Shifting Wittigian Binaries: Abstraction and Re-materialization of the Lesbian Body in Sande Zeig's The Girl

Introduction

The Girl, directed by Sande Zeig, is a film noir that takes place in modern-day Paris, based on an unpublished novella by fiction writer and lesbian-feminist scholar Monique Wittig, who also co-wrote the script. It is my contention that in this work, Zeig and Wittig call into question the epistemological grounds of our understanding of the lesbian body and lesbian desire, and in so doing, creatively contribute to the ongoing debates about representations of gender and sexuality in the visual arts. The Girl reshapes the viewers’ connection with images by appealing to their multi-sensory memory instead of just visual memory, a relation with the image that bears similarities to what Laura U. Marks names ‘haptic visualization’ in her book The Skin of the Film (2000). In particular, I will demonstrate how the movie recasts abstraction as a form of materialization of the lesbian body outside the heterosexual regime that, according to Wittig, renders it incoherent. With an allegorical story of lesbian love, author and filmmaker together engage in a process of cinematographic and theoretical abstraction that outlines a different way to envision and re-materialize the lesbian body in spatial and affective terms.

In this paper, I address the following questions: how does the tendency to abstraction that underpins the narrative of The Girl result not in an expected de-materialization of the lesbian body, but, instead, in its re-materialization? How is abstraction re-signified by the lesbian point of view? How does the movie engage with theories of the gaze in film studies? What does the cinematographic medium convey that perhaps Wittig's previous fictional and theoretical texts do not? Additionally, while the movie does not explicitly address the racialization of the only black character in the film, Bu Savé, her representation certainly calls for analysis. Is Bu Savé connected to the processes of abstraction-materialization at work in The Girl, and how? And finally, what impact does this Wittigian approach have or not have on the representations of the lesbian subject?

To address these questions, I explore the three main spaces crossed by the character of the lesbian narrator in the movie: a jazz club, a hotel room, and her studio. These spaces become a point of entry into Wittig and Zeig's cinematic reconfiguring of binaries such as the lesbian gaze/male gaze, oppression/ resistance, and above all abstraction/materialization. Each binary leads to the analysis of space and abstraction, and to the concepts of liminality and transition linked to the characters’ passage from one space (and its associated temporality) to another. I will show how Zeig and Wittig reconfigure the abstraction of the lesbian body by juxtaposing these spaces, as well as through cinematography (extreme close-ups and lighting) and narrative (within which characters also work on abstraction).

The Girl portrays a sexual affair between two women under the scrutiny and jealousy of a man. Two abstract, yet recognizable, realms of possibility shape the two women's experience: the male heterosexual world and the lesbian world. The two protagonists of the love affair, the Girl (a jazz singer) and the lesbian narrator (a painter) interact with the Man (the jealous jazz club owner), and Bu Savé (the narrator's ‘regular’ lesbian lover). In Wittigian terms, the Girl and the Painter (the narrator) represent opposite political categories: the Girl is, as Wittig states in her famous essay ‘The Straight Mind’ (1980), a ‘woman’, a term that refers not to biological or ontological determination, but rather to a sociopolitical group that ‘has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems’ (Wittig, 1980: 32). Wittig regroups these oppressive systems under the general name the ‘Straight Mind’. As lesbians have no meaning in these systems, for Wittig, ‘lesbians’ are not ‘women’. The Girl sleeps with men to advance her career; she evolves in the straight world. She is not a ‘lesbian’. From the very beginning, Wittigian structuralist poetics place the Girl and the Painter in a symbolic and political opposition that Wittig herself destabilizes when the two characters meet and fall in love.

Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was involved in the French feminist movement in the 1960s and co-founded the first political lesbian group, Les Gouines rouges in France in 1971. She is often referred to as a ‘materialist feminist’ or a ‘radical lesbian feminist’. These terms bear too many connotations in my view to appropriately label her work, and I would rather refer to her as a scholar and écrlvaln who searched for new ways to relate to others and the world. A professor at the University of Arizona from 1976 until her death in 2003, Wittig published unconventional and stylistically innovative novels and essays in which she exposes unilaterally the material violence of heterosexual society – including towards heterosexual individuals – and criticizes what she considers a counter-productive feminist movement seeking shared power with the ‘enemy’, instead of striving to change society as a whole. In a 2007 special issue of A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies on Wittig, Judith Butler accurately summarizes her position. For Wittig, she writes, ‘it [does] not do simply to reverse positions of power without radically changing the framework that configures power relations themselves’ (Butler, 2007: 520). In my reading of Wittigian theory, lesbian-as-a-political-category is not at all viewed as the positive opposite of ‘straight woman’, but instead as a category that disturbs all categories, a path to fundamental change. And on close examination, the numerous oppositions at work in Wittig's writings often usher in more questions than clear-cut answers.

Wittig attempts to act on material oppressions principally through language that, on the one hand, she considers part of the problem: ‘Language casts sheaves of reality upon the social body, stamping it and violently shaping it’ (Wittig, [1985] 1992: 64). And yet, on the other hand, she demonstrates in her own literary innovations that minority groups can hijack language as a means to destabilize and shatter the oppressive system from the inside. For Wittig, language is not only the master's tool, but carries the potential to become her Trojan Horse, a weapon to attack ‘the order of heterosexuality’ (Wittig, [1985] 1992: 71) from the inside. We see this, for example, with her work on subject pronouns in her novels – L'Opoponax (Prix Médicis in France 1964), Les Guérillères (1969), and The Lesbian Body (1973). The materiality of language at the heart of Wittig's work usually translates only into words. However, in the movie The Girl, it also manifests itself through images, which raises new questions about how Wittig and Zeig envisage the materiality of cinema and its potential impact on social organization. Thus, the question of abstraction/materialization takes two different, though interlinked, routes: the materiality of the lesbian body and the materiality of the cinematographic representation of the lesbian body. How do writer and filmmaker give shape through narrative to the lesbian body outside the heterosexual matrix? How do the images on the screen – through framing, montage, etc. – bring forth the materialization of this body?

The Jazz Club

In the first part of my analysis, I explain how the space of the jazz club stands for the territory of the ‘Straight Mind’, disturbed by the sudden appearance of a lesbian subject. By its intrinsic characteristics and its juxtaposition with other spaces, the club also reformulates the inscription of the lesbian subject in time.

The beginning of the movie reintroduces the dichotomy straight-lesbian already at work in Wittig's early texts, and posits lesbianization as the starting point for change. Lesbianization must be understood as a form of universalization of the lesbian point of view that Wittig uses as a device to ‘wage an assault … on [the] gendered presumption of universality’ (Butler, 2007: 522). Indeed, recasting the people's central point of view away from hetero-patriarchal parameters is a necessary pre-condition for any possibility of change. By imposing the lesbian point of view as universal (replacing the white, male, hetero-patriarchal dominant stance), Wittig prepares the ground for reworking social relations. Thus, a lesbian constitutes the point of origin of the movie's narration; next, she enters and challenges a ‘straight’ space.

The first shot of the movie shows the Girl walking down a dark cobblestone street. The camera films her from behind from a low-angle position. At first, we could assume that the woman is ‘conventionally positioned in the three-dimensional, diegetic space in a manner that makes [her] seem more passive ….’ (Hedges, 1991: 88), and that this point of view shot posits the voyeuristic male gaze as the source of what we know about her. However, the voice-over of the lesbian narrator that echoes the scene breaks this convention by introducing the female gaze directed at, and female desire for, another woman. The Girl is walking to the club where she sings every night for a straight audience; and yet we discover her character through the brief description of a lesbian observer: ‘The Girl has nerve. She lives in a hotel room. She has no brothers, no sisters, no mother, no father. She sings in a nightclub’. From the outset, the narration contests a heteronormative gaze on the characters by substituting a lesbian gaze. More importantly, it positions the character of the Girl in the liminal interstice between hetero-normative and lesbian contexts, possibly in what today we would call a ‘queer’ space, and already challenges the binary straight woman/ lesbian one might expect in Wittigian prose; Wittig does not use the term ‘queer’, but, in accordance with Harper, McClintock, Munoz and Rosen's definition of queer theory, I would argue that her work certainly ‘queries the field of identity politics in which [notions of gay, bisexual, or lesbian experience] necessarily intervene’ (1997: 1).

