[11/05/25] Wittig, Monique / Le Vay, David (tr.): The Lesbian Body

Winter Editions, paperback

Publication Date: November 5, 2025

Publisher Marketing: In this genre- and gender-bending work of theory-fiction, legendary French writer and activist of the 1970s feminist movement Monique Wittig celebrates the body—female, lesbian, literary—and challenges the order of heterosexuality in literature and history. First published in French in 1973, The Lesbian Body foregrounds the relationship between a lover and a beloved—also a writer and a text—as Wittig explores the ideological, historical, and physical feminine subject. Organized according to the principle of montage, poetic passages are juxtaposed with anatomic lists that mark female eros. Through expressions of joy, violence, and tenderness, the site of pleasure is celebrated over that of reproduction. In her transfiguration of gender and its paradigms, Wittig transformed French vocabulary, feminizing grammar and lesbianizing myths. This edition brings the English translation of Wittig’s groundbreaking work back into circulation for the first time since the mid-1980s, revised according to the author's notes, and with an introduction by Paul B. Preciado.

“The Lesbian Body is a fundamental work of lesbian existence. Wittig's applied vision is a state of natural delirium, a revolutionary excess of utopianism, refusal, and mutual self-creation. Revisiting it reveals how much passionate free thought has been lost, and simultaneously, how many of her tropes and discoveries have integrated into our collective consciousness.” —SARAH SCHULMAN

“In this stunning new rendering of The Lesbian Body by the French author, theorist, activist and teacher, the late Monique Wittig, we are plunged into an imagined world of passionate violence and erotic lesbian mayhem intertwined in strikingly bold poetic images. Wittig, in the reach and volatility of her imagination, stands alongside such important American writers as Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Valerie Solanas, all of whose work deserves to be read again, or for the first time.” —ESTHER NEWTON

“For me, Wittig opened up a sense of the world that had been, quite literally, unimaginable. She tore us apart.” —JUDITH BUTLER