” after all, and “as long as there is no access to their dwellings it’s impossible to be of any use to them.” Nonetheless, “I walk singing,” our self-styled troubadour (or trouvère) declares grandiosely, “like Blondel de Nesle in his search for Richard the Lionheart.” (According to the legend, the supremely loyal twelfth-century minstrel Blondel traveled vast distances in an attempt to find and free King Richard I of England, singing songs that only he—the cherished master—would recognize.) Here, of course, the captive beloved whom the nomadic lesbian is searching for, hoping to liberate them, also stands in for us, the reader. By likening her protagonist’s quest to a medieval romance about a devoted vassal deep in enemy territory, Wittig is surely lightly satirizing herself, even as she extends a deadly serious invitation to her readers: Are you capable of recognizing the melody? Is your heart, in other words, that of a lion?

The “music” that Blondel/“Wittig” wants the denizens of hell to hear is literally maddening. You are a slave! this lesbian troubadour essentially screams at the “creatures” she encounters, over and over—You are living in a ceaseless holocaust! When the book first appeared in English, Publisher’s Weekly aptly described it as “a Guernica of the human (feminist) condition.”29 True enough: much as Picasso evoked a descent into madness in his depiction of fascist bombardment—an elongated tableau of grotesquely distorted, jumbled suffering forms—Wittig, in 1985, graphically expresses the psychotic precipice that any feminist onlooker necessarily approaches when bearing witness to man-made infernos. Hell is here and now, it’s where we live, her avatar thunders. At the metatextual level, Wittig makes this basic point, as mentioned, by parodying the plot of the fourteenth-century Divine Comedy: in place of Alighieri’s next-realm punishments, her pointedly politicized twentieth-century version showcases the degradations, false consciousnesses, and tortures endured by women in this life. Wandering in the wreckage of the defeated 1968 decade, “Wittig” sees through the historic seat of flower power, into its underlying architecture of internalized misogyny and sexual servitude. The resulting ghoulish safari leads through a human shooting range, a concentration camp, a chattel auction, massacres, lynchings. When the protagonist helplessly asks, “Am I destined to visit all the charnel houses in this bloody place?” it is likely that the reader can commiserate, regardless of whether we share her bafflement, impatience, or disgust.

Instead of the two grand philosophical men of the Divine Comedy, Wittig’s protagonists are rifle-wielding guérillères who espouse a highly nonpassive approach to the sufferings on display. They are braver and more principled, but they are also macho and ridiculous in their own way, congratulating themselves repeatedly on their own enlightenment or debating how best to maintain calm—privileged escapees from heterosexuality—in the face of others’ inexplicable love of unfreedom. Dante and his classical guide merely look at what they encounter, but these non-“servile” lesbians open fire on slavers, disrupt business as usual, and attempt to free the not-always-grateful “slaves” at every opportunity. (The novel’s original title, No to Virgil or Virgil, No, succinctly captures Wittig’s critical negation of the Inferno’s spectatorial attitude.) Judgment, albeit secular judgment, is meted out in spades. There are stops in Limbo and Paradise, rotating at random so as to offer “Wittig” brief interludes of relief and respite from Hell. Exhibits in the latter category include a laundromat where housewives scream abuse at the narrator’s grotesquely mutating lesbian body; a train station where “poor creatures” stampede to be mowed and mangled by an approaching locomotive; and a town square where “damned souls,” collared and leashed, are promenaded by their captors, protesting all the while that they “like being on a leash.” Narratorial derision is often, in this way, reserved more for the “servile” populations of non-lesbians in each scene—likened variously to “automatons” and “groups of hens busy pecking”—than for their tormentors. Lesbianism’s hated enemy is evidently not only the class of merchants, hunters, and bankers “amusing themselves with their cudgels, rifles and bombs,” but also the homophobic laundry patrons, victim-like masochists, and feminist pseudo-radicals (“bicephalics,” two-faced intellectuals) illustrated in the course of the mission. “It is clear,” writes James Douglas Davis delicately, “that Wittig expresses through her literary doppelgänger Wittig her chagrin over the failure of certain members of her gender to participate collectively in uprising against the male hegemony.”30 “Loathing” might be an apter word.

Gille Wittig and Monique Wittig. Photo: Irene Bouaziz, 1974.

