Monique Wittig

The Category of Sex

O. expresses a virile idea. Virile or at least masculine.
At last a woman who admits it! Who admits what?
Something that women have always till now refused
to admit (and today more than ever before). Some-
thing that men have always reproached them with:
that they never cease obeying their nature, the call of
their blood, that everything in them, even their
minds, is sex.
--Jean Paulhan, "Happiness in
Slavery," preface to
The Story of 0,"
by Pauline Reage
In the course of the year 1838, the peaceful island of
Barbados was rocked by a strange and bloody revolt.
About two hundred Negroes of both sexes, all of
whom had recently been emancipated by the Procla-
mation of March, came one morning to beg their
former master, a certain Glenelg, to take them back
into bondage . . . . I s u s p e c t . . , that Glenelg's slaves
were in love with their master, that they couldn't bear
to be without him.
--Jean Paulhan, "Happiness in Slavery"
What should I be getting married for? I find life good
enough as it is. What do I need a wife f o r ? . . . And
what's so good about a woman? - - A woman is a
worker. A woman is a man's servant. - - But what
would I be needing a worker for? - - That's just it.
You like to have others pulling your chestnuts out of
the fire . . . . - - Well, marry me off, if that's the case.
--Ivan Turgenev, The Hunting Sketches
64 Feminist Issues/FaU 1982

The perenniality of the sexes and the perenniality of slaves and masters
proceed from the same belief, and as there are no slaves without masters,
there are no women without men. The ideology of sexual difference func-
tions as censorship in our culture by masking, on the ground of nature, the
social opposition between men and women. Masculine/feminine, male/
female are the categories which serve to conceal the fact that social differ-
ences always belong to an economic, political, ideological order. Every
system of domination establishes divisions at the material and economic
level. Furthermore, the divisions are abstracted and turned into concepts by
the masters, and by the slaves when they rebel and start to struggle. The
masters explain and justify the established divisions as a result of natural
differences. The slaves, when they rebel and start to struggle, read social
oppositions into the so-called natural differences.

For there is no sex. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.
It is oppression that creates sex and not the contrary. The contrary would be
to say that sex creates oppression or to say that the cause (origin) of oppres-
sion is to be found in sex itself, in a natural division of the sexes preexisting
(or outside of) society.

The primacy of difference so constitutes our thought that it prevents turning

inward on itself in order to question itself, no matter how necessary that may
be to apprehend the bases of that which precisely constitutes it. To appre-
hend a difference in dialectical terms is to make apparent the contradictory
terms to be resolved. To understand social reality in dialectical materialist
terms is to apprehend the oppositions between classes term to term and
make them meet under the same copula (a conflict in the social order),
which is also a resolution (an abolition in the social order) of the apparent
contradictions.

The class struggle is precisely that which resolves the contradictions be-
tween two opposed classes by abolishing them at the same time as it consti-
tutes and reveals them as classes. The class struggle between women and
men, which should be undertaken by all women, is that which resolves the
contradictions between the sexes, abolishing them at the same time as it
makes them understood. We must notice that the contradictions always be-
long to a material order. The important idea for me is that before the conflict
(rebellion, struggle) there are no categories of opposition but only of differ-
ence. And it is not before the struggle breaks out that the violent reality of
the oppositions and the political nature of the differences become manifest.
For as long as oppositions (differences) appear as given, already there, be-
Wittig 65

fore all thought, "natural," as long as there is no conflict and no struggle,

there is no dialectic, there is no change, no movement. The dominant
thought refuses to turn inward on itself in order to apprehend that which
questions it.

And indeed as long as there is no women's struggle, there is no conflict

between men and women. It is the fate of women to perform three-quarters
of the work of society (in the public as well as in the private domain) plus
the bodily work of the reproduction of society according to a preestablished
rate. Being murdered, mutilated, physically and mentally tortured and
abused, being raped, being battered, and being constrained to marriage is
the fate of women. And fate supposedly cannot be changed. Women do not
know that they are totally dominated by men, and when they acknowledge
the fact can "hardly believe it." And often, as a last recourse before the bare
and crude reality, they refuse to "believe" that men dominate them with full
knowledge (for oppression is far more hideous for the oppressed than for the
oppressors). Men, on the other hand, know perfectly well that they are dom-
inating women ("We are the masters of women," said Andr6 Breton) and
are trained to do it. They do not need to express it all the time, for one can
scarcely talk of domination over what one owns.

What is this thought which refuses to reverse itself, which never puts into
question what primarily constitutes it? This thought is the dominant thought.
It is a thought which affirms an "already there" of the sexes, something
which is supposed to have come before all thought, before all society. This
thought is the thought of those who rule over women.
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the
class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its
ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means
of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of
those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The
ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant
material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as
ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling
one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. [Marx and Engels, The Ger-
man Ideology]
This thought based on the primacy of difference is the thought of domina-
tion.

Dominance provides women with a body of data, of givens, of a prioris,

66 Feminist Issues~Fall 1982

which, all the more for being questionable, form a huge political construct,
a tight network that affects everything, our thoughts, our gestures, our acts,
our work, our feelings, our relationships.

Dominance thus teaches us from all directions:

--that there are before all thinking, all society, "sexes" (two
categories of individuals born) with a constitutive difference, a
difference that has ontological consequences (the metaphysical
approach),
--that there are before all thinking, all social order, "sexes" with
a "natural" or "biological" or "hormonal" or "gentic" differ-
ence that has sociological consequences (the scientific approach),
--that there is before all thinking, all social order, a "natural
division of labor in the family," a "division of labor [that] was
originally nothing but the division of labor in the sexual act" (the
Marxist approach).

