BGSQD
BGSQD
We’re happy to host the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research’s course on Lesbian Politics every Monday from 6:30-9:30pm from Oct. 19 through Nov. 9. This 4-week course draws on Monique Wittig’s work, as well as that of other French thinkers, including Simone de Beauvoir and Colette Guillaumin, to explore what a lesbian political theory can mean and its liberatory potential within and against patriarchy and the heterosexual paradigm.
All payments, refunds, and enrollments are through BISR. Please use the registration link on their website.
“Lesbians are not women,” the feminist theorist Monique Wittig famously pronounced. But what did she mean? According to Wittig’s theory, sexual difference is an ideology, not an ontological given. The relationship of woman to man is one of domination, determined as much by material and economic oppression as language and discourse. In other words, “there is no sex. Only sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.” By existing outside of heterosexuality, lesbians refuse the category of “woman” and break its ontological illusion of timeless difference: what Wittig calls the “heterosexual contract.” How, with Wittig, can we understand the possibilities of a feminism that seeks to abolish sex? What is the political role of lesbians within a heterosexual system? Can heterosexuality itself exist without producing or participating in sexed oppression, and if not, what are the alternatives? What is the meaning—and what are the possibilities—of lesbian politics?
Following the intellectual and political debates among Wittig and her contemporaries, we will probe the limits and possibilities of lesbian theory as a basis for the abolition of the “sex-class system.” How did Wittig and her fellow materialist feminists differentiate themselves from “French Feminist” theorists like Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray? How did Wittig’s creative experiments with gender and storytelling lay the groundwork for the emergence of queer theory in the United States? What can a lesbian politics provide for non-lesbians, both gay and straight? Authors will include Monique Wittig, Simone de Beauvoir, Christine Delphy, Colette Guillaumin, Françoise d’Eaubonne, and Françoise Verges.
Hannah Leffingwell is a writer, historian, artist, and educator specializing in queer and gender history, feminist and queer theory, lesbian culture(s), and contemporary LGBTQ+ and feminist social movements. In addition to her role as associate faculty at BISR, she has taught at The New School as a member of the part-time faculty and at NYU as an assistant instructor. Her research chronicles transnational lesbian organizing in the 1970s-90s and has been featured on Outhistory.org, Gender & History, and is forthcoming in an edited collection for Bloomsbury Academic. She holds a PhD in History and French Studies from New York University, where she defended her dissertation, “Becoming Lesbian: The Making and Unmaking of the International Lesbian Movement, 1972-1998,” in 2024. Her writing has also appeared in Jacobin, The Chronicle Review, Public Seminar, Political Junkie, Eurozine, Sinister Wisdom, and the Journal of the History of Ideas Blog. She is also active on Substack, where she writes a newsletter called “The Dykegeist.”
The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division is Manhattan’s only queer bookstore, located on the second floor of the LGBT Center. We’re open Tuesday-Sunday from 1-7pm and accessible by the 6th Ave 1 2 3 L trains and 8th Ave A C E trains. Our cafe, The Bureau Cafe, is open Tuesday-Sunday from 9am-7pm.