To the novel’s credit, “Manastabal,” the Virgil-equivalent figure, brusquely chastises “Wittig” for her ideological and spiritual shortcomings on more than one occasion (quite unlike the legendarily “gentle” Virgil in the Divine Comedy). It appears that the tourist richly deserves these remonstrances, since she comes across as a rather ignoble character, all in all: far from unbreakable, anything but indefatigable, and downright reactionary in the face of the town’s disappointing degree of sex-class consciousness. “Wittig” actively tries to abandon the mission several times, only to receive an earful of stern reproach: when you work to free the damned, “you’re also working for yourself,” as Manastabal reminds her, “for all liberty is precarious,” and all struggles interconnected. A line is likely crossed (for the reader) when “Wittig” goes so far as to say—of the nonfeminist women of San Francisco—that she thinks “death is a deliverance when degradation has reached this level”: “It would be better for them to be dead.” For this, Manastabal excoriates her “absolute lack of morality,” and tells her she has “no right to crush the souls we encounter with your personal judgment.” Yet the contemptuous “Wittig,” unchastened and defensive, only doubles down, shamelessly professing violent urges and an impulse to “maltreat the souls who are now souls in name only.” The imperial-feminist desire to forcibly liberate women from violence and “bring them back to life” has grown so consuming that it leads, when thwarted, directly to the wish to send ungrateful women to their deaths—to do violence oneself to the disgusting and stubborn mass of unliberated womankind.

Try as “Wittig” might to differentiate herself from her female enemies and repudiators (“My make-up is such that I haven’t the slightest understanding of servility …”), the solidaritous response-abilities of the liquid physical body constantly betray and muddle this self-exceptionalism. Whenever empathy “freeze[s] the blood in my veins,” or threatens to split “my chest and skull” in pain, or makes her “flesh creep,” our antiheroine is uncomfortably reminded that all these “victims” she sometimes wishes dead are “beings of flesh and blood like myself”: inextricably co-imbricated and interdependently connected. If even one “wretched woman” remains “embedded in the flesh of slavery,” then, in a sense, so do we all: every human flesh will be “slave flesh” together, or none will, by virtue of blood’s promiscuity. Indeed, as the British scholar Elliot Evans mentions in his monograph on the body’s “queer permeability” in French queer thought, the metaphor of uncontrolled blood flow—hemorrhage—undergirds Across the Acheron’s account of how collective abolitionist subjects come into being. It is as though accessing a post-patriarchal world will require us to bleed out, or bleed forth, or bleed into one another: “Finding the words for Paradise,” writes Evans about Wittig’s fiction, “is linked to the violent image of hemorrhage (bleeding).”31 Conversely, when the words required to conjure a revolutionary collective subject fail, it is “like a hemorrhage in reverse” (a phrase that occurs twice in the text). The worst thing we could do would be to staunch or stop the bleeding of the revolutionary war. Lesbian revolution becomes apprehensible—sensible—as an as-yet-unknown universal language made up of all humanity’s commingled blood.

Not everyone is willing to give their blood (yet). Thus the radically unresolved question How can feminism’s collective subject face reality, yet stave off nihilism? lingers at the heart of Across the Acheron’s purposive insanity, its embrace of the psychosis commonly known as hope. “Wittig’s utopia mingles fiction with history,” noted Marthe Rosenfeld in 1980.32 The real and the ideal bleed into one another. Reprieves in Paradise and Limbo have been seeping through our ostensibly nihilistic account of society like plasma through a body full of veins containing the flows of the past, the present, and the future all at once. Ultimately, rather than position the beloved post-patriarchy community in the untouchable, theoretical plane of the future, Wittig suggests that the surreally familiar ambience of heaven is already happening just down the street from where we live today, at a picnic spot under the Golden Gate Bridge full of post-gender beings carrying fruit or stirring a giant tureen. This is the “Angel’s Kitchen,” where the narrative culminates: an open-air dining space with birds overhead. Divine motorcyclists play sweet music, singing the words of the Mock Turtle’s hymnal from Alice in Wonderland—“soup of the evening, beautiful soup”—in a prismatic, crepuscular scene of heaped delicacies and herbal fragrance. There was perhaps never any need, it turns out, to cross the Underworld’s dread river to reach this multispecies tea party. Preparations for the feast have long been underway. Utopia can be here and now, ours for the taking, if we open our veins to one another and unbecome whatever it is we think we are.