Toward a Feminism Without Gender

Monique Wittig’s novels ‘The Lesbian Body’ and ‘Across the Acheron’ have just received new editions that reflect the feminist thinker’s ongoing cultural impact.

By Gabriel Ojeda-SaguéJanuary 12, 2026

• Fiction

• Gender & Sexuality

If we, as lesbians and gay men, continue to speak of ourselves and to conceive of ourselves as women and as men, we are instrumental in maintaining heterosexuality.
—Monique Wittig, “The Straight Mind” (1980)

THE “TRANS-EXCLUSIONARY radical feminist” philosophy (a.k.a. TERFism) that grounds womanhood in biological sex and frames trans antagonism as a defense of womanhood is now the law of the land. In the United States, Donald Trump’s executive order replacing “gender” with “sex” in federal documents and pulling funds from causes related to transness purports to be “defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government” (as the order’s title has it). Meanwhile, in the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom, a group called For Women Scotland was victorious in grounding the legal basis of the definition of “woman” in biological sex, a move transparently intended to limit trans women’s access to women-only spaces and services.

Some gay and lesbian activists have followed suit, rejecting the implicit alliances of the LGBT model and staking the claim that gayness is a sexual orientation toward members of the same sex that has nothing to do with gender. The anti-trans group LGB Alliance, for example, explains transness as “a psychological reaction to a sexist society,” an attempt to correct what is difficult about being a woman and a lesbian via “a new form of conversion therapy.” These legal victories on behalf of the increasingly powerful TERF movement seek to clarify, defend, and redeem the category of woman by purging it of transness and attaching it to a natural and unchanging biology meant to be embraced rather than escaped. “Woman,” “gay,” and “lesbian” seem less like prisons and more like bunkers when this formidable weaponry is pointed out of them.

For many of us who have devoted ourselves to feminism, this seems no feminism at all. Monique Wittig—the French lesbian feminist, novelist, philosopher, activist, and playwright—described this paradox of feminism very well. “What does ‘feminist’ mean?” she asked in her 1981 essay “One Is Not Born a Woman.” “For many of us it means someone who fights for women as a class and for the disappearance of this class. For many others it means someone who fights for woman and her defense—for the myth, then, and its reenforcement.” Wittig found herself firmly in the former camp, arguing across a rich body of work that sex is not a natural biological division that patriarchy simply ranks in social, political, and economic terms; on the contrary, sex is a product of the social, political, and economic order that we call patriarchy.

In other words, patriarchy is not the oppression of sex; rather, patriarchal oppression is what makes us believe we have a sex in the first place. Women are a class formed by an oppressive power, a class on whom are imposed the rigid labor obligations of reproduction, domesticity, and sexual availability; a class whose labor is appropriated by the class that calls itself “men.” To defensively take up the category of woman, as the TERFs do in the above examples, is, for Wittig, to encase oneself further in a myth designed to exploit. Wittig’s feminism is thus the realization that “women will have to abstract themselves from the definition ‘woman’ which is imposed upon them.”

As TERFs do battle in the public sphere with other kinds of feminism, from transfeminism to materialist feminism to inclusive liberal feminism, all camps have seen the resonances of their arguments with the second-wave feminist debates of the 1970s and ’80s over the meanings of sex, woman, gender, sexuality, and transness. New histories and analyses of the second wave from writers including Amia Srinivasan, Brenda Cossman, Dana Glaser, and Lorna Bracewell have looked back to this innovative and tense period to clarify the battles won and lost today. Just as TERFs have held Janice Raymond’s 1979 book The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male as a guidebook for contemporary anti-trans feminism, so have others sought to recirculate the writings of figures like Andrea Dworkin, Jill Johnston, and Shulamith Firestone.

