“Drafting Monique Wittig” (in all of draft’s polysemy), follows up on and responds to the 2004 conference held at Harvard (co-sponsored by Yale University), “Remembering Monique Wittig: A Memorial Conference,” which brought together a diverse set of interdisciplinary scholars to reflect on the life and work of Wittig and to mark her passing in 2003.The theoretical, intellectual, and political landscape of our current moment is markedly different now than it was then.

While Wittig’s archives will occupy a central role in the conference, no previous knowledge or familiarity with them is required to be able to participate, and we aim to bring together French- and English-speaking scholars from across the disciplinary and geographical map to reflect on the afterlives Wittig’s work and thought has had in the intervening years in literature, theory, the social sciences, and the arts. And unpublished documents (such as Wittig’s lecture notes for the classes she taught at various American universities) will reveal the influence her work as a teacher and her work as a writer had on each other.

Wittig’s archives, which will be featured in an exhibition at the Beinecke, will enable us to explore her relation to unfinished, encyclopedic, and collective forms of writing, as seen in her and Sande Zeig’s 1974 publication, Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes. Participants will have the opportunity to think Wittig alongside and in the archives that constitute a material trace and record of her life and thought. This conference both marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Wittig’s landmark novel, Les Guérillères, and showcases the Beinecke’s recent acquisition of the Wittig papers. Thie conference will also include an exhibition of Wittig's papers. Morgane Cadieu (Yale) and Annabel Kim (Harvard) are co-organizing an international conference at Yale University called “Drafting Monique Wittig,” For two days, diverse set of interdisciplinary scholars will reflect on the life and work of French novelist, play-writer, activist and feminist theorist Monique Wittig, author of Les Guérillères, The Straight Mind and The Lesbian Body.

La pensée straight by Monique Wittig