If Lesbians Said The Stuff Straight People Say

the liberated desire of queerness

This French cartoon was created by FHAR, the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action.  FHAR was was founded in 1971 in the aftermath of May 1968.  Guy Hocquenghem and Christine Delphy were members.

In the cartoon, take a look at the women in the right hand corner: you have one woman pointing her finger as if she is telling the other woman how it is, but really her desire for the other woman is blocked, a blocked erotic desire if you will...  a desire that is repressed in society. 

The big bubble emanating from the woman pointing her finger depicts men (and some women) who are unaware of or unable to act on the same-sex desire that they feel.  Rather, they feel this desire through gender and sexual violence or through homosocial bonding.

In the other image of the two women making love in the right hand corner, they are somehow escaping this whole process of violence through their "liberated desire" for one another.

See Michael Moon's introduction to Homosexual Desire by Guy Hocquenghem (pages 11-16) for more on this cartoon.  I credit him for bringing this cartoon to my attention and for the above description.

envisioning a lesbian revolution

thanks goes to carolyn gage for allowing me to reblog her wonderfully written piece on monique wittig's literary works, which i believe have revolutionary potential.

______________________________________________________________

Copyright 2003 Carolyn Gage

Originally published in off our backs, vol. xxxiv, Washington, DC.

Click here to see original link.

 Monique Wittig: In Memoriam

I began writing and researching lesbian literature in the early 1980’s. As a playwright, I was not just looking for my history, but I was searching for different paradigms and new/old archetypes from a culture that had been buried or appropriated. The so-called “classic” dramas were male narratives, obsessed with possession and overthrow, especially of father figures. The women were obstacles, rewards, or objects of exchange in the bloody transactions between men. This was not a template I could customize by the mere switching of pronouns.

And, of course, the so-called universal archetypes of this drama were happy housewives, glorying in their upwardly mobile marriages, or depressing martyrs and victims. The spunky women, like the mid-life, cast-off wife Medea, go mad with jealousy and murder their own children. The women excluded from male hierarchies waste their lives in futile gestures, like Antigone. The captive, raped, colonized survivor, like Cassandra, is doomed to a post-traumatic scenario of recounting her tale of atrocity to a population who will not or cannot believe her. And so on…

This was my “heritage” as a Western playwright. Obviously, I could not tell a lesbian story with these colonial archetypes or dominance paradigms. Nor did I want to write superficial lesbian sit-coms, or endless parodies or critiques of patriarchal drama for a rising elite of post-modern, faux feminists to consume. It is, of course, impossible to ignore this toxic theatre legacy, but rather than batter at the gates of this boys’ club in vain attempts to gain entry, I wanted to look back and down on it from the perspective of a fully-realized, lesbian-centered narrative.

Where would I turn for my narrative histories? Where was the lesbian-feminist equivalent of the Bible, or the Koran, or the Bhagavad Gita? Where was my Iliad, my Odyssey? Who would be my Homer?

And this is when I discovered the writings of Monique Wittig. I found them among the used paperbacks in a women’s bookstore in Portland, Oregon. The Lesbian Body. The Guérilières. The Opoponax. Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary. Wittig was generating archetypes and paradigms. She was writing about ancient matriarchal cultures that, paradoxically, were contemporaneous with ours. She was reclaiming goddesses, students of Sappho, the Vietnamese Trung sisters of 40 AD. She was not just going back in archeological time, but she was also going back in archetypal time by re-membering lesbian childhood from the eyes of the child in The Opoponax, bringing back the magical thinking of children, where the mythical beast of resistance, the opoponax, is congruent with the intense, wonder-filled discoveries of the developing mind.

I am the opoponax. You must not provoke him all the time the way you do. If you have trouble combing your hair in the morning you mustn't be surprised. He is everywhere. He is in your hair. He is under your pillow when you go to sleep. Tonight he will make you itch all over so badly that you won't be able to go to sleep. When dawn comes behind the window tomorrow morning you will be able to see the opoponax sitting on the window sill. I am the opoponax.

Wittig was writing about the fluid social configurations of women not bounded by heteropatriarchal obsessions with virginity and paternity. She was writing about the volcanic fury that formerly enslaved women direct toward each other and toward themselves:

Six of the women are none too many to hold her. Her mouth is open. Inarticulate words and cries are heard. She stamps the ground with her feet. She twists her arms to free them from the grip, she shakes her head in every direction. At a given moment she lets herself fall to the ground, she strikes the ground with her arms, she rolls about shrieking. Her mouth seizes the earth and spits it out. Her gums bleed. Words like death blood blood burn death war war war are heard. Then she tears her garments and bangs her head on the ground until she falls silent, done for. Four of the women carry her, singing, Behind my eyelids/ the dream has not reached my soul/ whether I sleep or wake/ there is no rest.

She was writing an eroticism that did not privilege the genitals, one that asked us to envision lesbian sexuality in radical new ways:

The kaleidoscope game consists of inserting a handful of yellow blue pink mauve orange green violet flies beneath someone’s eyelids, m/ine for instance. They are really tiny flies minute insects, their peculiarity lies in the bizarre intensity of their colours. You place them between m/y eyelid and m/y eyeball despite m/y protestations and laughter.

