Monique Wittig's Essay One Is Not Born A Woman

Criticism of heteronormative institutions such as marriage is often met with resistance and struggle in America even today. A little over a year after Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), queer sexuality has been accepted, but polyamory is still considered a taboo. Within our borders society has declared that men may lay with men, but only if it is with each other. Fifty years ago, the environment was quite similar. In France, to criticize the hegemonic institution of marriage was still deemed radical. Yet in her essay, “One Is Not born a Woman,” Monique Witting broke from her nation’s Catholic roots in declaring that women were only able to transcend the oppression of their sex if they broke from men. While much of her argument persuasively dictates the system of women’s oppression, Wittigs’s dependency on monogamy revels a shortcoming in her theory. For once polyamory is introduced, the authority of lesbianism is called into question.

Wittig ends her piece with a declaration that the destruction of the class “can be accomplished only by the destruction of heterosexuality as a social system which is based on the oppression of women by men and which produces the doctrine of the difference between the sexes to justify this oppression” (108). However by adding polyamory into the class dynamics, suddenly another possibility can be included. The class of woman do not need to completely remove themselves from men. Wittig may be right in that lesbians are “the only concept…which is beyond the categories of sex (women and men)” (108), but the destruction of the sexes cannot be the only way in which women can be liberated. Rather by reinventing the very definitions and expectations of the classes, polyamory and lesbianism can be both alternatives from simply being oppressed within the heteronormative