Focusing on Les guérillères and the use of the pronoun "elles" (a plural of "she" or a feminine "they," which has no counterpart in English) as a way to universalize the lesbian subject, Zerilli stresses that language is at the heart of Wittig's radical project to transform the social contract. Zerilli analyzes in what she calls "Monique Wittig's poetic revolution" (87).Īccording to Zerilli, Wittig's purpose was not "to put sex into doubt but to dramatize the space and practice of freedom" (91) and to shape "the free act that eschews truth in search of meaning and a new grammar of difference" (93). Her text can be read as an homage to Wittig the theorist and the poet, intertwined roles that Linda M. It initiated de Lauretis's own reflection on the "eccentric subject," the problem of disidentification and displacement, and even "anticipated some of the emphases of today's postcolonial feminism" (53). Teresa de Lauretis's contribution, carefully re-placing Wittig's work in the historical context, pays an interesting personal tribute to the author of the famous statement "lesbians are not women." De Lauretis reminds us that by considering women as a class and the lesbian as a figure that "exceeds the categories of sex and gender" (52), outside the political regime of heterosexuality, Wittig "opened up a conceptual, virtual space" that had been unthinkable before (52). 2 If this statement fails to answer questions such as what constitutes a "misreading" (is it an erroneous interpretation? a misunderstanding? or a provocative dialogue?) and is silent about the reasons why this misreading was so "influential," some of the responses are nevertheless rich and stimulating. Its aim, summarized in the preface, is to "respond to influential misreadings"-transparently targeting Judith Butler's critique, in Gender Trouble, of Wittig's work-"that dismiss her writing as 'essentialist', 'humanist' and/or 'lesbian separatist'" (ix).
The volume is divided into five sections, but one can immediately see that "Critical Approaches" (section 3) is not only the physical center and the longest section but also the core of the book's intellectual project. Books entirely devoted to Monique Wittig are infrequent enough to make us pay special attention to the book edited by Namascar Shaktini, who has dedicated her whole academic career to the study of the author of The Straight Mind and Other Essays.
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