Kara K.

Brower, ENG 385, 1 The Danger of the 'Wittig Lesbian' as a Constructed Identity Wittig, in her text Le Corps Lesbien, has attempted to expose lesbianism as an alternative consciousness to the "straight mind" which, she posits, pervades even the language of contemporary discourse (Wittig, p. 9). In this attempt, she states that her "desire to bring the body violently to life" necessitates doing "violence" to the language which constrains expression to the hetero-normative framework she rejects (p. 10). Wittig employs this violence to take on two very ambitious projects in Le Corps Lesbien: first, she aims to achieve an affirmation of [the female body's] reality by subsuming all the words that constitute it, and second, she seeks to wage the ideological battle of destroying the totalitarian binary of sex as propagated by unconscious heterosexual structuralism (Wittig1, 1981, p. 39). Though a valiant effort, Wittig's portrayal of lesbianism in her text as extracorporeal and even monstrous through invocations of imagined reality, myth, and scientific knowledge remove the lesbian, as an identity Wittig has constructed, from the material reality and oppressive violence that Wittig seeks to expose. While Wittig does achieve significant headway in identifying the lesbian as violated by and outside of heterosexual structure, she unfortunately falls into the trap of what Bulter warns is "performing" one's sexuality (Butler2, p. 24). That is, the Wittig lesbian, in Les Corps Lesbien, creates a "definitive narrativization" of the lesbian identity because it seeks to explicitly express that which cannot be expressed, chiefly, one's sexuality (Bulter, p. 25). While Wittig wishes to overturn identity categories as related to sex, her works actually creates the categorical identity of the monstrous Wittig lesbian. This construction results in the dangerous combination of one's identity with one's sexuality, which propagates the failed system of sexuality as performance (Butler, p. 29). Further, the Wittig lesbian as defined by mimetic reliance on the corporeal
1 Wittig, Feminist Issues, Winter 1981 2 Butler, Decking Out: Performing Identities

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 2 and extra-corporeal existence of her lover, also harmfully creates a identity that is inaccessible to lesbians who do not adopt such a relational identification with their sexuality. This paper seeks to weigh the success of Wittig's creation of a new lesbian consciousness against the harm of her construction of a lesbian identity removed from material reality and defined only relationally. A close textual analysis of Wittig's portrayal of extra-corporeal, monstrous lesbian, as well as her mimetic identification of the lesbian and her lover with support from Butler's discourse will be provided. Wittig begins the preface of Le Corps Lesbien with the assertion that fiction validates us (Wittig, p. 10). Running with this claim, she constructs a fictional world of women where the narrator expresses her non-uniform spectrum of emotions and experiences with her lover[s], whom remains unnamed throughout the text. In this expression, Wittig rejects conventional literary technique; there is no clear plot, the narrator and her protagonist[s] are easily interchanged and are often combined mentally and/or bodily into one character, and, even stylistically, the text is torn between narration and categorical lists of metaphorically related anatomical references. In this torn text, Wittig invokes religious and scientific repositories of knowledge alongside illusory detailed images of lovemaking and even dismemberment of the narrator and her lover. This juxtaposition of authoritative knowledge so deeply immersed in the patriarchal order that Wittig finds harmful with powerful imagined reality and myth creates the fundamental tension that Wittig relies upon to expose an alternative consciousness to the dominant heterosexual framework. In a particular passage that exemplifies this tension, Wittig writes you become disarticulated, your bones in collision, your muscle breaking off . . . one of your legs falls torn off the pelvis, you lose strength, . . only your strong and powerful arms inured to exertion continue carrying m/e, . . . I try to envelop you (Wittig, p. 44). This passage, as well as nearly the entirety of the text, uses scientific anatomy with clever precision yet positions that knowledge within a different reference frame; that is, the situation above could never be materially realized in reality, yet it possesses power of expression, beauty, and lyrical

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 3 emotion that allow anatomy to take a fundamentally new meaning. This reclaiming of authoritative knowledge repositories, e.g. anatomy and religion, allow for deviations from the structures that have created those repositories, notably patriarchal power structures and heterosexuality. In this passage, Wittig's imagined anatomical impossibility lets her create a situation in which neither lover is dominant or submissive. The narrator at the same time is being carried and also envelop[ing] her lover. Power hierarchies between sexual partners are overturned and even rejected through the means of her text, and because Wittig believes that individual power relations transcend to larger social hierarchical organization (Wittig, 1981, p. 53), social hierarchies are also overturned by this rejection. In another example, Wittig hauntingly talks of the narrator penetrating her lover's mind when she says I embed myself, finally I reach the left hemisphere of your brain, you repel me with all your willpower, . . . your head becomes detached at the level of the cervical vertebrae . . my adorable one your mouth wide-open (Wittig, p. 75). Here she creates a situation in which one lover literally reaches into the mind of the other, yet instead of being grotesque, the act is reclaimed by Wittig's use of the word adorable. The lovers become combined and entwined (Wittig, p. 51), mentally and physically, into one continuous self that becomes beautiful, even touching to the reader, instead of absurd or impossible. Scientific conceptions of the boundary of one's body are questioned and, through this passage and others, are not prioritized over the sheer power of constructed reality. In this way, Wittig achieves clear success. She has created a disintegrated text that does not give credence to the hierarchical structures of truth imposed by the patriarchal order, instead warping anatomy and religion into new and enticing constructions of meaning. In one of her lists of anatomical reference, she states THE DEFECTATION THE REPRODUCTION [XX+XX=XX] THE REACTIONS . . . (Wittig, p. 128). This passage highlights this reclamation. In classic anatomy, XX+XX does not equal XX but, in the world of lesbian consciousness she has conceived, this statement has authoritative truth value that it

