Body, Text, and Language: Wittig's Struggle For The Universal In Les Guérillères

In her second book, Les Guérillères, published in 1969, Monique Wittig sought to challenge and revolutionize the representation of women's experience. This text has often been read as a militant feminist text, but I would like to suggest a new reading of it: Wittig's Les Guérillères, read in light of the French commitment to the universal, posits the possibility for women to represent all of humanity, that is, the general or the whole. The allegory of the Amazonian women fighting for freedom is a powerful one indeed, for it captures the need for women to reclaim their silenced voices, but more importantly to show a historical process whereby women become representative of humanity, neither more nor less human than men. Reading Wittig's Les Guérillères from a Beauvoirean perspective allows for the realization of the category of women to represent all human beings. How can women represent the universal, be representative of humanity, without denying their situation or claiming some sort of neutrality? Wittig engages this task thematically and linguistically in Les Guérillères. I will argue that the women in the text do not seek a gender-neutral corrective to the destructive masculine order, but that they strive to represent the general, the whole, as embodied women.