Monique Wittig Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Sturrock

Critical Essay by John Sturrock

["The Lesbian Body" is] interestingly ill-conceived…. It comes under the heading of "lesbian texts" produced, so Miss Wittig's ranting foreword has it, "in a context of total rupture with masculine culture, texts written by women exclusively for women, careless of male approval…." "The Lesbian Body" is a rupture with something, certainly, not least the homelier conventions of femininity. "Say your farewells …," the narratrix cautions her lesbian lover in the very first line, "to what they, the women, call affection tenderness or gracious abandon," which is a rare understatement, because no sooner is it goodbye to all that than it's hello to "yellow smoking intestines spread in the hollow of your hands" and to "the green strings of bile flowing over your breasts." (pp. 18-20)

This very literally misanthropic novel is a series of short, violent invocations of a female body, or fantasies of how one lesbian body might possess...
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