Utopia in Blood; Monique Wittig's Les Guerilleres

Monique Wittig's second novel Les Guerilleres is obviously a tale of war, given that the morpheme "guerre" is clearly discernible in the work's title. However, the name of the novel itself is a neologism, an entwining of the masculine word "guerillero" with the feminine suffix "ere" in French. The name of the book itself immediately underscores the historical instability of gender inequity and calls into question why such a term had never existed previously in a feminized form: the feet that there had always been "guerilleros" and never any "guerilleres" draws attention to the historical perpetuity of gender power imbalances. As Dominique Bourque notes, "Le lecteur est frappe par les violations que Wittig inflige a la langue francaise. Car elle n'hesite pas a changer la graphie des mots ... 'guerilleres' plutot que 'guerrieres' ou 'guerilleros' (guerilleros n'existe pas dans le dictionnaire)" (Bourque 93). Bourque's remarks point out that Wittig goes far beyond the mere feminization of an extant noun in French, which would have been a simple enough linguistic transposition. Instead, "Guerilleres" connotes a deliberate and conscious push against convention on the writer's part. With the defiant lexical invention of "warrior women," the author commences a primary act of social subversion in which the nearly exclusive and ancient control of warfare and mastery of arms by men is shared now with women. This unexpected redistribution of power offers a space for Wittig's warrior women to fight against harms caused by hegemonic men, and the apocalyptic battlefields of Les Guerilleres, bloody zones existing largely outside time and space occupied by gender-based armies, become an experimental locale in which Wittig's feminist protagonists elles embrace their newfound potential for violence, raze the damaging misogynistic systems and traditions caused by sexism and emblazon future gender relationships with promises of equality. Therefore, although Wittig does deploy highly graphic depictions of war itself in Les Guerilleres, and mangled corpses, calls to arms and sinister and bloody battles do abound in the text, these marks of destruction are not blemishes, but ultimately indicate, much to the contrary, signs of hope. Wittig crafts an improbable feminist utopia by using violence to declare war on the ontology, the language, and the history that have promulgated women's inferiority and that have fomented alterity. Erika Ostrovsky points out that "the concept of a work of art as a 'war machine is extended to the entirety of the text, since Les Guerilleres is an epic of warfare against the established order, primarily that of male domination" (Ostrovsky 194). In Les Guerilleres, the women warrior protagonists elles confront most prominently the sexist male belief that women are weak and the apparent biological heirs of servitude and domestic submission, and the unraveling of the teleological taint ascribed to women throughout time therefore becomes paramount: Les choses etant en cet etat, elles font venir les metiers.... les brocheuses les tables de montages les brucelles les chalumeaux les fers a souder les fris a tresser a tordre a enfiler.... Elles les entassent sur un bucher immense auquel elles mettent le feu, en faisant exploser tout ce qui ne brule pas. Alors se mettant a danser autour, elles battent des mains, elles crient des phrases obscenes, elles coupent leurs cheveux ou bien elles les denouent. (Wittig, Les Guerilleres 102-3) Without the onuses of weaving and sewing and cooking and cleaning impeding their actions, the women acquire formidable potential: the vehement rejection of domestic labor in favor of their own self-derived imperatives and choices empowers the protagonists. As Brad Epps and Jonathan Katz emphasize, "For Wittig reality as 'naturally given' is a congeries of ideas whose historical force is such that the ideas--say, black and white in a racial register, or man and woman in a sexual register--are naturalized as real, purely and simply, that is to say, 'self-evidently. …