This nightclub the lesbian narrator then walks into is the first main space in the movie. She becomes a participant in the narration and, instead of direct confrontation (as in Les Guérillères) or removed observation as in Across the Acheron, another book by Wittig), she agrees to interact in a space the rules of which she does not know and thus cannot comply with. A deforming mirror through which the Painter sees the room symbolizes this first spatial transgression. We follow the narrator's gaze through the eye of the camera at the entrance. The mirror on her left reflects the distorted image of a room full of straight couples seated at small tables and the stage where the Girl is singing in a glamorous blue dress. What she sees does not match her frame of reference and her attitude replicates exactly the hetero-patriarchal gaze that, as Wittig said in ‘The Straight Mind’, ‘cannot conceive of a culture, a society where heterosexuality would not order’ ([1980] 1992: 28). Here, the ‘Lesbian Mind’ needs to adjust to the picture of this unknown space because for the Painter, lesbianism is the norm. These two instances (the voice-over of the Painter and the distorting mirror) show how, first, the gaze can be deceitful and, second, how, instead of creating a connection between the one who looks and the object of the gaze, vision increases the gap between them. The distorting mirror materializes the impenetrability of the club's space for the lesbian gaze. This device of the mise-en-scéne also marks the beginning of the search for a different connecting medium.

One significant scene illustrates the communication, as well as the physical, divide between the ‘Straight Mind’ and the ‘Lesbian Mind’. When the Girl brings the Painter to see how the club owner chooses the young women who work there, the two lovers observe what Wittig would call the ‘straight practices’ that take place and get perpetuated at the club. Women walk in front of the Man, who details their anatomy. They all look the same; they look like the Girl. The shot-reverse shots between the two lovers and the stage insist on the direction of the gaze from them in a corner to the degrading procession in front of them. They could be seen by the Man at any moment. The tension in the scene emphasizes the violence underlying the simultaneous presence of man and lesbian in one space as well as the latter's transgression-penetration. Penetration is a recurrent motif in the movie, and yet, associated not only with men as one might expect: penetration through the gaze (the Man choosing the women on the stage, but, at the same time, the two women watching him as he does), physical as well as symbolic penetration of space (when the Painter enters the club), and the penetration, or violation, of women's bodies (when the narrator gets beaten by the Man's bodyguard). By entering the nightclub, the Painter ‘penetrates’ and briefly re-territorializes the male space. This constitutes a transgression of the conventions establishing who can or cannot penetrate, and of the active/passive normative binary of male and female roles in society. Here, Zeig's strategy repeats the boundary-drawing relationship to space, but displaces the boundary from men/women to ‘Straight Mind'/'lesbian’, envisaged as political categories, which constitutes a clear continuation of Wittig's theories. In other words, boundaries are not between bodies, but rather between sociosymbolic positions. In this scene of the girls parading on stage, the two lovers’ gaze translates into a contestation of the space that Wittig associates with the language ‘of the exchange of women where human beings are literally the signs which are used to communicate’ ([1980] 1992: 22). Still, the Girl makes clear to the Painter that she is not one to change the system: ‘You're not up to him. You must know that’. The jazz club, in the end, can be transgressed, or penetrated, only temporarily. There, the lesbian never materializes.

