Reveries of a lesbian lover: The haptic geometry of Monique Wittig's The Lesbian Body.

Abstract

This article examines how The Lesbian Body, Monique Wittig's 1973 literary "reverie," reconfigures the spatial logic of language. As its lovers come together and undo one another through words, the text dismantles the projective regime in which interlocution fixes and delimits subjects in space. In its place, Wittig develops a haptic poetics in which meaning emerges à mesure-word by word-through tactile and communal relation. Central to this reorientation is the j/e pronoun, whose typographic slash interrupts the capture of representation and opens language to ongoing transformation. Reading The Lesbian Body as a material practice in which subjectivity and world co-emerge, I argue that Wittig's spatial experiments unsettle the heterosexual body schema and imagine forms of becoming unbound by inherited coordinates of identity. Her work ultimately advances a lesbian universalism grounded not in projection or identification, but in a shared, haptic geometry of touch.