MONIQUE WITTIG

The French novelist, poet, and social theorist Monique Wittig was a founding member in the feminist movement that emerged in late-1960s France. Her literary and theoretical works are today recognized for their essential contributions to feminist theory and lesbian and gay theory worldwide, as well as to the movement for lesbian and gay rights.

Wittig won major critical acclaim and the coveted Prix Médicis with her first novel, The Opoponax (1964). A sensitivity to the nuances of language, and in particular its encoding of gender, marked all of her fiction: Les Guérillères (1969), The Lesbian Body (1973), Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary (co-authored with Sande Zeig, 1975), and Virgile, non (1984; translated as Across the Acheron, 1987). These works offered a powerful illustration of her philosophy of lesbian materialism, a theoretical position she set forth in a series of essays collected in The Straight Mind (1992), a term she coined.

Wittig’s work has been translated into a dozen languages, including German, Dutch, Finnish, Japanese, and Spanish. Her collaboration with Zeig resulted most recently in a feature film based on her short story, “The Girl” (2001), directed by Zeig. Monique Wittig was a professor at the University of Arizona, Tucson.