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 --- from list french-feminism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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