The Literary Workshop - Gender must be completely destroyed

Foreword by Sande Zeig
Translated by Ann Jefferson 

A bold, revelatory argument for the power of language by leading radical lesbian feminist and author of The Straight Mind.

The Literary Workshop takes readers inside Monique Wittig’s creative process, unlocking the practice of writing both in material and political terms. Wittig provides her most com­plete account of how literature and politics work together. Part of the generation that revolutionized French literature, Wittig reveals the secret of her craft: that the work a writer does with language is itself a form of resistance.

Born and raised in France, Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was a driving force in second-wave feminism and one of the most brilliant authors of her generation. A provocative thinker, she famously declared that lesbians are not women and in­troduced women into a materialist framework by treating them as a class. Wittig is the author of, among other titles, The Straight Mind, Les Guérillères, and The Lesbian Body. Her debut novel, The Opoponax, won Le Prix Medicis.

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Praise:

"Wittig became a celebrity in the American women's movement. Her collection of essays, The Straight Mind (1992), is witty, imaginative and, as ever, experimental. It is her imaginative use of style-as-politics that will be her lasting legacy, influencing writers as diverse as Kathy Acker and Jeanette Winterson." - Guardian

"A key figure in French feminism, perhaps the foremost theorist of a profoundly radical lesbianism" - Publishers Weekly

"A dazzling writer. Her words are lucid and gleaming like moonlight" - Edna O’Brien, author of The Country Girls