Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

Paradoxically, Wittig nowhere entertains an Aristophanic myth about the original unity of genders, for gender is a divisive principle, a tool of subjection, one that resists the very notion of unity.
Significantly, her novels follow a narrative strategy of disintegration,
suggesting that the binary formulation of sex needs to fragment and proliferate to the point where the binary itself is revealed as contingent. The free play of attributes or physical features is never an absolute destruction, for the ontological field distorted by gender is one of continuous plenitude. Wittig criticizes the straight mind for being unable to liberate itself from the thought of difference In temporary alliance with Deleuze and Guattarri, Wittig opposes psychoanalysis as a science predicated on an economy of lack and “negation.”
In Paradigm an early essay, Wittig considers that the overthrow of the system of binary sex might initiate a cultural field of many sexes. In that essay she refers to Anti-Oedipus: For us there are, not one or two sexes, but many (cf. Guattarri/Deleuze), as many sexes as there are individuals.”
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The limitless proliferation of sexes, however, logically entails the negation of sex as such. If the number of sexes corresponds to the number of existing individuals, sex would no longer have any general application as a term one’s sex would be a radically singular property and would no longer be able to operate as a useful or descriptive generalization.
The metaphors of destruction, overthrow, and violence that work in Wittig’s theory and fiction have a difficult ontological status.
Although linguistic categories shape reality in a violent way, creating social fictions in the name of the real, there appears to be a truer reality, an ontological field of unity against which these social fictions are measured.Wittig refuses the distinction between an abstract concept and a material reality, arguing that concepts are formed and circulated within the materiality of language and that that language works in a
material way to construct the social world.
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On the other hand, these
“constructions” are understood as distortions and reifications to be judged against a prior ontological field of radical unity and plenitude.
Subversive Bodily Acts
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Constructs are thus real to the extent that they are fictive phenomena that gain power within discourse.These constructs are disempowered,
however, through locutionary acts that implicitly seek recourse to the universality of language and the unity of Being.Wittig argues that it is quite possible fora work of literature to operate as a war machine,”
even a perfect war machine.”
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The main strategy of this war is for women, lesbians, and gay men—all of whom have been particularized through an identification with “sex”—to preempt the position of the speaking subject and its invocation of the universal point of view.
The question of how a particular and relative subject can speak his or her way out of the category of sex directs Wittig’s various considerations of Djuna Barnes,
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Marcel Proust,
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and Natalie Sarraute.
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The literary text as war machine is, in each instance, directed against the hierarchical division of gender, the splitting of universal and particular in the name of a recovery of a prior and essential unity of those terms.
To universalize the point of view of women is simultaneously to destroy the category of women and to establish the possibility of anew humanism. Destruction is thus always restoration—that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.
Literary works, however, maintain a privileged access to this primary field of ontological abundance.The split between form and content corresponds to the artificial philosophical distinction between abstract, universal thought and concrete, material reality. Just as
Wittig invokes Bakhtin to establish concepts as material realities, so she invokes literary language more generally to reestablish the unity of language as indissoluble form and content through literature . . words comeback to us whole again language exists as a paradise made of visible, audible, palpable, palatable words.”
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Above all, literary works offer Wittig the occasion to experiment with pronouns that within systems of compulsory meaning conflate the masculine with the universal and invariably particularize the feminine. In Les

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