For Wittig, the existing languages of patriarchal culture were the enemy of both women and men, concretizing a system of oppression and ʻslaveryʼ in which women, and other Others, become both commodity and fetish.įor Wittig the attack on patriarchal language meant being a practitioner as well as a theorist. Her writings include novels, short stories, plays, theory and criticism, yet in each of these genres her attempt was always to test the generic boundaries, pushing them so hard at times that they shattered, allowing new possibilities of form and representation to emerge. It is impossible, viewing the range of her output from the 1960s up to the ﬁnal projects she was working on at the time of her death (including a screenplay based on life at the Mexican border), to categorize or delimit Wittigʼs work as either principally literary or theoretical indeed the distinctions between these forms were always problematic to Wittig. At the time of her death she was Professor of French and Womenʼs Studies at the University of Arizona. She moved to the United States in the mid-1970s and held a number of teaching positions in different institutions, including the University of California at Berkeley, New York University, Duke University and Vassar College. Wittig met her lifelong partner Sande Zeig in Paris in 1975, while both were becoming involved in the French womenʼs liberation movement. She received her doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. After a country childhood, Wittig moved with her family to Paris, where she attended university and worked in publishing.

Wittig was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France on 13 July 1935. Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was one of the most provocative and innovative of lesbian feminist thinkers of the twentieth century. Radical inventions Monique Wittig, 1935–2003ʻBut remember.

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