Description
In this genre- and gender-breaking work of theory-fiction, legendary writer and cofounder of the 1970s French feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body-lesbian, literary and defiantly political-and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature. First published in French in 1973, THE LESBIAN BODY mines the relationship between a lover and a beloved -- also a writer and a text -- to explore the ideological and historical constructions of the female subject. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig's groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado. || "For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart." --JUDITH BUTLER || "A fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness." --SARAH SCHULMAN || "In this stunning new rendering of THE LESBIAN BODY by the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time." --ESTHER NEWTON || "THE LESBIAN BODY explodes all the clichés associated with femininity and lesbianism and transforms the bodies of the lover and the beloved into a raucous, violent, lustful catalogue of unbecoming." --JACK HALBERSTAM || Fiction. French Literature. Queer Studies. Gender Studies. Literary Theory. Feminist Theory. Women Authors. LGBTQ+ Authors.
