Adrienne Rich and Monique Wittig (or, Chloë and Olivia, the sequel)

Like Woolf and Cixous, both Rich and Wittig are first and foremost creative writers -- Rich a poet, Wittig a French-language novelist -- who are also feminist activists and theorists. Unlike Cixous and Woolf, though, Rich and Wittig don't write theory in a way that seems stylistically continuous with fiction or poetry. This isn't to say that they don't write movingly or take advantage of particular figurative and rhetorical devices in their prose--see Rich's rather stunning description of "the queasy strobe light" of compulsory heterosexuality that "flickers across and distorts our lives," for example (1607) -- yet it does seem fair to say that their writing violates fewer of the conventional norms for discursive prose: we'll find no imaginary Manx cats, no enthusiastic evocations of masturbation, no "pwetty eyes" (1958). Since we've discussed the value of these literary strategies for theory while looking at Woolf and Cixous, one overall question for us on Friday would be about the relative and tactical pros and cons of abandoning such stylistic experiments.


Adrienne Rich, "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence"
Like Johnson, both Rich and Wittig give us, in their extensive footnotes, a sense of how wide-ranging and various the projects of feminist and queer scholarship had become by the early '80s: the graduates of Newnham and Girton had by this time more than taken up the suggestions for future research made by Woolf in Room.

Adrienne Rich

Unlike Johnson, though -- remember that her essay was written later, in 1998 -- both Wittig and especially Rich write at a moment when the women's movement and, a fortiori, the gay rights movement felt the gains made since The Feminine Mystique (1963) to be far from secure. The late '70s had seen Anita Bryant gain a national audience for her "Save Our Children" campaign, which sought to save children not from hunger or poor schools but from gays with civil rights. ("If homosexuals are allowed civil rights, then so would [sic] prostitutes, or thieves, or anyone else" -- see the video below; skip to a minute or so in for the original footage of Bryant). The Equal Rights Amendment (see Lorde 119) was dead in the water by 1981, after what had seemed like its nearly inevitable ratification in the previous decade. Ronald Reagan had won the 1980 presidential election on a "family values" platform that most feminists and gays felt to be inimical to their causes.

Rich's essay has the ambitious goal of contextualizing female heterosexuality within an array of social, political, and economic practices, ranging from sex trafficking to advertising to pornography to workplace harassment and unequal pay. Foucault argues that "power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere" (93). Rich's essay at once tries to enumerate a set of under-observed sources of male and heterosexual, and (thereby) to make possible a strategy within the feminist movement to resist and transform these sources. This strategy of naming unspoken things is, of course, also Friedan's; Rich borrows a formulation of it--I think, though the footnote placement is odd--from Kathleen Barry, Female Sexual Slavery:

Until we name the practice, give conceptual definition and form to it, illustrate its life over time and in space, those who are its most obvious victims will also not be able to name it or define their experience. (quoted N 1600)

We should think, then, about the usefulness (and limitations) of some of Rich's chosen terms. Two of her major innovations in this regard are "lesbian existence" and "lesbian continuum." Rich prefers "lesbian existence" to "lesbianism," she says, because the latter "a clinical and limiting ring" (1603). What advantages does she see in the term "lesbian existence"? Do these seem convincing to you?

"Lesbian continuum," Rich writes, is meant to suggest "a range...of woman-identified experience," including "forms of primary intensity" that don't arise from sexual acts between women (1603-4). Rich's tactic here, we might say, is to loosen the conceptual tie between "lesbian" and any particular kind of sexual aim or object. Again, what are the gains of this strategy? (We should be sure to get clear about the meaning of "woman-identified" and "male-identified" in this context as well--we rather hurried past these important terms while discussing Lorde).

Considering more broadly the place of sexuality in Rich's essay, we might compare her description of the "erotic in female terms" to Cixous's. Here's Rich:

...as we delineate a lesbian continuum, we begin to discover the erotic in female terms: as that which is unconfined to any single part of the body or solely to the body itself; as an energy not only diffuse but, as Audre Lorde has described it, omnipresent in "the sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic," and in the sharing of work; as the empowering joy which "makes us less willing to accet powerlessness..." (1604)

And here's a similar moment from "The Laugh of the Medusa":

I have been amazed more than once by a description a woman gave me of a world all her own which she had been secretly haunting since early childhood. A world of searching, the elaboration of knowledge on the basis of a systematic experimentation with the bodily functions, a passionate and precise interrogation of her ertogeneity. This practice, extraordinarily rich and inventive, in particular as concerns masturbation, is prolonged or accompanied by a production of forms, a veritable aesthetic activity, each stage of rapture inscribing a resonant vision, a composition, something beautiful. (1943)

These moments are similar in that both Rich and Cixous object, as they elsewhere in their essays, to a typically male imagining of sexuality as fetishistically localized in the genitals; they see female eroticism as more diffuse, more "polymorphous" (to use Freud's term, though with a different value). What are the important differences between these passages, though, in terms of emphasis and style? What different conclusions do Rich and Cixous draw from fundamentally similar ideas about a distinctively feminine sexuality?

