★★★★★ 5
Gem from a brilliant thinker.
Format: Paperback
This book will forever redefine feminism for its readers.
There are two threads: one political, the other literary commentary. Fortunately, Witting pulls the former into the latter. The astute and radical political critique in Wittig's book is uniquely powerful.
Wittig addresses the question of how a movement is comprised of both group energy and individual experience. The theory, legacy, and limits of Marx and Engels are discussed.
Then, drawing on de Beauvoir and other iconoclasts, Wittig addresses our dominator culture in a way that goes directly to its core.
Wittig deals efficiently yet persuasively with the argument over whether nature or culture is responsible for inequality, declaring that "there is no sex." This statement becomes the book's alpha and omega, and the lens through which Wittig shows us history, literature, and the future of activism.
Like whiteness, maleness is a social category that can be renounced. Man (Homo) once meant everybody in the human community -- it was indeed generic, in the unifying sense. Unfortunately, the word has so frequently been used to describe a socially constructed group that expels half of itself in order to oppress it, "man" is now identified with those identified as male.
In the essay "The Category of Sex" Wittig writes:
"The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters proceed from the same belief, and, as there are no slaves without masters, there are no women without men. The ideology of sexual difference functions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the grounds of nature, the social opposition between man and women. Masculine/feminine, male/female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. ...The masters explain and justify the established divisions as a result of natural differences."
I understand that Wittig has recently passed away. If only I had discovered this book a little earlier, so that I could have met the author. That feeling, I suppose, is the sign of a truly good read. "A text by a minority author is only successful if it succeeds in making the minority point of view unviersal" writes Wittig --and to read this book from beginning to end is to find that the author has done just that.
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Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2004
