46. The Site of Action p. 135. In this essay, Wittig distinguishes between a
“first” and second contract within society:The first is one of radical reciprocity between speaking subjects who exchange words that “guarantee”
the entire and exclusive disposition of language to everyone (135); the second contract is one in which words operate to exert a force of domination over others, indeed, to deprive others of the right and social capacity for speech. In this debased form of reciprocity, Wittig argues,
individuality itself is erased through being addressed in a language that precludes the hearer as a potential speaker. Wittig concludes the essay with the following the paradise of the social contract
exists only in literature, where the tropisms, by their violence, are able to counter any reduction of the Ito a common denominator, to tear open the closely woven material of the commonplaces, and to continually prevent their organization into a system of compulsory meaning (139).
47. Monique Wittig,
Les Guérillères, trans. David LeVay (New
York Avon, originally published under the same title (Paris Éditions du
Minuit, 1969).
48. Wittig, The Mark of Gender p. 9.
49. In On the Social Contract a paper presented at Columbia University in (in
The Straight Mind and Other Essays [Boston: Beacon Press, pp. 33–45), Wittig places her own theory of a primary linguistic contract in terms of Rousseau’s theory of the social contract. Although she is not explicit in this regard, it appears that she understands the preso- cial (preheterosexual) contract as a unity of the will—that is, as a general will in Rousseau’s romantic sense. For an interesting use of her theory, see
Teresa de Lauretis, Sexual Indifference
and Lesbian Representation inTheatre Journal, Vol. 40, No. 2 (May 1988) and The Female Body and
Heterosexual Presumption in
Semiotica, Vol. 3–4, No. 67, 1987, pp. Wittig, On the Social Contract. See Wittig, The Straight Mind and One is Not Born a Woman. Wittig, On the Social Contract pp. 40–41.
53. Wittig, The Straight Mind and On the Social Contract. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche,
Genealogy, History in
Language, Counter-Memory, Practice Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, trans.
Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca:
Gender Trouble214
Cornell University Press, 1977), p. 148. References in the text are to this essay.
Mary Douglas,
Purity and Danger (London, Boston, and Henley:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 4.
56. Ibid, p. 113.
57. Simon Watney,
Policing Desire AIDS, Pornography, and the Media (Minne- apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
58. Douglas,
Purity and Danger, p. 115.
59. Ibid, p. 121.
60. Ibid, p. 140.
61. Foucault’s essay A Preface to Transgression (in
Language, Counter-Memory,Practice) does provide an interesting juxtaposition with Douglas notion of body boundaries constituted by incest taboos. Originally written in honor of Georges Bataille, this essay explores in part the metaphorical
“dirt” of transgressive pleasures and the association of the forbidden orifice with the dirt-covered tomb. See pp. 46–48.
62. Kristeva discusses Mary Douglas’s
work in a short section of Powers ofShare with your friends: 
