Yale French Studies, Number 142

Yale French Studies 142 explores the contemporary relevance of an alternative strand of feminism as theorized by Monique Wittig This volume of Yale French Studies foregrounds Monique Wittig (19352003), a writer who left France to live and teach in the United States, in a diverse range of multidisciplinary conversationsin literary studies, history, and gender and sexuality studiesto demonstrate how Wittigs theoretical and literary work remains an indispensable resource for thinking and creating in the twenty-first century. Editors Morgane Cadieu and Annabel L. Kim flip the materialist lesbianism that Wittigs collection of essays, The Straight Mind, centers and describes as being the core of Wittigs work to deal instead with lesbian materialism, thereby making "lesbian" the method and "materialism" the object and allowing Wittigs work to realize its full range. The volume reinterrogates the official historiography of French materialist feminism; expands the intellectual framework within which Wittigs work is usually considered; insists on the language-centric materialism that emerges from Wittigs writing as a way of joining the political with the literary; and attends to the way this literary material inspires material responses and creations within the plastic arts. Underlying the entire volume is a keen sense of the materiality of Wittigs archives, housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, as a site of lesbian thought in Wittigs radical sense of the term: a fugitive positionality.