'About “One is not born a woman” by Monique Witting Essay\r'

'Monique Wittig was born(p) in July 3, 1935 in the Haut Rhin departwork forcet in Alsace. She moved to Paris in the 1950s, where she studied at the Sorbonne. Her maiden novel, L’Opoponax, published by Minuit in 1964, immediately drew financial aid to her when it was awarded the Prix Médicis by a jury that included Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. Praised by such(prenominal) influential writers, the novel was quickly translated into incline, where it similarly won captious acclaim.\r\nWittig became really involved in the events touch the disintegration of students and workers in may of 1968. Like umteen others, she realized that the mathematical group workforce returning the revolt were non inclined to sh atomic number 18 leadership. Wittig was mavin of the first theoreticians and activists of the new feminist move handst.\r\nIt was in this atmosphere of radical political action that she completed what is often considered her most in fluential work †Les Guérillèreticuloendothelial scheme †published in 1969. Revolutionary both in form and content, this novel has been widely translated, debated, and used as a source of ideas by compositiony major(ip) feminist and sapphic thinkers and writers around the world.\r\nIn May 1970, Wittig co-published what deal be described as the pronuncia custodyto of the French feminist move handst. Ever since, Wittig’s kit and boodle have included both fiction and non-fiction attempts evolving an ongoing dialogue between theory and literary practice. end-to-end the proto(prenominal) ’70s, Wittig was a central figure in the radical lesbian and feminist movements in France. She was a founding member of such groups as the Petites Marguérites, the Gouines rouges, and the Féministes révolutionnaires.\r\nIn 1973 she published Le corps lesbien (translated into English in 1975 as The Lesbian Body), and in 1976 Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (translated into English in 1979 as Lesbian Peoples: Material For A Dictionary), co-authored by her fellow Sande Zeig. In 1976 Wittig and Zeig moved to the United States.\r\nFrom that time on, Wittig turned her attention increasingly toward theoretical works, and a flesh of her most famous essays date from the late ’70s and early 80s. In a variety of genres ranging from the philosophical essay (â€Å"The Straight Mind”) to the parable (â€Å"Les Tchiches et les Tchouches”) she explored the intersections of lesbianism, feminism, and literary form.\r\n about of these essays were published in two journals. She became part of the newspaper column collective of France’s major theoretical journal, Questions féministes, and she was advisory editor to an American journal, Feminist Issues, founded in part to make available in English the important works existence published in France, nonably in Questions Féministes. Her work became genuinely bi -lingual, as she translated her own work from English into French, and vice-versa.\r\nShe also translated Djuna Barnes’s Spillway as La Passion. anterior translations include Marcuse’s angiotensin-converting enzyme-Dimensional Man and the Portugese The leash Marias’ Nouvelles lettres portugaises. She was a professor in women’s studies and French at theUniversity of Arizona in Tucson, where she died of a mall attack on January 3, 2003. Monique Wittig called herself a â€Å"Radical lesbian.”[5] This sensitiveness can be found throughout her books, where she represent wholly women.\r\nTo avoid all confusion, she stated: â€Å" in that respect is no such thing as women belles-lettres for me, that does non exist. In literature, I do non separate women and men. One is a writer, or matchless is non. This is a mental space where call forth is non determining. One has to have some space for freedom. lyric allows this. This is about building an idea of the neutral which could carry sexuality”.\r\nA theorist of material feminism, she stigmatised the legend of â€Å"the muliebrityhood”, called heterosexuality a political regime, and depict the basis for a cordial contract which lesbians withstand: â€Å"…and it would be incorrect to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has thinking only in heterosexual transcriptions of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” (1978)\r\nFor Wittig, the syndicate â€Å"woman” exists only through its coition to the category â€Å"man”, and â€Å"woman” without apprisal to â€Å"man” would cease to exist. Wittig also developed a critical view of Marxism which obstructed the feminist struggle, except also of feminism itself which does not question the heterosexual dogma. done these critiques, Wittig advocated a strong universalist position, saying that the evolve of the soulfulness(a) and the chemise of desire require the abolishment of gender categories.\r\nMain Idea\r\nSimone de Beauvoir said: â€Å"One is not born, but becomes a woman”. Wittig states that on that point is no â€Å" born(p) woman” and that the idea of organism feminine is created by society. She also notes that since a lesbian society does exist, this defeats the idea of â€Å" inseparable woman.” However, Wittig recognizes that many mountain still believe the oppression of women is â€Å"biological as well as historical”. Wittig explains further that this could never be a lesbian approach to women’s oppression because it is based on the idea that the root system of society is heterosexuality.\r\nAlso, biology or the capability of having children is not enough to define Woman. Wittig also discusses the idea that sex is like race in the sense that it is visible and therefore seems to be recollective to some kind of nat ural crop. This leads to the lesbian perspective that this perception of Woman is very â€Å"unnatural” because it was created and based originally the women’s liberation movement. Wittig states: â€Å"To withstand to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man” .