Gender trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

appear to enact a different kind of political strategy than the one for which she explicitly calls in her theoretical essays. In The Lesbian Body
and in Les Guérillères, the narrative strategy through which political transformation is articulated makes use of redeployment and transval- uation time and again both to make use of originally oppressive terms and to deprive them of their legitimating functions.
Although Wittig herself is a materialist the term has a specific meaning within her theoretical framework. She wants to overcome the split between materiality and representation that characterizes
“straight” thinking. Materialism implies neither a reduction of ideas to matter nor the view of theory as a reflection of its economic base,
strictly conceived.Wittig’s materialism takes social institutions and practices, in particular, the institution of heterosexuality, as the basis of critical analysis. In The Straight Mind and On the Social Contract,”
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she understands the institution of heterosexuality as the founding basis of the male-dominated social orders. Nature and the domain of materiality are ideas, ideological constructs, produced by these social institutions to support the political interests of the heterosexual contract. In this sense,
Wittig is a classic idealist for whom nature is understood as a mental rep- resentation.A language of compulsory meanings produces this representation of nature to further the political strategy of sexual domination and to rationalize the institution of compulsory heterosexuality.
Unlike Beauvoir,Wittig sees nature not as a resistant materiality, a medium, surface, or an object it is an idea generated and sustained for the purposes of social control. The very elasticity of the ostensible materiality of the body is shown in The Lesbian Body as language figures and refigures the parts of the body into radically new social configurations of form (and antiform). Like those mundane and scientific languages that circulate the idea of nature and so produce the naturalized conception of discretely sexed bodies, Wittig’s own language enacts an alternative disfiguring and refiguring of bodies. Her aim is to expose the idea of a natural body as a construction and to offer a deconstructive/reconstructive set of strategies for configuring
Subversive Bodily Acts
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bodies to contest the power of heterosexuality. The very shape and form of bodies, their unifying principle, their composite parts, are always figured by a language imbued with political interests. For
Wittig, the political challenge is to seize language as the means of representation and production, to treat it as an instrument that invariably constructs the field of bodies and that ought to be used to deconstruct and reconstruct bodies outside the oppressive categories of sex.
If the multiplication of gender possibilities expose and disrupt the binary reifications of gender, what is the nature of such a subversive enactment How can such an enactment constitute a subversion In
The Lesbian Body, the act of lovemaking literally tears the bodies of its partners apart. As lesbian sexuality, this set of acts outside of the reproductive matrix produces the body itself as an incoherent center of attributes, gestures, and desires. And in Wittig’s Les Guérillères, the same kind of disintegrating effect, even violence, emerges in the struggle between the women and their oppressors. In that context,Wittig clearly distances herself from those who would defend the notion of a
“specifically feminine pleasure, writing, or identity she all but mocks those who would holdup the circle as their emblem. For Wittig, the task is not to prefer the feminine side of the binary to the masculine,
but to displace the binary as such through a specifically lesbian disintegration of its constitutive categories.
The disintegration appears literal in the fictional text, as does the violent struggle in Les Guérillères. Wittig’s texts have been criticized for this use of violence and force—notions that on the surface seem antithetical to feminist aims. But note that Wittig’s narrative strategy is not to identify the feminine through a strategy of differentiation or exclusion from the masculine. Such a strategy consolidates hierarchy and binarisms through a transvaluation of values by which women now represent the domain of positive value. In contrast to a strategy that consolidates women’s identity through an exclusionary process of differentiation, Wittig offers a strategy of reappropriation and subversive redeployment of precisely those values that originally appeared to

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