Trojan horse: Monique Wittig's war on gender

Language, and more specifically gender within language, is the central component in French feminist writer Monique Wittig's war on gender. In her works Les Guerilleres and Le Corps lesbien, Wittig uses a deconstructionist methodology to wage war on the binary gender construct that privileges the masculine and reduces the feminine to the position of inferior and "Other." In order to accomplish her project of subverting the existing phallogocentric ideology and displacing the gender system that denies women any claim to the universal, Wittig experiments with pronouns, expands the notion of the theory of universalism, creates neologisms, revisions myths, epics, and fairy tales, and interweaves secondary narratives within her texts. With these literary strategies, Wittig succeeds in creating a Trojan horse capable of destroying old oppressive forms and generating new revolutionary discourse which expands the semantic space for females.