Despite its apparent impenetrability, the jazz club is a space that encompasses multiple temporalities and thus, despite itself, embodies crossings and transitions, if not radical change. The club temporalizes space by using the anachronism of the 1940s jazz scene, its ambience and its dress codes, but re-located to 1990s Paris. It is anchored in the urban space of the French capital, and like the city, it is both fixed in time and always changing. In the same way, the lesbian subject is portrayed not as having no past, but as carrying her past as being-in-progress, a being-in-transitivity. Indeed, the Painter, with her black suit, wearing her sleeves up, seems to represent a butch figure of the 1980s lost in the post-modern queer twenty-first century, a figure who is suddenly confronted with 1940s heterosexual codes and spaces. And yet, these three different periods are not in conflict. Her body is instead a surface that ‘[registers] … the co-presence of several historically specific events’ and she embodies ‘a kind of temporal transitivity’ that complicates the reading of her character (Freeman, 2000: 729). I agree with Freeman in that ‘temporal drag’ (i.e. the wearing of particular clothes from a period at a later point in time by a younger generation) does not so much show a mere hybrid personality, but rather bears witness to ‘the movement time of collective political life’ (Freeman, 2000: 729). In other words, if drag constitutes a potential contestation of current norms (as Judith Butler contends in Gender Trouble), it can also manifest the trace of the past in the present (instead of the mere reversal of the binary masculine-feminine). In addition, I would suggest that the co-presence of different temporalities in the movie through genre, music, clothes, and decor, as well as immutable elements such as light and water, ascribe an atemporal nature to the issues at stake in Monique Wittig's work, which helps build and generalize their theoretical implications across historical time and geographical spaces. This might constitute an over-arching and over-ambitious approach, but these multiple temporalities and elements also attenuate the stark binary oppositions that constitute the premise of the movie, and they support the need to question these oppositions. In other words, over-generalizations are counterbalanced by the immediate questioning of their underpinnings, that is, fixed and unliveable dichotomies.

The mise-en-scène superimposes different decades of the twentieth century through the space of the jazz club. Zeig also fragments time with alternative shots of the city, the river, and daylight and nocturnal scenes – all transitional spaces that become time-shifters. Time is therefore spatialized and organized like a map, but never ‘solidifies’ as a single definable entity. The Paris space, and the jazz club space, mirror the juxtaposition of history and generations, and collapse multiple temporalities and the passage of time into the here and now, into the (almost-) anywhere, anytime – like the transient, and transitive, lesbian subject. Thus, in this movie, juxtapositions and dichotomies constitute intrinsic elements of multiplicity and contribute to the disputing of fixed binaries.

We have seen in this first part that, even though The Girl is structured around binary oppositions, it also, in the same gesture, questions the categories these oppositions are based upon, such as ‘woman’ and ‘lesbian’, fixed and transient, penetrating and being penetrated, and male gaze and lesbian gaze. A typical film noir space, underpinned by the classic dichotomies of the genre (black/ white, good guy/bad guy), the jazz club functions as a bastion for these oppositions and, at the same time, it reveals their intrinsic deconstructive nature. Still, it is a space where the lesbian remains invisible, aberrant, and abstract from the point of view of the ‘Straight Mind’.

The Hotel Room

Opposites are more obviously shifting in the hotel room where the Girl lives. Even more than the jazz club, it is a transitory space, yet one where the body starts metamorphosing through a process of abstraction-rematerialization induced by Zeig's camera work. What specific connotations does this room have in the film? And how does the juxtaposition of the nightclub and the hotel room complicate the presence and localization of lesbian desire? A hotel is neither a completely public space nor a completely private space. In a hotel, the rooms people live in are impersonal. They retain perhaps the smells of previous guests, impose the colours of old-fashioned wallpaper, and breathe solitude, uprootedness, and sex. And they are not exclusively spaces for sexual encounters (other types of interaction take place there). A place of transition, in essence, the hotel room defines for the audience the character of the Girl, already narrated by the Painter at the beginning of the movie: she has no family, no home, and no past. We do not know any more about the Painter. We know only the shifting expression of their desire for one another – a desire in transition. This space decontextualizes the two women's bodies from customary social meanings, such as family background and domestic dwellings, to focus instead on a combination of more abstract and yet simultaneously more material impulses. They appear abstract from a hetero-patriarchal perspective because the impulses do not proceed from conventional needs informed in part by Judeo-Christian traditions in the West such as marriage and reproduction in the heterosexual economy. Yet, they are material, as physical bodies are the primary motive and vector of interaction between the women.

