Dans l’arène ennemie: Textes et entretiens, 1966–1999

In her later collection of parables Paris-la-Politique (1999; not yet published in English translation), the novelist, essayist, and gender theorist Monique Wittig adopts the narratorial position of the black sheep: a lesbian first-person (“je”) who is singled out, belittled, and mocked, even by her supposed feminist allies (the pronominal “elles”). The aptly named collection Dans l’arène ennemie (In the Enemy Arena) also frames Wittig’s position in the literary and political spheres as one of antagonism, of the lesbian writer against the world. As coeditors Sara Garbagnoli, an independent sociologist with the Laboratoire d’Études de Genre et de Sexualité,¹ and Théo Mantion, a doctoral candidate in French at Harvard University, underscore in the introduction, Wittig was always on the offensive, notably in her desire to theorize “the straight mind,” or obligatory heterosexuality as an implicit social contract to which everyone is subjected; her Marxist critique of heterosexuality as...