And now the Brooklyn-based small press Winter Editions has brought out new versions of

of Wittig’s novels The Lesbian Body (1973) and Across the Acheron (1985), in David Le Vay’s English translations (the latter also with Margaret Crosland). These editions, edited by Alice Centamore and Matvei Yankelevich (with contributions from Namascar Shaktini and Sande Zeig), represent a new stage in the reckoning with the legacy of second-wave feminism, assessing whether the movement’s ultimate goal should be the defense or the undoing of the category of woman. With revised translations that minimize the use of “women” and other gendered terms, and with introductions by trans critical theorist Paul Preciado and family abolition scholar Sophie Lewis, these new editions strongly claim Wittig for transfeminism and for the abolition of gender. Both Preciado and Lewis see in Wittig’s clashes with France’s predominantly heterosexual Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) a prologue to today’s clashes between transfeminism and TERFism. Lewis definitively rejects any attempts by TERFs, such as self-described “femalist” Dora Moutot, to reclaim Wittig for their cause as displaying a grasp of the French author’s work “so poor as to constitute outright misinterpretation.” These editions, which make newly accessible to American audiences one of Wittig’s most beloved and one of her most underread novels, usher her into contemporary debates, adapting her perspective on 20th-century feminism for a 21st-century audience struggling anew with what kind of world feminism brings to bear.

There are at least two important differences between Wittig and other second-wave feminist thinkers who have enjoyed contemporary revivals. The first has to do with the meaning of “lesbian.” Wittig was opposed to separatist and political forms of lesbianism that embraced the identity as the ultimate expression of womanhood; for Wittig, by contrast, lesbianism is what becomes available when you reject the category of woman. “[I]t would be incorrect,” she wrote in her essay “The Straight Mind,” “to say that lesbians associate, make love, live with women, for ‘woman’ has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems. Lesbians are not women.” Lesbianism is thus, for Wittig, already a trans position in that it rejects the constructs of normative sex and gender. The gravest error would be for lesbians to try to reclaim their place in womanhood; rather, their radical potential lies precisely in their nonwomanhood, a position from which they can destroy the social order of heterosexuality.

“We are escapees from our class,” Wittig wrote in “One Is Not Born a Woman,” “in the same way as the American runaway slaves were when escaping slavery and becoming free” (I’ll return to the frictions of that analogy in a moment). For Wittig, as much as lesbianism was an erotic position, it was also a political flight from the symbolic order of sex/gender. As a result, “lesbian” may be a more capacious category than we might initially expect; in fact, other kinds of sexual and racial minority cultures might also be “lesbian” to the degree that they reject a society based on sex/gender. Does this mean, then, that lesbianism has no erotic or physical specificity? The Lesbian Body is largely an attempt to answer that very question.

Indeed, the second major difference between Wittig’s work and other second-wave feminists enjoying a renaissance today is that, outside of a single book of critical essays (1992’s The Straight Mind and Other Essays), Wittig most frequently explored her political worldview in experimental, ambivalent, and imagistic novels. As she made clear in her 1985 essay “The Mark of Gender,” Wittig saw language as the key enforcer of the sex system, “cast[ing] sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.” She believed that the revolutionary lesbian project required a total reinvention of language—a project she sought to enact in her novels. “The Mark of Gender” outlined the goals of her first three novels, each of which would presciently embark on a different experiment in pronoun use.

Wittig’s first two novels—The Opoponax (1964), a hypersensory coming-of-age story that also deserves reprinting, and Les Guérillères (1969), her most popular and still widely printed novel of feminist militants—experiment with the language of collectivity. The Opoponax centers its story on a single character referred to with the French pronoun “on,” which literally means “one,” is frequently used as an equivalent to “we,” and was rendered cleverly (if somewhat inaccurately) as “you” in Helen Weaver’s 1976 English translation. This usage gives the central character, a young girl raised in a convent, a subject position that is counterintuitively neuter and permeable. Les Guérillères tests the possibilities and frictions of “elles,” the feminine “they” that refers to groups exclusively composed of women, asking how elles might become the universal position rather than the marginal one.

