I'm starting this series with the great Monique Wittig!
While I may not agree with everything she wrote, I find all her writings to be beneficial to lesbians and how we understand ourselves as lesbians.
One of Wittig's most famous pieces...
One Is Not Born a
Woman
Monique Wittig
A materialist feminist approach to women’s
oppression destroys the idea that women are a “natural group”: “a racial group
of a special kind, a group perceived as natural, a group of men
considered as materially specific in their bodies.” What the analysis
accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of
facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social)
fact constituting women as a “natural group.” A lesbian society pragmatically
reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a
political one and shows that we have been ideologically rebuilt into a “natural
group.” In the case of women, ideology goes far since our bodies as well as our
minds are the product of this manipulation. We have been compelled in our
bodies and in our minds to correspond, feature by feature, with the idea
of nature that has been established for us. Distorted to such an extent that
our deformed body is what they call “natural,” what is supposed to exist as
such before oppression. Distorted to such an extent that in the end oppression
seems to be a consequence of this “nature” within ourselves (a nature which is
only an idea). What a materialist analysis does by reasoning, a lesbian
society accomplishes practically: not only is there no natural group “women”
(we lesbians are living proof of it), but as individuals as well we question
“woman,” which for us, as for Simone de Beauvoir, is only a myth. She said:
“one is not born, but becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or
economic fate determines the figure that the human female presents in society:
it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature, intermediate between
male and eunuch, which is described as feminine.”
However, most of the feminists and
lesbian-feminists in America and elsewhere still believe that the basis of
women’s oppression is biological as well as historical. Some of them
even claim to find their sources in Simone de Beauvoir. The belief in mother
right and in a “prehistory” when women create civilization (because of a
biological predisposition) while the coarse and brutal men hunted (because of a
biological predisposition) is symmetrical with the biologizing interpretation
of history produced up to now by the class of men. It is still the same method
of finding in women and men a biological explanation of their division, outside
of social facts. For me this could never constitute a lesbian approach to
women’s oppression, since it assumes that the basis of society or the beginning
of society lies in heterosexuality. Matriarchy is no less heterosexual than
patriarchy: it is only the sex of the oppressor that changes. Furthermore, not
only is this conception still imprisoned in the categories of sex (woman and
man), but it holds onto the idea that the capacity to give birth (biology) is
what defines a woman. Although practical facts and ways of living contradict
this theory in lesbian society, there are lesbians who affirm that “women and men
are different species or races (the words are used interchangeably): men are
biologically inferior to women; male violence is a biological inevitability…”
By doing this, by admitting that there is a “natural” division between women
and men, we naturalize history, we assume that “men” and “women” have always
existed and will always exist. Not only do we naturalize history, but also
consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression,
making change impossible. For example, instead of seeing giving birth as a
forced production, we see it as a “natural,” “biological” process, forgetting
that in our societies births are planned (demography), forgetting that we
ourselves are programmed to produce children, while this is the only social activity
“short of war” that presents such a great danger of death. Thus, as long as we
will be “unable to abandon by will or impulse a lifelong and centuries-old
commitment to childbearing as the female creative act,” gaining control
of the production of children will mean much more than the mere control of the
material means of this production: women will have to abstract themselves from
the definition “woman” which is imposed upon them.
A materialist feminist approach shows that what we
take for the cause or origin of oppression is in fact only the mark
imposed by the oppressor: the “myth of woman,” plus its material effects and
manifestations in the appropriated consciousness and bodies of women. Thus,
this mark does not predate oppression: Colette Guillaumin has shown that before
the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist,
at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of
families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an “immediate given,”
a “sensible given,” “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what
we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and
mythic construction, an “imaginary formation,” which reinterprets physical
features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social
system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They
are seen as black therefore they are black; they are seen as women,
therefore, they are women. But before being seen that way, they
first had to be made that way.) Lesbians should always remember and
acknowledge how “unnatural,” compelling, totally oppressive, and destructive
being “woman” was for us in the old days before the women’s liberation
movement. It was a political constraint, and those who resisted it were accused
of not being “real” women. But then we were proud of it, since in the
accusation there was already something like a shadow of victory: the avowal by
the oppressor that “woman” is not something that goes without saying, since to
be one, one has to be a “real” one. We were at the same time accused of wanting
to be men. Today this double accusation has been taken up again with enthusiasm
in the context of the women’s liberation movement by some feminists and also,
alas, by some lesbians whose political goal seems somehow to be becoming more
and more “feminine.” To refuse to be a woman, however, does not mean that one
has to become a man. Besides, if we take as an example the perfect “butch,” the
classic example which provokes the most horror, whom Proust would have called a
woman/ man, how is her alienation different from that of someone who wants to
became a woman? Tweedledum and Tweedledee. At least for a woman, wanting to
become a man proves that she has escaped her initial programming. But even if
she would like to, with all her strength, she cannot become a man. For becoming
a man would demand from a woman not only a man’s external appearance but his
consciousness as well, that is, the consciousness of one who disposes by right
of at least two “natural” slaves during his life span. This is impossible, and
one feature of lesbian oppression consists precisely of making women out of
reach for us, since women belong to men. Thus a lesbian has to be
something else, a not-woman, a not-man, a product of society, not a product of
nature, for there is no nature in society.
