Les Guérillères

Les Guérillères is a 1969 novel by Monique Wittig. Its premise is a war between the sexes in which women fight bloody, victorious battles with knives, machine guns and rocket launchers, and in which sympathetic men join their struggle. The book avoids a linear plot and individual characters; it offers a collective, fragmentary narration that depicts the peace that follows the total war declared against the patriarchal system, a war whose course is explained only near the end.

The work belongs to the ferment of late-1960s feminism and extends Wittig's concern with language and gender. Its most distinctive feature is the reinvention of linguistic categories, especially personal pronouns, which she saw as the place where gender is inscribed. Wittig coins new words and forms meant to express ways of being of the body that the language of the heterosexual social contract cannot accommodate, and the lesbian appears as a figure standing outside that framework, from which the heteronormative categories can be subverted.

The reception was divided. Some critics praised it as an epic hymn to women's liberation, while others found it dull and repetitive. Feminist readings by Toril Moi and Nina Auerbach have treated it as a closed structure in which women win the war and found a new order, while others have read it as an open structure of freedom. The novel has also influenced contemporary art: it inspired Beatriz Santiago Muñoz's film work Song, Strategy, Sign (2016).