File spoon-archives/french-feminism.archive/french-feminism_2004/french-feminism.0410, message 1


Subject: [FRENCH-FEMINISM]: FW:      CFP: Annulling Gender: The Legacy of Monique Wittig
Date: Thu, 21 Oct 2004 06:12:56 -0700
From: "Judith Poxon" <poxon-AT-ccolex.ccol.csus.edu>


This was posted on WMST-L, and I thought it might be of interest to this list. Please reply to the contacts listed in the CFP, and not to me or to french-feminism. Thanks.

Judith Poxon

-----Original Message-----
From:	Women's Studies List on behalf of Julia Balén
Sent:	Thu 10/21/2004 12:59 AM
To:	WMST-L-AT-LISTSERV.UMD.EDU
Cc:	
Subject:	     CFP: Annulling Gender: The Legacy of Monique Wittig
Annulling Gender: The Legacy of Monique Wittig
 
The deconstruction and eradication of gender is the central goal of Monique
Wittig¹s work in literature, theory, and film.  From her first fiction,
L¹Opoponax, her work resists the universalization of the masculine and the
particularization of the feminine, as a way to deconstruct the legitimacy of
these very concepts.  In each successive text, she radically reworked
language not only to render it live, but to denaturalize and annul the ³mark
of gender.²  She articulates the difficulty of such a venture in her
collection of essays entitled The Straight Mind, an expression she coined.
Speaking of Djuna Barnes, but effectively describing her own work she
writes:

[The lesbian] poet generally has a hard battle to wage, for, step by step,
word by word, she must create her own context in a world in which, as soon
as she appears, bends every effort to make her disappear.  The battle is
hard because she must wage it on two fronts: on the formal level with the
questions being debated at the moment in literary history, and on the
conceptual level against the that-goes-without-saying of the straight mind
(SM 65).

Her refusal to accept anything that-goes-without-saying made her thinking
profoundly unique and challenging.  Perhaps most radically, Wittig took
Simone de Beauvoir¹s claim that ³one is not born a woman² a step further,
via Marx, to claim that lesbians are not women because they do not
participate in the gender/class system of male/female.  She fought, not for
recognition of minority status, but to lay bare the constructed nature of
naturalized dichotomies like male/female.

This collection assesses a central legacy of Monique Wittig¹s work^Ëannulling
gender.  Although scholarship to date on Wittig¹s work has addressed, to
some degree, her undermining of gender, scholars have largely subordinated
this topic within other contexts.  For example, Parce que les lesbiennes ne
sont pas des femmes, ed. Marie-Hélène Bourcier and Suzanne Robichon, 2002,
based on a colloquium on her work in Paris in 2001 focuses on ³[les]
réflexions et analyses littéraires dans des perspectives qui concernent
l¹histoire contemporaine des lesbiennes, leurs mouvements politiques, les
enjeux et les polémiques qui les intéressent,² addresses her work to annul
gender secondarily to a primary focus on lesbian history.  While there are
numerous articles on Wittig¹s work (with many more books and articles within
the fields of feminist, LGBT, and queer studies deeply indebted to her
work), there  are only five books devoted solely to Wittig¹s writing.  Erika
Ostrovsky¹s, The Constant Journey (1991), focuses on Wittig¹s strategies of
³renversement:² ­³the annihilation of existing literary canons and the
creation of highly innovative constructs.²  A less critical work, L¹Écriture
de Monique Wittig: A la couleur de Sappho by Catherine Écarnot, 2002
attempts to situate Wittig¹s work at the crossroads of the Nouveau Roman and
feminism.  Dominique Bourque¹s work, De l¹intertextualité mythique dans Le
Corps lesbien de Monique Wittig, forthcoming in 2003 from Montréal/Paris:
Publications AHLA, offers an excellent analysis of how intertextuality
functions in Le Corps lesbien.  And finally, Namascar Shaktini¹s edited
collection, Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays,
forthcoming from University of Illinois Press, like the Bourcier and
Robichon collection, contains essays that approach various aspects of
Wittig¹s work from numerous angles, but none that focus directly on this
primary motor of her work, the annullment of gender.  Perhaps it is because
of the radical nature of such a project that no one has focused primarily on
this aspect which is central to her work, but in her memory this collection
will honor the primacy of this project to her work.

We are interested in articles that approach the subject from a wide variety
vantage points including, but not limited to: linguistic, historical,
materialist, literary, philosophical, cultural, feminist, etc.
 
Articles might address questions like: What strategies for annulling gender
does Wittig make use of across texts and genres?  To what effect?  How do
these strategies translate?  What is the relationship between queer theory
or postmodern theory and Wittig¹s work in relation to gendering?  What are
the political and/or philosophical foundations of the Wittigian project?
What is the influence the Wittigian project in literature, philosophy,
politics, etc.
 
Proposals are due by December 30, 2004 and the deadline for full texts is
July 15, 2005.
 
Please submit proposals or questions to:
Dominique Bourque : dbourque-AT-uottawa.ca <mailto:dbourque-AT-uottawa.ca>  in
French 
Julia Balén : julia.balen-AT-csuci.edu in English




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