Elles

In my eclectic, persistent search to distract myself from things I should be doing, I listened to a podcast called la société après mai 68, which refers to the social upheaval (student and worker riots) in France during the "Days of May" in 1968. The podcast was an interview with Antoinette Fouque, a co-founder of the French feminist Mouvement de la Libération des Femmes (MLF) in the late '60s. The other co-founder was Monique Wittig (1935-2003).

I'm not sure how I first came upon Wittig's writing, but in my early twenties I bought a used copy of her second novel, Les Guérillères, about a group of women waging war on men. I probably was drawn to it because the title was French (my major at UCSB), even though the text was an English translation. 

To get to my point here, years after I read this book, I got to take a class with Monique Wittig at the University of Arizona. We read five of her novels, including Les Guérillères, and a collection of essays. I read them in the original French, and while I didn't entirely understand them (the words or meaning), I was certainly in awe and grateful for the opportunity to be in her presence at a seminar table. My shameless claim to fame is that she and the rest of the class came to my house for coffee and pastries at the end of the semester. (Inasmuch as pastries are pastries if they're not patisseries.) 

I remember that she was greatly displeased about David Le Vay's translation of Les Guérillères because he altered and distorted the entire philosophical construct, which centered on the simple pronoun elles. In French, a group of men is referred to as ils; a group of women is elles. Traditionally speaking, if there is one man among any number of women, the pronoun (as well as relevant adjectives and past participles) is masculine.

To describe the warriors in Les Guérillères, Wittig uses the pronoun elles, and Le Vay shifts between "they" and "the women." For example, the first line: "When it rains the women stay in the summer-house." Why "the women" when Wittig simply wrote "elles"? Her purpose, as I understand it, was to re-appropriate the feminine pronoun as the universal. The English "they" was perfectly acceptable because it is ungendered. Throughout my English translation, I edited "they women" to keep the reference as she preferred.

Louise Turcotte, who wrote the foreword to Wittig's essay collection, The Straight Mind, writes, "In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed.... [Her] lesbian thought does not aim to transgress but clearly to do away with the categories of gender and sex on which the very notion of universality rests." In fact, Wittig identified her movement not as feminism but "radical lesbianism" because the feminine is defined in opposition to the masculine, whereas lesbianism is entire unto itself. 

I just saw that today is Heterosexual Pride Day. Apparently it's not going over too well in the twittersphere. We live in interesting times, is all I can say.

http://savoirs.rfi.fr/fr/comprendre-enrichir/histoire/archives-la-societe-apres-mai-68