\r\nMeaning, that refusing to â€Å"be a woman” is exactly just refusing to acquire imposed ideas of femininity. She also clarifies: â€Å"Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a ware of society, not a product of personality, for there is no nature is society” It is not enough to simply promote women (â€Å"woman is wonderful” concept); it is the idea of being a man or a woman â€Å"which are political categories and not natural splitns” that necessarily to be rejected.\r\nA materialist feminist approach sees women and men as separate sectionalizationes. therefore, the goal is â€Å"to suppress men as a chassis, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle” . This delegacy that if there was no longer a relegate called â€Å"men,” there would no longer be a screen called â€Å"women.” The first step would be to part the myth of Woman. Wittig states that â€Å"‘woman’ is there to confuse us, to extend the reality ‘women’” . She believes that the new focus would be on personal identity.\r\nWittig also presents a Marxist perspective. She states that Marxism lead to two results for women: the order of men and women was assumed to be natural and the conflict between men and women was hide behind a â€Å"natural division of travail”. Also, if women united it would threaten the strength of the people in a Marxist society.\r\nWittig concludes by calling attention again to the rejection of the myth of Woman. She believes that the categories of sex must be destroyed and that all sciences that use these descriptions should also be re jected. She again comes back to the model of lesbianism; she states that this is the only category that goes beyond woman and man currently. So, in order to reject this myth of Woman we must destroy â€Å"heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression”\r\nLiterary Evidence\r\nHer discussion is based on Simone de Beauvoir’s quote: â€Å"One is not born a woman, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines the figure that the human feminine presents in society: it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between male and eunuch (a man who has been castrated), which is described as feminine”. â€Å"not only is this conception still imprisoned in the categories of sex (woman and man), but it holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth is what defines a woman”\ r\nâ€Å"Before the socioeconomic reality of moody slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in this modernistic meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families” â€Å"But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an imaginary formation, which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived.\r\nThey are seen as black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.” ….said to belong to a natural order.” â€Å"To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one has to become a man [referring to lesbians]……. Thus a lesbian has to be something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of nature, for there is no nature in society.â €\r\nâ€Å"The refusal to become (or to remain) heterosexual always meant to refuse to become a man or a woman, consciously or not. For a lesbian, this goes further…. It is the refusal of the economic, ideologic and political power of a man.” â€Å"… Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the foolish consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which sort good and using them as a definition for women….. defining women the best features (best according to whom?) which oppression has given(p) us, and it does not radically question the categories â€Å"man” and â€Å"woman”, which are political categories and not natural givens.”\r\nFeminist- â€Å" psyche who fights for women as a folk and for the disappearance of this class… Someone who fights for woman and her defense-for the myth, then, its reinforcement.” Early feminism †â€Å"…fo r them these features where natural and biological rather than social. They adopted the Darwinist theory of evolution.\r\nThey did not believe like Darwin however that women were less evolved than men, but they did believe that male and female natures had diverged in the division of evolutionary development…” â€Å"Our fight aims to suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political struggle. Once the class â€Å"men” disappears, â€Å"women” as a class pull up stakes disappear as well, for there are no slaves without masters”. â€Å"But to become a class we do not have to suppress our individual selves, and since no individual can be cut to her/his oppression we are also confronted with the historical exigency of constituting ourselves as the individual subjects of our history as well.”\r\nâ€Å"There is no possible fight for someone disadvantaged of an identity…” Speaking of Marxism †â€Å"For women, Ma rxism had two results. It prevented them from being awake that they are a class and therefore from constituting themselves as a class for a very long time, by leaving the relation, â€Å"women/men” outside of the social order, by turning into a natural relation… Marxist theory does not allow women any more than other classes of oppressed people to construct themselves as historical subjects, because Marxism does not take into narration the fact that a class also consists of individuals one by one.”\r\nâ€Å"The opposite is also true; without class and class consciousness there are no real subjects, only alienated individuals….. The advent of individual subjects demands first destroying the categories of sex.” â€Å"We are escapees from our own class in the same way as the American walkaway slaves were then escaping slavery and becoming free” â€Å"This can be accomplished only by the expiry of heterosexuality as a social system which is b ased on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between sexes to justify this oppression.”\r\n advert to previous readings\r\nWomen’s Time †Julia Kristeva (giving birth as a realization of womanhood) The Laugh of the Medusa †Cixous (beauty myth)\r\n'