Lesbians on the French Stage: From Homosexuality to Monique Wittig's Lesbianization of the Theatre

Abstract

Writing an article about French lesbian plays in 1995 is neither an easy nor an innocent task. First, the word lesbian itself covers several definitions based on different sexual practices and concepts of desire, a variety of historical, cultural, ethnic, and national life-styles, and often conflicting political agendas. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has aptly shown, "lesbian," like "gay," often calls to mind two sets of oppositions which entail two controversial issues. The first one is that of gender identification: women-identified women (Adrienne Rich's "lesbian continuum," for example, which can lead to female or feminist separatism) vs. men-identified women ("the inversion trope," which can consolidate the antihomophobic alliance with gay men). The second focuses on sexual object choice — same-sex vs. opposite-sex object — and has given rise to several different theories: constructivist vs. essentialist, for example, or psychoanalytical (which tends to be "universalizing") vs. socio-political (which leads to a "minoritizing" approach). According to Sedgwick, such coexisting categories are not only unstable, but their use always entails some divisiveness founded on epistemological contradictions. As well, the idea of a lesbian play is even more problematic depending on whether one considers the erotics or sexual politics of a play or both, or whether one also takes into account the sexual orientation and degree of "outness" of its author, director, actors, and even implied or real audiences. Finally, at this point in history. when writing in a North American context, it is hardly possible to approach the topic without taking politics into account, since most gay men and lesbians are now strongly united in their struggle against homophobia and against the present right-wing backlash affecting the treatment of the AIDS epidemic. But one of the dangers of adopting a political stance is the temptation to overvalue lesbian or gay plays on account of their scarcity or marginality and to favour one form of lesbian life or one aesthetic choice of representation over another.