Whatever the approach, the idea remains basically the same. The sexes, in
spite of their constitutive difference, must inevitably develop relationships
from category to category. Belonging to the natural order, these relation-
ships cannot be spoken of as social relationships. This thought which im-
pregnates all discourses, including commonsense ones (Adam's rib or Adam
is, Eve is Adam's rib), is the thought of domination. Its body of discourses
is constantly reinforced on all levels of social reality and conceals the politi-
cal fact of the subjugation of one sex by the other, the compulsory character
of the category itself (which constitutes the first definition of the social
being in civil status). The category of sex does not exist a priori, before all
society. And as a category of dominance it cannot be a product of natural
dominance but of the social dominance of women by men, for there is but
social dominance.

The category of sex is the political category that founds society as hetero-
sexual. As such it does not concern being but relationships (for women and
men are the result of relationships), although the two aspects are always
confused when they are discussed. The category of sex is the one that rules
as "natural" the relation that is at the base of (heterosexual) society and
through which half of the population, women, are "heterosexualized" (the
making of women is like the making of eunuchs, the breeding of slaves, of
animals) and submitted to a heterosexual economy. For the category of sex
is the product of a heterosexual society which imposes on women the rigid
obligation of the reproduction of the "species," that is, the reproduction of
Wittig 67

heterosexual society. The compulsory reproduction of the "species" by

women is the system of exploitation on which heterosexuality is economi-
cally based. Reproduction is essentially that work, that production by
women, through which the appropriation by men of all the work of women
proceeds. One must include here the appropriation of work which is associ-
ated "by nature" with reproduction, the raising of children and domestic
chores. This appropriation of the work of women is effected in the same way
as the appropriation of the work of the working class by the ruling class. It
cannot be said that one of these two productions (reproduction) is "'natural"
while the other one is social. This argument is only the theoretical, ideologi-
cal justification of oppression, an argument for the purpose of making
women believe that before society and in all societies they are subject to this
obligation to reproduce. However, as we know nothing about work, about
social production, outside of the context of exploitation, we know nothing
about reproduction of society outside of its context of exploitation.

The category of sex is the product of a heterosexual society in which men

appropriate for themselves the reproduction and production of women and
also their physical persons by means of a contract called the marriage con-
tract. Compare this contract with the contract that binds a worker to his
employer. The contract binding the woman to the man is a contract in princi-
ple for life, which only law can break (divorce). It assigns the woman cer-
tain obligations, including unpaid work. The work (housework, raising of
children) and the obligations (surrender of her reproduction in the name of
her husband, cohabitation by day and night, forced coitus, assignment of
residence implied by the legal concept of "surrender of the conjugal domi-
cile") mean in their terms a surrender by the woman of her physical person
to her husband. That the woman depends directly on her husband is implicit
in the policy of nonintervention of the police when a husband beats his wife.
The police intervene with the specific charge of assault and battery when
one citizen beats another citizen. But a woman who has signed a marriage
contract has thereby ceased to be an ordinary citizen (protected by law). The
police openly express their aversion to getting involved in domestic affairs
(as opposed to civil affairs), where the authority of the state does not have to
intervene directly since it is relayed through that of the husband. One has to
go to shelters for battered women to see how far this authority can be exer-
cised.

The category of sex is the product of heterosexual society that turns half of
the population into sexual beings, for sex is a category which women cannot
be outside of. Wherever they are, whatever they do (including working in
68 Feminist Issues~Fall 1982

the public sector), they are seen (and made) sexually available to men, and
they, breasts, buttocks, costume, must be visible. They must wear their
yellow star, their constant smile, day and night. One might consider that
every woman, married or not, has a period of forced sexual service, a sexual
service which we may compare to the military one, and which can vary
between a day, a year, or twenty-five years or more. Some lesbians and nuns
escape but they are very few, although the number is growing. Although
women are very visible as sexual beings, as social beings they are totally
invisible, and as such must appear as little as possible, and always with
some kind of excuse if they do so. One only has to read interviews with
outstanding women to hear them apologizing. And the newspapers still to-
day report that "two students and a woman," "two lawyers and a woman,"
"three travelers and a woman" were seen doing this or that. For the cate-
gory of sex is the category that sticks to women, for only they cannot be
conceived of outside of it. Only they are sex, the sex, and sex they have
been made in their minds, bodies, acts, gestures; even their murders and
beatings are sexual. Indeed, the category of sex tightly holds women.

For the category of sex is a totalitarian one, which to prove true has its
inquisitions, its courts, its tribunals, its body of laws, its terrors, its tortures,
its mutilations, its executions, its police. It shapes the mind as well as the
body since it controls all mental production. It grips our minds in such a way
that we cannot think outside of it. This is why we must destroy it and start
thinking beyond it if we want to start thinking at all, as we must destroy the
sexes as a sociological reality if we want to start to exist. The category of
sex is the category that ordains slavery for women, and it works specifi-
cally, as it did for black slaves, through an operation of reduction, by taking
the part for the whole, a part (color, sex) through which the whole human
group has to pass as through a screen. Notice that in civil matters color as
well as sex still must be "declared." However, because of the abolition of
slavery, the "declaration" of "color" is now considered discriminatory.
But that does not hold true for the "declaration" of " s e x , " which not even
I
women dream of abolishing. I say: it is about time to do so.
Berkeley, 1976

Note

1. Pleasure in sex is no more the subject of this paper than is happiness in slavery.