Best 23 quotes of Monique Wittig on MyQuotes

Monique Wittig

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    A materialist feminist approach to women's oppression destroys the idea that women are a 'natural group' . . . What the analysis accomplishes on the level of ideas, practice makes actual at the level of facts: by its very existence, lesbian society destroys the artificial (social) fact constituting women as a 'natural group.' A lesbian society pragmatically reveals that the division from men of which women have been the object is a political one . . .

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses. It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    Frankly, [the definition of woman] is a problem that the lesbians do not have because of a change of perspective. 'Woman' has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual, economic systems. Lesbians are not women.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    ... I am with fire between my teeth and still nothing but my blank page.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    I feel a near passion for intelligence at grips with itself and not letting go.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and nonpossession.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be to say that sex creates oppression, or to say that the cause (origin) of oppression is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting (or outside of) society.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    men are not born with a faculty for the universal and ... women are not reduced at birth to the particular. The universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men. It does not happen by magic, it must be done. It is an act, a criminal act, perpetrated by one class against another. It is an act carried out at the level of concepts, philosophy, politics.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    The basic agreement between human beings, indeed what makes them human and makes them social, is language.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    The bearers of fables are very welcome.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    The category of sex is the political category that founds society as heterosexual.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions between two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time that it constitutes and reveals them as classes.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    They say that oppression engenders hate. They are heard on all sides crying hate hate.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    They say that there is no reality before it has been given shape by words rules regulations. They say that in what concerns them everything has to be remade starting from basic principles. They say that in the first place the vocabulary of every language is to be examined, modified, turned upside down, that every word must be screened.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    Today, together, let us repeat as our slogan that all trace of violence must disappear from this earth, then the sun will be honey-colored and music good to hear.

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    A text by a minority writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal. ('The Universal and the Particular')" ... In claiming the lesbian point of view as universal, she overturns the concepts to which we are accustomed. For up to this point, minority writers had to add "the universal" to their points of view if they wished to attain the unquestioned universality of the dominant class. Gay men, for example, have always defined themselves as a minority and never questioned, despite their transgression, the dominant choice. This is why gay culture has always had a fairly wide audience. [From the Foreword "Changing the Point of View" by Louise Turcotte]

  • By Anonym
    Monique Wittig

    One only has to read interviews with outstanding women to hear them apologizing