In 1976, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes was published in France. Written in collaboration with Sande Zeig, it was translated by the authors as Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary.

Sponsor Message.

In contrast to The Lesbian Body, Lesbian Peoples has a light touch. It is an imaginative take on history that chronicles by keywords, sometimes in strange juxtaposition, the passage of a mythic people to the utopian "Glorious Age."

As much a period piece as a rewriting of historical periodization, key figures of lesbian feminism make cameo appearances. Jill Johnston's "Lesbian Nation" is cited as the last nation to exist before the beginning of the Glorious Age.

Wittig's most recent book of fiction was published in France in 1985 as Virgile, Non, and two years later in English as Across the Acheron. Elements of all of her previous writing are present: parody--of Dante's Divine Comedy; revolutionary utopia--paradise is across the Golden Gate Bridge; and Wittig's unconventional namings--the central character is none other than "Wittig."

This book is the least well-known of her published works, perhaps because the idea that lesbians (and women) existing in the "straight" world are living in a kind of purgatory is not as popular as it once was or, perhaps, because this is the least "universal" of her books.

Monique Wittig immigrated to the United States in 1976. Once in North America, she turned her pen to theoretical essays on feminism, language, and literature. In these essays, mostly written in English and published in Feminist Issues, Wittig developed her ideas about what she described as "materialist lesbianism," where lesbians represent the possibility of escaping the category of "woman" by refusing her "role" and rejecting the "economic, ideological, and political power of a man."

In these essays, Wittig also finally began to explain the linguistic manipulations in her complex fictions, with which many readers struggled. Some of these essays, including "One is Not Born a Woman," "The Category of Sex," and "The Mark of Gender," have become canonical in Women's Studies; in the emergent field of Lesbian and Gay Studies, "The Straight Mind" has particular significance. Her essays have recently been collected and published under this title.

On January 3, 2003, Wittig died of a heart attack in Tucson, Arizona, where she had taught in the University of Arizona's Women's Studies Program for twelve years. She is survived by her partner and collaborator, Sande Zeig.

Monique Wittig's linguistic brilliance and political courage made her truly one of the avant-garde. To date, only one book-length study of her work has been published, but the importance of her books and essays for several generations of thinkers in the areas of gender and sexuality will make her the subject of many more.

Historically either distrusted as agents of chaos or admired as examples of female power and intelligence, Amazons were depicted as heterosexual until the twentieth century, when lesbians adopted them as symbols of powerful women living without men.

The contributions of gay men and lesbians to twentieth-century French literature have been closely intertwined with the course of mainstream literature.

Although the question of homosexual identity is a complex one, it has polarized activists, theorists, and literary critics into two primary camps, essentialists and constructionists, both of which can contribute usefully to an understanding of the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Although gay, lesbian, and queer theory are related practices, the three terms delineate separate emphases marked by different assumptions about the relationship between gender and sexuality.

Although most lesbian mystery fiction reflects a political stance, the most effective lesbian crime novels have been those that have most enthusiastically embraced the need to entertain the reader.

From the great modernist writers of the 1920s and 1930s to the pulp writers of the 1950s to the lesbian writers of today, lesbian novelists have had a powerful impact on the lesbian community.

Post-modern theory has led to the problematizing of marginalized and "other" peoples and cultures and to viewing homosexuality as a social construction.

In the Divine Comedy Dante treats male homosexuality first as violence against God and then more sympathetically as merely one of the kinds of love.

Inspired by Jill Johnston's collection of essays of the same name, the term "lesbian nation" became a rallying cry for political lesbians of the 1970s.

One of France's leading lesbian theorists and political activists, Geneviève Pastre is a writer and publisher who has made lesbian feminism the root of her political and literary work.