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 4 could not possess without the violence Wittig has introduced. Reproduction, here, can be positively reclaimed to not necessitate a man. The proximity to the other clearly acceptable anatomical terms makes this formulation of new reproduction viable as well, making what is natural questionable. Wittig has achieved one of her projects through this juxtaposition; she has successfully made the reader conscious of the influence of heterosexual structuralism and how quickly that seemingly invincible structuralism that invades even the most authoritative discourses, such as anatomy, can be reversed and repositioned. Bulter, indeed, celebrates this success stating that negative constructions of lesbianism as a fake or bad copy can be occupied and reworked, to call into question the claims of heterosexual priority (Butler, p. 17), which is exactly what Wittig has done. However, at what cost does this success of reformulation of priority come for Wittig's work? While Wittig has indeed expanded the reader's consciousness outside that of heterosexual hierarchies, including the implicit hierarchies present in authoritative knowledge and language, she does so by dangerously defining the identity of narrator and her lover by their sexuality alone. In her preface, Wittig states that she is fascinated by and wishes to record that which has never been previously written (Wittig, p. 10). She defines Le Corps Lesbien as a lesbian text in a context of total rupture with masculine culture (Wittig, p. 9). Even the very title of the work shows her intention to create a text that defines not a but the lesbian body. The harm of such a designation is that she has created a lesbianism as an identity . While it is clear that the lesbian identity she constructs falls outside of and not within the hetero-normative binary of sex she wishes to destory, Bulter warns that this creation of an other to heterosexuality is actually what reinscribes the power domain [e.g. heterosexual structuralism] that it resists (Butler, p. 17). The problem in the formulation of one's identity and one's selfhood as one's sexuality is that such an identity requires the necessity of represent[ing] that self as a prior truth (Butler, p. 18). Sexuality, in creating a stable and definable identity, Butler advances, can no longer be fluid or

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 5 changeable because then the corresponding identity could not be stable. If sexuality is incorporated as an integral part of one's identity, then to maintain that identity one then engages in a string of performances that constitute and contest the coherence of that 'I' [e.g. that identity](Butler, p. 18). For this reason, Butler states that this I does not [i.e. should not] play its lesbianism as role and to do so, would be falling into the same failing that makes the performance of heterosexuality a fundamentally flawed conception of true identity. Unfortunately, Wittig's work Le Corps Lesbien falls into this trap as a sacrifice to achieve her previously mentioned success. Even more alarmingly, the identity of the lesbian she creates (designated here as the 'Wittig lesbian') is portrayed as being outside of human classification and even monstrous, an identity that very few, if any, real lesbians can even engage with or, for political means, stand behind. Throughout the text of Le Corps Lesbien, the narrator references her lesbian lover as a monster (Wittig, pp. 38, 41, 72, 74) or an equivalent term. In one instance, she states I prepare to die by your side adored monster while you cry incessantly about m/y ears (Wittig, p. 38). The hyperbole Wittig brings forth in this passage describing a scene of lovemaking transmits to the reader an entirely different way of imagining worldly acts such as sex (i.e., as comparable to the sacrifice of death) but, in doing so, takes the experience outside the realm of the real and into the realm of performance that Butler speaks against. In another passage, the narrator reveals I recall the soft contact of breast and bellies the slow sinuous comings and goings . . . the delicacy of touching in the gehenna to which you have condemned m/e m/y tormentor without entrails all reassembled on m/e horribly confined exploding into a thousand impotent fragments to disjoin m/e completely (Wittig, p. 103). What is the purpose of Wittig's narrator referring to her lover as a monster or tormentor? The intentionality of Wittig's inclusion of these terms is perhaps revealed in the fact that she wishes, as mentioned earlier, to recite one's body and bring a real body violently to life (Wittig, p. 10). Wittig has attempted to reproduce real and material feelings about sex and devotion and all of the beauty and horror that comes

