Thesis--University of Wisconsin--Madison. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 309-319).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1983. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 194-200).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Santa Cruz, 1994. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 238-254).

Thèses (M.A.)--Université de Sherbrooke (Canada), 2002. / Titre de l'écran-titre (visionné le 20 juin 2006). Publié aussi en version papier.

This dissertation explores the history of social-constructionist theories of sexual difference through the surprising connection between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the lesbian-feminist writer and theorist Monique Wittig. Wittig developed a social contract theory that radically denaturalized sexual difference, an approach she credited to Rousseau. I offer an interpretation of her appropriation of Rousseau that frames it within the French women’s liberation movement. Then, re-reading him through her lens, I argue that Rousseau too viewed sexual difference as a social construction. Chapter 1 argues that Wittig’s concept of “the lesbian” is modeled after Rousseau’s “natural man.” Wittig used this notion in the “lesbian question” quarrel in the women’s movement to depict human freedom after the abolition of sexual difference. In chapter 2, I show how Wittig interprets the social contract as a political and epistemological concept that encodes the presuppositions, like heterosexuality or race, which shape the social order and knowledge production. Through this concept, she engages in a debate with the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss over Rousseau’s legacy. Chapter 3 demonstrates that Rousseau retooled the naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon’s methodology and data in order to denaturalize sexual difference. From there, he posited that sex originates in the transition from proper nouns to common nouns, and is therefore a linguistic construction. This construction allows humans to understand virtue, because without it, humans are unable to access their moral sense. In chapter 4, I argue that his novel Julie represents his most sustained effort to harness material science to favor the development of moral sense. The novel synthesizes spiritual exercises’ emphasis on linguistic representations with materialist ideas about language’s influence on the body. It calls on readers to use spiritual exercises to shape their sexual identities in order to conform with rigidly defined gender roles. In the conclusion, I bring Wittig and Rousseau together within a loosely existentialist framework. I argue that by severing the chain of necessity between biology and sex, they posit a meaninglessness underlying our sexual identities; they react differently to this abyss, but it is in their realization of it that their work has a striking relevance today.

Le Mouvement de libération des femmes en France ne fut pas seulement un mouvement politique et social, ce fut également l’une des dernières, si ce n’est la dernière, avant-garde littéraire que la France a connue. Du point de vue international, l’activité des littératrices au sein du Mouvement constitue un des principes distinctifs de la lutte des femmes en France. Les manifestantes qui déposent publiquement une gerbe de fleurs à la femme plus inconnue encore que le soldat inconnu sous l’Arc de Triomphe le 26 août 1970, sont déjà pour certaines – appelées à le devenir pour d’autres – des écrivaines. Dix ans plus tard, le MLF, depuis peu marque déposée à l’Institut national de la propriété industrielle, appartient à une éditrice, Antoinette Fouque, promotrice d’une écriture dite féminine. Dans l’espace circonscrit par ces deux points fixes, paraît un ensemble de textes qui s’inscrivent au sein de deux tendances majoritaires – mais antagonistes – du Mouvement, le féminisme d’une part et la néo-féminité, ou éloge de la différence, d’autre part. En miroir, un double rhizome éditorial se développe, partageant maisons d’édition et revues en deux factions militantes et littéraires bien distinctes. Pendant dix ans, la littérature se met tout autant au service du Mouvement des femmes que le Mouvement irradie la littérature, chacun-e influençant et informant la pratique et la pensée de l’autre. C’est de cette coïncidence entre littérature et Mouvement de libération des femmes que le présent écrit se propose de rendre compte, afin de retracer un mouvement politique qui fut et se fit littéraire, et, dans le même élan, une littérature qui fut et se fit politique. Par là même, la thèse redouble la question posée par tout un mouvement de femmes à la littérature elle-même, contestant ses définitions premières et repoussant les limites qui lui ont été assignées. / The Women’s Liberation Movement (MLF) was not only a political and social movement, but one of the last, if not the very last, literary avant-garde that France has experienced. From an international perspective, the activity of the literary women within the movement represents one of the fundamental principles of the fight for women’s rights in France. The demonstrators, who publicly placed a bouquet of flowers for the unknown wife of the Unknown Soldier under the Arc de Triomphe on August 26th 1970, are for some, and are soon to become for others, women writers. Ten years later, the MLF, a recently registered trademark with the National Institute for Intellectual Property Rights, belongs to the editor, Antoinette Fouque, promotor of female writing. Within the space determined by these two fixed points, there exists a collection of texts that adhere to two major trends – although antagonistic – of the movement, Feminism on one hand and Neofeminity, or the praise for “difference”, on the other hand. Mirroring each other, a dual editorial form develops, sharing publishers and scholarly journals, into two distinct literary and militant factions. For ten years, literature served the purpose of the Women’s Liberation Movement as much as the latter promoted literature, each influencing and informing the other by practice and thought. It is precisely this coexistence between literature and the Women’s Liberation Movement that the present dissertation proposes to examine, in order to trace the political movement that was and made itself literary, and, by the same token, a literature that was and made itself political. At the same time, the dissertation continues the question asked of literature by an entire women’s movement, challenging its assigned definitions and pushing back its boundaries.