She was also celebrating women’s capacity for savagery.

The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning.

Wittig reclaimed and venerated the intricacies of the vulva in the “feminaries” that were distributed among the girls of in her tribe of women warriors:

The women say the feminary amuses the little girls. For instance three kinds of labia minora are mentioned there. The dwarf labia are triangular. Side by side, they form two narrow folds. They are almost invisible because the labia majora cover them. The moderate-sized labia minora resemble the flower of a lily. They are half-moon shaped or triangular. They can be seen in their entirety taut supple seething. The large labia spread out resemble a butterfly's wings. They are tall triangular or rectangular, very prominent.

Then, consistent with her commitment to anarchy, she has the feminaries destroyed:

The women say that it may be that the feminaries have fulfilled their function. They say they have no means of knowing. They say that thoroughly indoctrinated as they are with ancient texts no longer to hand, these seem to them outdated. All they can do to avoid being encumbered with useless knowledge is to heap them up in the squares and set fire to them. That would be an excuse for celebrations.

Wittig is clear that patriarchal languages is a language of ownership, and that women must resist it:

The women say, the language you speak poisons your glottis tongue palate lips. They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like many-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak

The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, If I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.

Wittig worked with some of the classical goddesses and myths, envisioning her lover at a gathering with Artemis, Aphrodite, Ishtar, Persephone, and host of other female deities. She retold the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, with a female protagonist descending into hell to bring back her reluctant, self-loathing lover, who begs her at every step to abandon her to her misery. She offers a paean to Sappho, describing a violet rain that irradiates the naked body of her beloved. In Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary, co-written with Sande Zeig, she not only reclaims all kinds of goddesses and mythical figures, but describes various ages (“Steam Age,” “the Concrete Age”), characterizing the present era as “the Glorious Age,” thereby attempting to perpetuate and memorialize a myth of her own making:

For almost two millenniums lesbians had been represented with glories around their heads. This was mistaken for a sign of sanctity and was not yet recognized as a form of energy. When the companion lovers appeared to one another in their brilliance and were able to stand the sight, they caught and used this energy that they immediately called “glorious.” From which comes the “Glorious Age.”

Wittig was, single-handedly, generating ancestral memories and cultural prototypes. She was, as she said, “Starting with zero.” And she did more than imagine a past and a future for lesbians. She realized them—that is, made them real—and then reported back to us from the center of that new reality. She was an anarchistic pioneer, smashing through men’s civilizations to reveal a primitive wildness and promise that have always existed in possibility.

The obligatory and all-but-overtly sneering obituaries for Wittig in the mainstream press do not do her justice. They desiccate and desecrate her work in their attempts to get at it, but it remains inaccessible to outsiders. The succulence of Wittig’s writing is in the juice—which like the vaginal secretions she names “cyprine”– is distinctly lesbian.

The greatest tribute we can offer to this visionary foremother of lesbian-feminism is to take her writings to heart. And she has left us an injunction for this dazzling lesbian revolution that fluttered with such bizarre intensity behind her eyelids… Listen:

There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember… You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

mary lambert's music video "secrets"

monique wittig's trojan horse

click on the following image to see my infographic that i created.

it is on Monique Wittig's idea of the trojan horse.

it is a call for revolution which Wittig sees as an act of invention and as a breaking away from preconceived notions.

check it out and feel free to share!

"dear straight people" by denice frohman

5678! by butterfly boucher

You wanna know how love is made
You wanna see the world change
Well gather all your people 'round
And listen for the countdown

(Five, six, seven, eight)

It's a science
And the beat is our alliance
But once you have it
There is method to the madness

The sky is falling, this is true
Been falling since I fell for you
The feeling of deja vu
And no one does it like you do

It's a science
And the beat is our alliance
But once you have it
There is method to the madness

(Five, six, seven, eight)

Oh, it's a chemical attraction
Can you feel it?
It's the sound of satisfaction

(So you think you can dance, do you?
So you think you can dance, do you?
Honey, everybody thinks they can dance
Watch me dance)

And no one does it like you do

(Five, six, seven, eight)

It's a science
And the beat is our alliance
But once you have it
There is method to the madness

(Five, six, seven, eight)

Oh, it's a chemical attraction
Can you feel it?
It's the sound of satisfaction

(Watch me dance)

STAR Consent Campaign PSA

i developed this Consent Campaign PSA for STAR, Sexual Trauma Awareness & Response.

renversement

renversement

noun

1. the act of beginning anew without naturalization or predetermination

2. the creation of new forms

3. the act of invention, upheaval, revolution, subversion

4. freedom

renversement is the refusal to install another political form.  it is the idea that freedom cannot be founded.

to be free and to act are the same.

Sources:

On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political and Literal Essays edited by Namascar Shaktini

The Straight Mind by Monique Wittig