Lesbian Politics: Sex, Difference, and Domination (Brooklyn Institute for Social Research — BISR)

We’re happy to host the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research’s course on Lesbian Politics every Monday from 6:30-9:30pm from Oct. 19 through Nov. 9. This 4-week course draws on Monique Wittig’s work, as well as that of other French thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Colette Guillaumin, to explore what a lesbian political theory can mean and its liberatory potential within and against patriarchy and the heterosexual paradigm. All payments, refunds, and enrollments are through BISR. Please use the registration link on their website. “Lesbians are not women,” the feminist theorist Monique Wittig famously pronounced. But what did she mean? According to Wittig’s theory, sexual difference is an ideology, not an ontological given. The relationship of woman to man is one of domination, determined as much by material and economic oppression as language and discourse. In other words, “there is no sex. Only sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.” By existing outside of heterosexuality, lesbians refuse the category of “woman” and break its ontological illusion of timeless difference: what Wittig calls the “heterosexual contract.” How, with Wittig, can we understand the possibilities of a feminism that seeks to abolish sex? What is the political role of lesbians within a heterosexual system? Can heterosexuality itself exist without producing or participating in sexed oppression, and if not, what are the alternatives?