Lesbian Materialism: The Life and Work of Monique Wittig

Cet automne paraissait le volume 142 des Yale French Studies, dirigé par Morgane Cadieu et Annabel L. Kim : un numéro entièrement consacré à Monique Wittig, faisant suite aux rencontres de 2019 lors des ouvertures des archives à la Beinecke.

Au sommaire :

Annabel L. Kim, “Preface: Lesbian Materialism in the Life and Work of Monique Wittig”

Lynne Huffer, “This Whispering Skeleton”

Gina Stamm, “Le Corps lesbien: Material without Abjection”

Sandrine Sanos, “Monique Wittig’s One Dimensional Man: Translation Work and Post-’68 Feminist Utopian Thought”

Annabel L. Kim, “Interlude I”

Ilana Eloit, “Lesbian Paradoxes to Offer: French Heterofeminism and the Erased History of Monique Wittig’s Exile to the United States”

Katherine A. Costello, “The Cishetero Mind, or Monique Wittig’s Queer and Transgender Lesbianism”

Alice Kaplan, “A Biography for Monique Wittig”

Annabel L. Kim, “Interlude II”

Anne F. Garréta, “No Biography for Dead Women”

Suzette Robichon, “Monique Wittig’s “Reading Worksites””

Sande Zeig, “Wittig’s Way: The Constant Journey”

Annabel L. Kim, “Interlude III”

Morgane Cadieu, “Afterwords: Lesbian Atomism”

This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (1935–2003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversations—in literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studies—to demonstrate how Wittig’s theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century.

Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the “materialist lesbianism” that Wittig’s collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittig’s work to deal instead with “lesbian materialism,” thereby making “lesbian” the method and “materialism” the object and allowing Wittig’s work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittig’s work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittig’s writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittig’s archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittig’s radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.