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. Having stood up to fight
for a sexless society, we now find ourselves entrapped in the familiar deadlock
of “woman is wonderful.” Simone de Beauvoir underlined particularly the false
consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that
women are different form men) those which look good and using them as a
definition for women. What the concept “woman is wonderful” accomplishes is
that it retains for defining women the best features (best according to whom?)
which oppression has granted us, and it does not radically question the
categories “man” and “woman,” which are political categories and not natural
givens. It puts us in a position of fighting within the class “women” not as
the other classes do, for the disappearance of our class, but for the defense
of “woman” and its reinforcement. It leads us to develop with complacency “new”
theories about our specificity: thus, we call our passivity “nonviolence,” when
the main and emergent point for us is to fight our passivity (our fear, rather,
a justified one). The ambiguity of the term “feminist” sums up the whole
situation. What does “feminist” mean? Feminist is formed with the word “femme,”
“woman,” and means: someone who fights for women. For many of us it means
someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this
class. For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense--
for the myth, then, and its reinforcement. But why was the word “feminist”
chosen if it retains the least ambiguity? We chose to call ourselves
“feminists” ten years ago, not in order to support or reinforce the myth of
woman, nor to identify ourselves with the oppressor’s definition of us, but
rather to affirm that our movement had a history and to emphasize the political
link with the old feminist movement.
It is, then, this movement that we can put in
question for the meaning that it gave to feminism. It so happens that feminism
in the last century could never resolve its contradictions on the subject of
nature/ culture, woman/ society. Women started to fight for themselves as a
group and rightly considered that they shared common features as a result of
oppression. But for them these features were natural and biological rather than
social. They went so far as to adopt the Darwinist theory of evolution. They
did not believe like Darwin, however, “that women were less evolved than men,
but they did believe that male and female natures had diverged in the course of
evolutionary development and that society at large reflected this
polarization.” The failure of early feminism was that it only attacked the
Darwinist charge of female inferiority, while accepting the foundations of this
charge--namely, the view of woman as “unique.” And finally it was women
scholars--and not feminists-- who scientifically destroyed this theory. But the
early feminists had failed to regard history as a dynamic process which
develops from conflicts of interests. Furthermore, they still believed as men
do that the cause (origin) of their oppression lay within themselves. And
therefore after some astonishing victories the feminists of this first front
found themselves at an impasse out of a lack of reasons to fight. They upheld
the illogical principle of “equality in difference,” an idea now being born
again. They fell back into the trap which threatens us once again; the myth of
woman.
Thus it is our historical task, and only ours, to
define what we call oppression in materialist terms, to make it evident that
women are a class, which is to say that the category “woman” as well as the
category “man” are political and economic categories not eternal ones. Our
fight aims to suppress men as a class, not through a genocidal, but a political
struggle. Once the class “men” disappears, “women” as a class will disappear as
well, for there are no slaves without masters. Our first task, it seems, is to
always thoroughly dissociate “women”(the class within which we fight) and
“woman,” the myth. For “woman” does not exist for us: it is only an imaginary
formation, while “women” is the product of a social relationship. We felt this
strongly when everywhere we refused to be called a “woman’s liberation
movement.” Furthermore, we have to destroy the myth inside and outside
ourselves. “Woman” is not each one of us, but the political and ideological
formation which negates “women” (the product of a relation of exploitation).
“Woman” is there to confuse us, to hide the reality “women.” In order to be
aware of being a class and to become a class we first have to kill the myth of
“woman” including its most seductive aspects (I think about Virginia Woolf when
she said the first task of a woman writer is to kill “the angel in the house”).
But to become a class we do not have to suppress our individual selves, and
since no individual can be reduced to her/his oppression we are also confronted
with the historical necessity of constituting ourselves as the individual
subjects of our history as well. I believe this is the reason why all these
attempts at “new” definitions of woman are blossoming now. What is at stake
(and of course not only for women) is an individual definition as well as a
class definition. For once one has acknowledged oppression, one needs to know
and experience the fact that one can constitute oneself as a subject (as
opposed to as object of oppression), that one can become someone in
spite of oppression, that one has one’s own identity. There is no possible
fight for someone deprived of an identity, no internal motivation for fighting,
since, although I can fight only with others, first I fight for myself.
enjoy
dirt