Sexual violence: Finally, Rich brings into the foreground the issue of sexual violence between men and women, in the forms of forced prostitution, sexual abuse, rape, and harassment.

While we haven't focused on these issues as of yet, it's worth recalling here that the place of sadism and masochism in sexual behavior were already problems for Freud in The Three Essays: sadism and masochism are "the most common and the most significant of all the perversions" (23), and they "occupy a special position among the perversions, since the contrast between activity and passivity which lies behind them is among the universal characteristics of sexual life" (25). What's striking here is that, rather as Freud saw homosexuality as a special kind of preference but also a latent potential within every person ("original bisexuality"), here he seems unable to decide whether sadism and masochism are special kinds of sexuality or tendencies inherent to all sexuality whatsoever.

Drawing on the scholarship of Catherine MacKinnon, Rich calls into question the distinctions between (heterosexual) sex and violence underlying contemporary studies of rape (see 1598-99). Whereas Freud observes the pervasiveness of an aggressive component to sexual behavior, which he sees as more often (though not exclusively) characteristic of men than of women, Rich is interested in the concrete effects of male sexuality as a form of socially sanctioned aggression. Against those who would see rape as violence and intercourse as sexuality, Rich argues (following MacKinnon) that perhaps all intercourse is rape, that it's difficult to tell the difference between them.

Compulsion, Desire, Violence, Consent: This brings us to what is perhaps the central raised by Rich's argument: what does she mean by saying that heterosexuality is "compulsory," that women live "in the absence of choice" (1609) in the matter? Clearly, Rich can't mean that no women can choose to have sex with other women, or that no women are able to love other women. It does sound here, though, as if she's saying that no woman can choose to be heterosexual. Is that indeed her argument?

Here's a thought experiment that might help us sort out her claim: You crave almond butter. You go to the grocery store to find no almond butter, but only a shelf full of Skippy peanut butter -- creamy, not chunky. It costs $50 per jar. You ask the store manager if there's any almond butter, or even some other kind of peanut butter--with a bit less sugar, perhaps. No luck. You can, though, buy a bag of unshelled almonds for $1000, and grind them into almond butter yourself. Your choice. Or is it? What, in other words, are the conditions of possibility for choice, or for consent?

Monique Wittig, "One is Not Born a Woman"
Though deeply critical of the naturalization of gender roles in the text of Marx and in Marxist practice, Wittig's "One is Not Born a Woman" makes an argument about women patterned on Marx's argument about the proletariat (or working-class): Just as the proletariat must become conscious of itself as a class in order to bring about a classless society, so must women become conscious of themselves as a (non-natural, socially constructed) class in order to bring about a sexless society--a society without "men" or "women":

What does "feminist" mean? Feminist is formed with the word "femme," "woman," and means: someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. (1909)

Yet Wittig notes that many feminists don't understand feminism in this way in practice: "For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense--for the myth, then, and its reenforcement" (1909). We've seen Barbara Johnson articulate a version of the impasse that Wittig struggles with here:

...deconstruction introduces a fissure between "woman" as a concept that can never be a proper name for all women and "feminism" as a movement that must -- but cannot -- consider "woman" as an epistemological ground for action. (Johnson, 7)

Feminism requires some concept of "woman," but is also dedicated to changing the entrenched and stereotyped versions of that concept. Wittig goes a step further in seeking not a change but an end to the concept. In doing so, she asserts that "the capacity to give birth (biology)" should not be seen to define women, because this "naturalize[s] history" (1907), mistakes the made for the given. This places her at odds with varieties of feminism that seek to define woman or femininity affirmatively, or to use female specificity as a psychological or political resource:

