The Straight Mind: And Other Essays - Softcover

Wittig, Monique

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807079170 ISBN 13: 9780807079171

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1992

Synopsis

These political, philosophical, and literary essays mark the first collection of theoretical writing from the acclaimed novelist and French feminist writer Monique Wittig.

About this title

About the Author:

Monique Wittig (1935-2003) was a French-born feminist theorist and the author of L'Opoponax and Les Guérillères. Her writing focused on the performativity of gender, sexuality, and lesbian feminism. She studied at the Sorbonne and The School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (L'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), and later taught at such institutions as Vassar College and University of California—Berkeley.

Review:

The Straight Mind is French literary theorist Monique Wittig's first collection of essays centering on women's struggle for liberation from sexism and classism. These nine essays comprise a thoughtful and unique approach to the study of historical materialism and dialectics, and transverse philosophical, political, and literary theory. Monique Wittig describes this collection as a focus on "lesbian materialism," in which she examines men and women as distinct classes rather than as "essentialist" categories. "Lesbians are not women," writes Monique Wittig, and she presents powerful ideas about how the idea of "woman" is socially constructed and used to convey certain images. It is not enough, she argues, to transform economic oppression because not all oppression is, at the source, economic. Sexism will continue to exist even in a society where all people have equal economic opportunities. Only by transforming our thought processes, and in turn, our language, can we transform our society into one in which there is no longer the dominant and the dominated: "In other words, this means there cannot any longer be women and men, and that as classes and categories of thought or language they have to disappear, politically, economically, ideologically." Controversial and abstract, these are essays that challenge and provoke on both intellectual and emotional levels. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Heather Downey

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Press
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0807079170
• ISBN 13: 9780807079171
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 132