The meaning of the terms abstraction and materialization depend, therefore, on the socio-political positioning of their user. For the ‘Straight Mind’, the lesbian body is an impossibility; an abstraction in the sense that it is officially withdrawn or absent from its constituting social norms and behaviours. From a Wittigian point of view, the lesbian body materializes when it abstracts itself, or ex-tracts itself, from the ‘Straight Mind’. I define abstraction in the context of this movie as the ex-traction of the lesbian body from the heterosexual regime's control that leads to its materialization. Thus, the term, like a tool, changes meaning when it changes hands – or rather when it changes speaker. I call materialization, or re-materialization, the second phase in the cinematographic process under way in the movie The Girl that aims to give coherence back to the lesbian body. Indeed, I will show how what would be deemed abstract from a hetero-patriarchal point of view actually constitutes, from Zeig and Wittig's point of view, the true materialization of the lesbian body, once they have extracted it from its first context.

Cinematographically, the filming of erotic scenes in the hotel room breaks away from the encoding of heterosexual eroticism through the use of extreme close-ups that become the physical medium for a new conception of materiality – a materiality constructed through a process of abstraction whose aim is to deceive the eyes/gaze of the ‘Straight Mind’. In other words, I read extreme close-ups here as abstracting bodies from a hetero-normative perspective, and re-materializing them from a lesbian or non-hetero-normative perspective. In her paper ‘The Close-Up: Scale and Detail in the Cinema’, Mary Ann Doane challenges the claimed autonomy of the close-up in films, and analyses its ambiguity in relation to space and proximity. She writes:

Although Doane refers more specifically to close-ups of the face, I would argue that extreme close-ups in erotic scenes in The Girl are exactly presence transformed into ‘a sign, a text, a surface that [demand] to be read’, and constitute the privileged location of Wittigian theory in this film, deepening our understanding of her previous writings. Close-ups abs-tract bodies, not in order to dematerialize them, but, instead, in order to ex-tract them from the ‘Straight Mind’, by depriving the viewer of the certainties offered by vision. They blur bodies so that their recognizable contours are lost within the borders of the screen and, as a consequence, such close-ups force the audience to appeal to senses other than vision to comprehend the scene.

In her book, The Skin of the Film, Laura U. Marks explains how some filmmakers use their camera to appeal to senses other than vision in order to bring to the surface other sensations in the audience; sensations that originate in the individual ‘memory of the senses’, that is, smell, taste, touch, etc. She writes: ‘Haptic visuality [or tactile visuality – touching with the eye] implies a familiarity with the world that the viewer knows through more senses than vision alone’ (Marks, 2000: 187). One way to create haptic ‘mutuality with the image’ (Marks, 2000: 184) is to bring the camera so close to the surface of a fabric, of an object, or any surface that ‘the viewer is called upon to fill in the gaps in the image, to engage with the traces the image leaves’ (Marks, 2000: 183). In short, the viewer must have a sensory connection with the image from her past in order to interact with it and decipher it in the present. In her book, Marks focuses on objects (‘fetishes’) and the connection between an individual and objects through haptic cinema the main objective of which seems to conjure up memories of a close encounter with a person, in the past, via a meaningful object. I would like to use this notion for my argument about the materiality of the lesbian body and re-route it a bit: could the object (the ‘image-object’) with which the viewer must connect be the lesbian body? And could haptic visuality open up a new reality for the body in the future as well as conjure up the past? I believe The Girl offers a positive answer to both questions. On the one hand, extreme close-ups of lesbian bodies making love serve as a form of encoding them and protecting them from those who cannot decode the images. To illustrate this with a metaphor, we can imagine two persons speaking a language they have invented in earshot of people who do not understand in order to keep their conversation private. I believe this is how close-ups function here. On the other hand, author and filmmaker not only re-create images by appealing to the sensory memory of knowledgeable viewers, but they also strive to create a new intelligible space for the lesbian body in the future. Let me illustrate these two points with scenes from the movie.

