Monique the freedman

His name will probably mean nothing to the general public, but he has been circulating for years in feminist and lesbian circles.

Born in 1935 into a modest and conservative family, Monique Wittig burst onto the literary scene at the age of 29 with "L'Opoponax" (1964, Midnight) which recounts the love of one child for another.

The book won the Prix Médicis in France.

Will follow "Les Guérillères" (1969) and "Le Corps lesbien" (1973), an essay which has just been reissued.

In these texts, she works on pronouns.

Arguing that the masculine has appropriated the universal, she pleads for a use of "we" and that words such as + man + and + woman + be removed.

Beyond pronouns, she wants to free herself from norms: masculine or feminine, literature or essay...

"She did not want to choose between literature and theory and put literature in theory and vice versa", deciphers for AFP the writer Emilie Notéris who dedicated the book "Wittig" to her (2022, ed . Les Pérégrines), a kind of "draft for a biography", according to him.

From MLF to exile

On August 26, 1970, she was one of the handful of activists who laid a wreath in memory of the wife of the unknown soldier under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, in what was the founding act of the French feminist movement MLF (Mouvement women's liberation).

Six years later, she left France for the United States.

The reason ?

Deep ideological differences with his MLF comrades.

According to Wittig, the struggle involves questioning heterosexuality as a model of society.

At the MLF, "Monique Wittig was confronted with the limits of what it was acceptable to think in a framework circumscribing lesbianism to a simple sexuality", assures AFP Dominique Bourque, professor at the Institute of Feminist Studies and genre and the French department of the University of Ottawa.

It is this dividing line, between on the one hand the revolutionary vision - which some will consider radical - of Monique Wittig on a heterosexual system (dominated by men) to be fought via political lesbianism and that of the militants of the MLF who only see lesbianism as a sexual orientation, which will isolate the writer.

She was "set aside and made invisible", affirms to AFP the journalist, feminist activist and elected mayor of Paris Alice Coffin, who says she only discovered her thought "lately".

She was also inspired by the work of Monique Wittig in her successful essay "The lesbian genius", in 2020. Grasset).

heiresses

Once in the United States, Monique Wittig taught at the university and wrote texts such as "La Pensée straight", published in English in 1992. However, recalls Emilie Notéris, her life "was far from easy. did not know glory, on the contrary, it was a life of struggle".

It was not until the 2000s that his thought circulated a little more widely in France thanks to activists who did not hesitate to quote his texts.

Thus in 2019, the writers Virginie Despentes and Anne Garréta accompanied by the historian Laure Murat, the editor Suzette Robichon and the performer Rébecca Chaillon made a public reading of "Guérillères" at the House of poetry, in Paris.

It also influences novels such as Wendy Delorme's "The Time of Fire Will Come" or Juliet Drouar's "Sortir de l'hétérosexualité" book.

For Dominique Bourque, the evolution of society and mentalities "have made it possible to highlight his career and his works".

A rediscovery linked to the fact that "post-MeToo feminism is no longer afraid to point out men by refusing a discourse of complementarity between men and women, which political lesbianism has always done", abounds Alice Coffin.

© 2023 AFP