Gustav Klimt

Mermaids

Kościuszko Mound in Kraków, Poland

Man Ray with Lee Miller

In 1973, the French Feminist Monique Wittig wrote her beautiful and disturbing book-length theory-poem The Lesbian Body, which is a revolutionary enactment of the problem of pronouns. In the body of the text, Wittig performs her “I” as always split, as holding no True place for her (as not only a woman, but particularly as a lesbian woman), thereby when she writes “I”/Je, it is always split as J/e, as are all the pronouns throughout the book –el/les, t/u, etc. In translation, however, the I for J/e is italicized because the single-letter English pronoun for self cannot be split. The brutality of the Lesbian Body comes through not only via the tearing of the pronouns, bit also the ways in which the characters, J/e and t/u, violently break each other apart with Sapphic and Dionysiac pleasure. As a result, The Lesbian Body is performative in at least two ways: one, for the ways in which the two lovers switch back and forth their dominant and submissive roles, so much so that it is impossible to trace who is eating, tearing, filling, and cutting who; and two, for its writerly form that encourages the subject-subject that the lovers themselves embody, if with violence.