Shaktini, Namascar

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.

Identity in the African diaspora has been an issue of great interest in recent years. In her first novel Heremakhonon, Maryse Conde explores African diasporan female identity. She brings into question multi-culturalism, race stratification, classism, and sexism as major influences in developing identity for the African diasporan woman. For Conde's protagonist in the novel, Veronica, fragmented consciousness is manifested by movement from Guadeloupe, her birth land, to France, to Africa in search of a place or an individual who might help her "heal" her identity. In addition to establishing the existence of fragmentation of consciousness in her character, Conde creates a unique narrative voice which employs elements of autonomous interior monologue to explore the female Diasporan perspective. Finally, Maryse Conde, through the experiences of her character Veronica, refutes the essentialist view of identity in African peoples of the world.

French feminist writer and theorist, Monique Wittig, theorizes from a nonessentialist, materialist lesbian position to posit categories of sex and gender as social constructions, thereby contesting what she terms the heterosexual regime. Because her social theory and literary praxis inform the thinking of leading figures associated with Queer theory, such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Teresa de Lauretis, Wittig is often considered a precursor to the Queer theory movement. As Queer studies gain purchase in academic curricula, it is timely to assess Wittig's historical contribution to the Queer theory movement and her future pertinence to it as a "Queer" theorist.