Summary Of One Is Not Born A Woman By Wittig

Monique Wittig’s works, The Lesbian Body (1975) and “One is Not Born a Woman” (1980), might seem similar to Cixous’s, in that she engages in a political project designed to create a non-phallogocentric discourse, but she turns to “lesbianization” rather than bisexuality. She posits an opposing model to the heterosexual mode of language that transcends the categories of sex and gender, and she calls it the “lesbianization of language”. She claims that, saying, “lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex” (20). For her, the ‘lesbianized language’ serves both men and women to engage in the same space. Expectedly, Bernard Shaw also uses the ‘lesbianized language’ as a tool to enable his females to break free
from the heterosexual discourse and recover their silenced voice, through a purely feminine language. Kristeva takes along the same line as Cixous and Wittig wherein she recommends that there ought to be coordination between the semiotic (women’s language) and the symbolic (men’s language) to generate a perfect frame that authorizes the two sexes to exist together without conflict. That is to say, the feminine or the semiotic could be found in both men and women’s writing, hence it is not necessarily produced only by women. Kristeva, in fact, analyzes a group of male writers such as Lautréament, Mallarmé, Joyce, and Artaud, who announce their crack with the syntactical and semantic orders in favor of the exploration of patterns of rhythms and intonations. Their use of the écriture feminine, indeed, uncovers the move from the gender of the author to the gender of the text.