The grammatical experiment that informs The Lesbian Body focuses on the subject pronoun “je” (“I”). Wittig understands that our language is compromised—that whenever we refer to ourselves, we do so within the confines of a system of gender that distances and divides us from ourselves and each other. But then, as she put it in “The Mark of Gender,” “no woman can say ‘I’ without being for herself a total subject—that is, ungendered, universal, whole.” Anytime we speak ourselves into the world, we face this dilemma—that we are full subjects, human beings, and divided subjects, gendered (non)beings. In The Lesbian Body, Wittig represents this paradox of language as both the source of our social alienation and the site of our self-presentation by using the modified pronoun “j/e” (represented in these new editions by an elegantly slashed I).

Just as the novel does to its central pronoun, our protagonist breaks open and divides the body of her lover. The Lesbian Body is composed of over 100 vignettes describing the way obsessive, devoted, and fiercely jealous lesbian lovers, living on a mythological version of Lesbos, literally enter each other’s bodies. “I discover that your skin can be lifted layer by layer,” we are told at the novel’s outset. “I touch your skull, I grasp it with all m/y fingers, I press it, I gather the skin over the whole of the cranial vault, I tear off the skin brutally beneath the hair.” The language is as violent as it is erotic, as elegant as it is melodramatic. The “lesbian body” is both a mass of endlessly divisible flesh and a passionate, delirious erotic vehicle. Much like its grammatically and anatomically split subjects, The Lesbian Body is full of contradictions, ambivalences, and ruptures. Wittig commented that the title came to her as a kind of joke, “le corps lesbien” grammatically masculinizing something that was distinctly feminine.

We may also note a paradox between the title’s declaration and Wittig’s larger philosophy: if the “lesbian” is a runaway from a system that classifies bodies in language, then there should be no such thing called “the lesbian body.” Or, perhaps, as Preciado puts it in his introduction to this new edition, “each and everybody that is ready to walk the path of radical emancipation will become a Lesbian Body.” Another ambivalence arises: is the anatomizing of the lesbian body—especially in the poem that courses through the book (and provides this new edition with its cover): “THE VEINS THE ARTERIES THE VESSELS THE NERVES […] THE PLEXUSES THE GLANDS THE GANGLIA,” and so on—the dissolution of that body or its reconstruction? The book works over these ambivalences without precisely resolving them, luring the reader into their uncertain dramas with prose that is heady, pleasurable, and gory.

This new edition of the novel retains David Le Vay’s original translation but updates it with notes made by Wittig herself. The most important change, and a clear vehicle for this new edition’s political framework, is the reduction of the use of the terms “woman” and “women”: for example, Wittig’s original “Deux d’entre elles alors t’escortent et t’entraînent de force,” which Le Vay had originally translated as “Then two of the women escort you and drag you forcibly away,” is now rendered as “then two of them escort you and drag you forcibly away.” Le Vay’s translation of “elles” as “the women,” recognizing the feminine collective of the pronoun, is simplified into “them” to cohere with Wittig’s project (from Les Guérillères onward) of universalizing the term’s marginal femininity.

And this is precisely where these new editions position Wittig against a separatist reading of her work. Her sapphic island is no Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, no enclave for the divine feminine; Wittig seeks (as she put it in “The Mark of Gender”) “not to feminize the world but to make the categories of sex obsolete in language.” The island here is not utopic but universalist, where “lesbianism” means the rending of the body from its sex and gender, and where “lesbian sex” means, as C. Jacob Hale once put it, “hav[ing] sex without men or women.” The lesbian is no longer the minority position but that which frees all of us from the divisions of patriarchal language—or, as Wittig phrases it in the grammar of the novel, “I look at you from inside yourself, I lose m/yself.”