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 than the refusal of the role "woman." It is the refusal of the economic, ideological, and political power of a man. This, we lesbians, and nonlesbians as well, knew before the beginning of the lesbian and feminist movement. However, as Andrea Dworkin emphasizes, many lesbians recently "have increasingly tried to transform the very ideology that has enslaved us into a dynamic, religious, psychologically compelling celebration of female biological potential. Thus, some avenues of the feminist and lesbian movement lead us back to the myth of woman which was created by men especially for us, and with it we sink back into a natural group. (1909-10) 

We might wonder, here, how Wittig and Cixous would respond to each other, given that Cixous sometimes does indeed celebrate a specifically feminine sexuality:

Bring the other to life. Women know how to live detachment; giving birth is neither losing nor increasing. It's adding to life an other. Am I dreaming? Am I mis-recognizing? You, the defenders of "theory," the sacrosanct yes-men of Concept, enthroners of the phallus (but not of the penis): Once more you'll say that all this smacks of "idealism," or what's worse, you'll splutter that I'm a "mystic." (Cixous, 1957)

Is Wittig one of the "yes-men of the Concept"? Is Cixous a mystic? How might we understand the (apparent?) conflict between their feminisms?

For Wittig, the category that escapes the historical legacy of sexism and heterosexism embedded in the categories of "man" and "woman" is "lesbian":

Lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, or politically, or ideologically. (1912)

I don't want to overplay the differences and conflicts among the theories of Cixous, Rich, and Wittig: surely they have a great deal of common ground, and would agree about many practical matters of social and political reform. Yet in this last quote, Wittig, whose arguments are in some ways so resonant with those of Rich, would seem to be at odds with her: if for Rich a lesbian is the quintessentially woman-identified woman, it seems that for Wittig, "lesbian" is politically valuable as a category precisely for not being identified with woman, as she says emphatically at the end of "The Straight Mind": "Lesbians are not women" (32). Before deciding which of these positions you agree with, you should think about the potential uses and values of each.

As for Rich, the place of sexuality in Wittig's theory is again a point of interest: she defines lesbians by opposition to social and political forms of oppression, and not primarily in terms of sexual desire.

Another point of contact with our earlier readings comes in Wittig's claim that "equality in difference" is an illogical principle (and note that she seems to echo here the "separate but equal" language of Brown vs. The Board of Education). Obviously, this places her in emphatic disagreement with writers like Lorde and Cixous who see difference as a value in itself; see too Johnson's discussion (borrowing from Joan Scott) of the conflicts between and equality (Johnson, 5).

"The Straight Mind"

Monique Wittig

In this essay, Wittig looks back at the linguistic turn in the human sciences, which happened earliest and most emphatically in France, following Saussure, and slowly spread abroad in the second half of the 20th century. Wittig's title for this essay echoes the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss's The Savage Mind (La Pensée sauvage) (see her page 27).

Wittig sees structuralism, including Lévi-Strauss and Lacan, as faulty first of all because it (like Saussurean linguistics, which studies languages as fixed and not changing structures) it is ahistorical. This criticism is, to a point, typical of the varied schools of thought sometimes categorized as "poststructural," of which Derrida and Foucault are usually taken to be exemplary. Indeed, Derrida articulates his post-structural theory precisely through a critique of the ahistoricity of Lévi-Strauss in "Structure, Sign and Play in the Human Sciences" (in Derrida's Writing and Difference).

Where Derrida sees not enough difference in structuralism, a failure to take account of temporal difference, Wittig again wishes to do away with difference altogether. Her motivations for this theoretical move lie in the history of oppression that conceptual differences (especially binaries) have undergirded--you'll think back on Dora, no doubt, as you read her critique of psychoanalysis (23ff.).

Wittig's ideas about language as having "material" consequences might recall Foucault's discussion of discourse and power: do you see substantial overlap between these two thinkers? Are there important differences between them that you would point to?

There's a moment at the end of Wittig's essay that seems as important as it is easy to overlook:

...let us say that we break off the heterosexual contract.
     So, this is what lesbians say everywhere in this country and in some others, if not with theories at least through their social practice, whose repercussions upon straight culture and society are still unenvisionable. (32)

 The interesting suggestion here is that social practices speak, even if not yet articulately. We might think back here to Woolf's decision, in Room, to tell stories (about a walk on campus, a luncheon, a dinner) before articulating theories, or to Cixous's description of women's speech as expressive not just of ideas but of drives. We often think of theory as avant-garde, as articulating ideas that practice will need to catch up with, yet Wittig reverses that common conception. Since she doesn't provide examples of these practices, can you imagine what she might have in mind?

We'll continue to think about the relation of practice and theory later this semester -- next week, to begin with, as we turn to the work of Judith Butler.