法國女性主義健將Monique Wittig過逝

看板Feminism (女性主義)作者nairobi (to be a UNV !)時間22年前 (2003/02/08 15:47)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

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以下新聞轉貼自英國衛報 http://books.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4598718,00.html Monique Wittig Radical French writer at the cutting edge of feminist philosophy Margaret Reynolds Wednesday February 5, 2003 The Guardian Monique Wittig, who has died aged 67, was a radical philosopher, lesbian theorist, feminist practitioner and avant-garde writer. Her move to spend the last decade or so of her life at the University of Arizona - in the heart of the wild west - was only one of many radical translations that characterised her extraordinary career. She was born in Dannemarie, on the Upper Rhine in France. After her parents, who opposed the Nazis, fled to Rouergue, in the French Aveyron, she grew up in country surroundings, before her family moved on to Paris, where she attended university. The 1960s were made for Wittig. She became a founder member of the Mouvement de la Liberation Feminine, helped organise a separatist group called the Feministes Revolutionnaires and, with a group of other women, marched on the Arc de Triomphe to lay a wreath dedicated to The Wife Of The Unknown Soldier. She knew the older generation of feminist philosopher politicians - Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute and Marguerite Duras - but she had her own ideas. She received a number of rejection slips before her work was noticed by Jerome Lindon at Editions de Minuit, a revolutionary publishing house best known as the champion of the nouveau roman, and the publisher of Alain Robbe-Grillet. He turned down La Mechanique (Mechanics), but took her next novel L'Opoponax. It won the Prix Medicis in 1964. Wittig published Les Guerilleres in 1969, Le Corps Lesbien in 1973, and Virgile, Non in 1985 - all with Editions de Minuit. These works are part fiction, part argument, part literary experiment. Les Guerilleres (The Women Guerrillas) features nothing but a large mysterious "0" on some pages. Others consist of lists of names set out like poetry - "Calypso, Judith, Anne" - while still more tell the strange beauty of some encampment, ritual or coupling. But every page is a call to arms: "The women affirming triumph that all action is overthrow". In her novel L'Opoponax, the two girls refer to themselves in the third person as "on" ("one"). In Le Corps Lesbien, the distinction between "you" and "I" is elided. "J/e", in the French, becomes "m/e" and "m/y" in the English translation by David LeVay (1986). The protagonists ex plore each other, body and spirit, becoming each other, just as the formal qualities of the text are designed to blend. Wittig created in her writing a politics of collaboration and integration. Eventually, Wittig broke from the Mouvement and went to the United States. Her problem was this: she did not believe in the concept of "woman" - as in women's studies, the women's movement, or even in the theoretical style of writing ecriture feminine, identified by her compatriots Helene Cixous and Catherine Clement. When she took up her last job in women's studies at Tucson, Wittig was resigned to the paradox. Her work shares the political concerns and seriously teasing allusiveness of writer-philosophers like Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and, in Canada, Nicole Brossard. But there was a difference. Wittig's point of view was not separatist. The term "woman", she argued, had to be rejected as secondary - contaminated by its second-class relation to the term "man", and governed by the dictates of conventional heterosexuality. "Lesbians," she said, "are not women." To break down definitions was her mission. In spite of her reluctance to perform, she became a celebrity in the American women's movement. Her collection of essays, The Straight Mind (1992), is witty, imaginative and, as ever, experimental. It is her imaginative use of style-as-politics that will be her lasting legacy, influencing writers as diverse as Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson. She published Lesbian Peoples: Material For A Dictionary (1976) in collaboration with Sande Zeig, with whom she also worked on a film, The Girl. She may have ended her life in the mainstream, as a professor of French (1990-2003), and of women's studies (1997-2003), but she remained a pioneer. · Monique Wittig, writer and academic, born July 13 1935; died January 3 2003 -- Screwing up your guy, I am going home. > < ~~ Eric Cartman -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.csie.ntu.edu.tw) ◆ From: 203.203.203.137