But I am troubled by one of Wittig’s tools for shifting the lesbian from a form of woman to an escape from sex/gender itself. Many second-wave feminists learned how to craft their language and activism from the work of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements, which sometimes led to an imprecise analogy of gender to race (the most infamous example perhaps being Yoko Ono’s assertion in a 1968 interview that “woman is the [n—] of the world”). Wittig frequently employs this kind of analogy, combining her materialist sense of woman as a class with Black activism’s language of fugitivity and bondage to explain her theory of the lesbian’s radical potential. Examples abound in her theoretical work—for instance, these from The Straight Mind: “[E]xactly as it was for serfs and slaves, women may ‘choose’ to be runaways and try to escape their class or group (as lesbians do)”; “as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men”; “lesbians are runaways, fugitive slaves”; and so on. Recent scholarship has critiqued this analogy, pointing out blind spots in Wittig’s grasp of racial difference, but I would argue that her final novel, Across the Acheron, actually thematizes the dissatisfaction with this language of enslavement.

Across the Acheron is a bizarre text, telling of a character named “Wittig” and her journey through a hellish San Francisco, clearly but loosely modeled on Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the story, Wittig is guided by Manastabal (the author’s invented Virgil, named after an African moth or perhaps a bastardization of the ancient Numidian king Mastanabal) through the city’s lost souls and into a paradise of collectivity, of abundant feasts and naked dykes on bikes. Like The Lesbian Body, its writing is elegant and horrific, a “Guernica of the human (feminist) condition” (as Publishers Weekly called it upon its publication). Much of the novel’s drama involves Wittig’s inability to make the lost souls understand they are in hell, that they are being tortured and subjugated but can still free themselves. Wittig is bitter, brash, and distinctly unconvincing to the lost souls, seeming to exaggerate and ironize the writer Wittig’s own late-career disappointment with the fate of feminist activism. Much of the commentary on the novel has described it as an exploration of the difficulties and disillusionments of the struggle for freedom, a reckoning with the fact that some people will continue to invest deeply in systems that work against them, a poetic iteration of the same anxieties about solidarity that influenced Andrea Dworkin’s 1983 book Right-Wing Women.

When reading Across the Acheron, it is impossible not to see how much the language of Wittig the character has been shaped by the legacy of racial enslavement. Witness her cries to the lost souls of San Francisco: “Are you so embedded in the flesh of slavery that no sound from outside can reach you?”; “We’re in the middle of a lynching session, a typical human hunt”; “I’m very much afraid there are no runaways at this place except her and me.” In one section of the novel, the lost souls are sold at auction; in another, a righteously angry Wittig enters a brothel (“the temple of love”) and brutally lashes the inmates there with a bullwhip, in a fury reminiscent of Jesus in the Temple. Manastabal frequently chastises her for this antagonism to the lost souls:

You can, if you wish, feel delighted over and over again at having deserted and been the runaway slave who ran farther away than anyone else, and you can tell yourself that’s all right. […] All the same, as long as one has this privilege it’s a poor show if you use it to grind down even further the unfortunate creatures who are deprived of it.

What at once interests and frustrates me about this novel is how much it attends to the inability of Wittig’s radical language to work its intended effect, to inspire the fugitive collectivity her career always envisioned. The novel’s Wittig is an emblem of the failures of Wittigian thought.

The revival in interest in Wittig that we are seeing now, of which these new editions are a major part, is a clear sign of the frustration with the turn that “feminism” has recently taken, in policy and activism, toward enshrining “woman,” “biological sex,” and a bastardized view of gayness that excludes transness. We need Wittig now because we require a tool kit for undoing gender in language, rejecting sex in political economy, and escaping the seductive trap of womanhood. Wittig offers us a feminism without gender, a materialist transfeminism that envisions a radical reconstruction of the relationship between our bodies and our selves.

At the same time, however, we need more than Wittig if we really want the radical collectivity she imagined. I think even Wittig knew this, that her final works of fiction are largely a reckoning with how her feminism struggles with the problem of producing liberation. That problem is no further resolved now than it was during the second wave; in fact, it seems denser and more complex today given the legal, political, and economic enhancements of the structures of sex and race. These new editions of Wittig’s novels, then, remind us that perhaps the most important realization of her feminism is that the project of freedom and collectivity is not one of becoming but one of unbecoming.