Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

indeed, any he (il ), and to offer elles as standing for the general, the universal. The goal of this approach she writes, is not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language.”
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In a self-consciously defiant imperialist strategy, Wittig argues that only by taking up the universal and absolute point of view, effectively lesbianizing the entire world, can the compulsory order of heterosexuality be destroyed. The j/e of The Lesbian Body is supposed to establish the lesbian, not as a split subject, but as the sovereign subject who can wage war linguistically against a world that has constituted a semantic and syntactic assault against the lesbian. Her point is not to call attention to the presence of rights of women or lesbians as individuals,
but to counter the globalizing heterosexist episteme by a reverse discourse of equal reach and power.The point is not to assume the position of the speaking subject in order to be a recognized individual within a set of reciprocal linguistic relations rather, the speaking subject becomes more than the individual, becomes an absolute perspective that imposes its categories on the entire linguistic field, known as the world Only a war strategy that rivals the proportions of compulsory heterosexuality, Wittig argues, will operate effectively to challenge the latter’s epistemic hegemony.
In its ideal sense, speaking is, for Wittig, a potent act, an assertion of sovereignty that simultaneously implies a relationship of equality with other speaking subjects.
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This ideal or primary contract of language operates at an implicit level. Language has a dual possibility It can be used to assert a true and inclusive universality of persons, or it can institute a hierarchy in which only some persons are eligible to speak and others, by virtue of their exclusion from the universal point of view, cannot speak without simultaneously deauthorizing that speech. Prior to this asymmetrical relation to speech, however, is an ideal social contract, one in which every first-person speech act presupposes and affirms an absolute reciprocity among speaking subjects Wittigs version of the ideal speech situation. Distorting and concealing that ideal reciprocity, however, is the heterosexual contract,
Subversive Bodily Acts
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the focus of Wittig’s most recent theoretical work,
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although present in her theoretical essays all along.
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Unspoken but always operative, the heterosexual contract cannot be reduced to any of its empirical appearances.Wittig writes:
I confront a nonexistent object, a fetish, an ideological form which cannot be grasped in reality, except through its effects, whose existence lies in the mind of people, but in away that affects their whole life, the way they act, the way they move, the way they think. So we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real.
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As in Lacan, the idealization of heterosexuality appears even within
Wittig’s own formulation to exercise a control over the bodies of practicing heterosexuals that is finally impossible, indeed, that is bound to falter on its own impossibility. Wittig appears to believe that only the radical departure from heterosexual contexts—namely becoming lesbian or gay—can bring about the downfall of this heterosexual regime.
But this political consequence follows only if one understands all participation in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression.The possibilities of resignifying heterosexuality itself are refused precisely because heterosexuality is understood as a total system that requires a thoroughgoing displacement. The political options that follow from such a totalizing view of heterosexist power area) radical conformity orb) radical revolution.
Assuming the systemic integrity of heterosexuality is extremely problematic both for Wittig’s understanding of heterosexual practice and for her conception of homosexuality and lesbianism. As radically
“outside” the heterosexual matrix, homosexuality is conceived as radically unconditioned by heterosexual norms.This purification of homosexuality, a kind of lesbian modernism, is currently contested by numerous lesbian and gay discourses that understand lesbian and gay culture as embedded in the larger structures of heterosexuality even as they are positioned in subversive or resignificatory relationships to heterosexual cultural configurations.Wittig’s view refuses the possibil-

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