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 6 with those acts but in doing so has created a individual narrative that she umbrellas under the lesbian body. The harm in such a representative narrative is that sexuality may be said to exceed any definitive narrativization. Sexuality is never fully 'expressed' in a performance . . (Butler, p. 25). The Wittig lesbian is an identity performed repetitively in Le Corps Lesbien as monstrous and extracorporal, a classification that can only be accessed in the imagined or real acts of sex that only the narrator has experienced. In the passage above, the narrator is disjoined into a thousand impotent fragments (Wittig, p. 103) by her monster-lover. While metaphorically beautiful, sexuality, in being expressed so openly, can never be reproduce faithfully the actual act to an audience and, therefore, becomes an inevitable performance. That performance becomes so easily believable by the fact that Wittig uses the word you, involving the reader in the validation of the performance itself. Only the person experiencing the act can understand exactly what is meant by being disjoined and exactly the significance of monster; for the reader, these formulations become motifs in a narrative performance that is so continuously repeated throughout the work they become what the reader thinks is a lesbian. The sexual experiences of the narrator become the embodiment of sexuality that define the larger identity of lesbian and that identity, in itself, is extra-corporal and thus largely inaccessible in the material world. Unfortunately, Wittig has acknowledged earlier that this text will serve as one of the first lesbian texts (Wittig, p. 9) placing readers in one of two difficult positions: either the reader will believe the 'Wittig lesbian', for better or worse, is the embodiment of some constructed lesbian identity or feel alienated by such a construction, especially if the reader is a lesbian and does not identify with the narrative expressed in the work. The failure of this formulation of identity damages the success Wittig has achieved earlier. Concisely, Wittig has tried to express that which cannot be expressed (e.g. sexuality) (Butler, p. 25) and has made the mistake of making an individual narrative of sexuality (a sexuality that is consistently destructive, monstrous, and larger-than-life) into an identity

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 7 that encompasses more than narrator alone. Moreover, it also should be noted that the identity of the Wittig lesbian in Le Corps Lesbien is defined by mimetic reliance on the corporeal and extra-corporeal existence of her lover. Bulter defines gender mimetism as constituted by the variously gendered Others who have been loved and lost, where the loss is suspended through a melancholic and imaginary incorporation (and preservation) of those others into the psyche (Butler, p. 26). She asserts the mimetism is not motivated by a drama of loss or wishful recovery, but [it] appears to precede and constitute desire (and motivation) itself. In this way, Wittig has established the sexuality of the narrator as reliant upon her recalled or imagined Other, her lover. In one passage, the narrator says let your vulva- labia heart clitoris iris crocus- be of odorous refractory osmium, be strong m/y most beautiful one the most febrile the most flagrant m/y hands breaking on touching you m/y voice seeking to re-echo your voice (Wittig, p. 74). The fact that the narrator's voice is dependent upon the echo of her lover's voice is a poignant illustration of how her sexuality is intimately tied to her lover's expression. Her act of lovemaking is contingent upon the goal re-echo[ing] her lover's pleasure. The narrator, in any instance of sexual expression in the text, must recall her lover or lovers, whether present or not. This dependency on the Other, at times, is even expressed in the physical combination of the two lover's bodies until they are indistinguishable from one another (I cannot distinguish yours from m/ine Wittig, p. 81; you are m/yself, you are m/yself Wittig, p. 50). Wittig's use of the lover as pivotal to the narrator's sexuality incorporates the lover into the sexual psyche of the narrator, defined by Bulter's terminology. This mimetic reliance upon the lover in Les Corps Lesbien is not problematic in so far as it establishes that identification and desire can coexist (Butler, p. 26). However, the problem of such a formulation arises from the claim that Wittig does not confine this mimetism to fluid and dynamic sexuality alone (a sexuality that may changed based on experiences with many Others) but instead extends it to the creation of the identity of the Wittig lesbian, as

Kara K. Brower, ENG 385, 8 established previously. Butler asserts that such a consideration of the psychic identification would vitiate the possibility of any stable set of typologies that explain or describe something like gay or lesbian identities (Butler, p. 27). This is where the fundamental contradiction arises in Wittig's work; she has created a lesbian identity from a concept of sexuality that is confined to dependence on the Other expressed in the text, a specific Other that will never be accessible to the reader. This identity is only achievable because classification of the mimetic Other in the text is repetitive, and as such, in some capacity stable. However, in real life, sexuality as defined by mimetic reliance is consistently changing with every new experience or recollection of the Other and is thus incompatible with a stable identity. Thus, the Wittig lesbian is never realizable, because identity cannot and should not be defined integrally by one's sexuality. Therefore, while Wittig, through Le Corps Lesbien, has achieved considerable success in identifying the problematic nature of heteronormative hierarchical structures and, correspondingly, overturned many of these structures though the bold construction of her text, she, nonetheless, has created difficult dilemmas of her own. Her use of narrative under the name The Lesbian Body has offered lesbianism as a category opposed to heterosexuality and has created the identity of the Wittig lesbian, stable only in its description of the lesbian as extra-corporal and monstrous. This identity fails in the same way that heterosexual identity fails; it relies upon the false promise of performance of one's sexuality, which cannot ever be fully expressed and cannot ever truly be consistent when reliant upon another. Wittig's has essentially written a work that never could have been written without serious compromise to achieve its goals. While Wittig's text has created significant political impetus from its success, it was cannot and should not be regarded as defining work for lesbian sexuality, if such a classification of sexuality should even exist.