After another scene at the nightclub where we first see a woman give an envelope to the Man while the Girl is singing the song ‘Mean Ol’ Man’, the latter joins the Painter at her table. They kiss and sit. As the camera pans right, we see in the background, framed by the two women in a medium close shot, the Man, slightly blurred, watching them talk. Then from the medium shot in the club, we jump to extreme close-ups of their intermingled bodies. The Man previously observing them in the first scene disappears literally and symbolically. Through the editing, this segment also exposes the contrast between the Girl's relationship with the Man and the one between the two women. The first one is governed by power, jealousy, and greed; the other one is free.

This definition of circulation taken from Lesbian People: Material for a Dictionary, which Wittig and Zeig wrote together, infuses the images with energy. It points to the lesbianization of the world advocated by Wittig. Bodies are then genderless and reduced to bundles of energy, a process that forestalls erotic hierarchy and extols disinterested reciprocity. They are away from the Man, abstracted from the ‘Straight Mind’. Circulation (and its embodiment in the movie scene) de-genders interactions. And indeed, for Wittig, the lesbian is not (conventionally) gendered; she is neither a man nor a woman, and Zeig films bodies accordingly.

During this sexual encounter, the camera focuses in on parts of the bodies – an attention reminiscent of Wittig's novel The Lesbian Body, which is also used in movies such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) but with different goals and outcomes. The camera focuses in so much that we have to reconstitute for ourselves the total image of what the scene represents and also the sex of the bodies (Monique Wittig contends that both sex and gender are social constructs, and thus collapses the two concepts). This constitutes a step towards abstraction (from the differential heterosexual regime) and re-materialization of the lesbian body (into the Wittigian lesbian regime): ‘the lesbian overthrow of “sex” targets as models of domination those sexually differentiated norms of bodily integrity that dictate what “unifies” and renders coherent the body as sexed body’ (Butler, [1990] 1999: 146). Through extreme close-ups, the camera in The Girl temporarily renders incoherent bodies as sexed bodies, while at the same time they become coherent as non-sexed bodies. Wittig and Zeig dismiss heterosexual norms and create a space for non-normative bodies to become coherent outside of the ‘Straight Mind’ or heterosexual regime. This new space Zeig creates cinematographically is not necessarily a physical (bed)room, but rather a space shaped by and with the interaction of bodies, and as I argue, by the free ‘circulation’ of desire. Close-ups, in this process, create intimacy between the two women, as well as between the women and the ‘knowing’ audience; that is, viewers who can adopt the ‘lesbian (political) point-of-view’ by appealing to their multi-sensory memory. This process also underlines the theoretical dimension of the movie's narrative, consistent with Monique Wittig's work, and proposes a free space for the lesbian body that can project itself into the future. Indeed, what we see is not the representation of the past, as in most examples in Marks’ book, but instead the representation of what happens ‘now’ and can happen again and again at any moment. Zeig films the hotel room like the battlefield of Wittig's war on the phallus as ‘primary signifier’ (Shaktini, 1990: 291). When the two female protagonists make love, they circulate desire between each other; when the Girl has sex with a man, she is working. The nature of the hotel room changes depending on which bodies invest it: when filled with lesbian bodies, it is the site of energy circulation. Bodies are all but abstracted. The Wittigian lesbian perspective extracts them from the constraining and oppressive contextualization of the ‘Straight Mind’, and gives them back to materiality. Abstraction, in its new meaning, becomes a radical point of resistance through eroticism.

I want to underline that these images are made incoherent to the ‘Straight Mind’, which corresponds to what I call the abstraction of the lesbian bodies (i.e. the symbolic extraction) from the heterosexual regime. In short, bodies are made incoherent by being abstracted. This incoherence takes us back to Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay, in which she asserts that mainstream cinema turns women into a spectacle for the patriarchal gaze, and reminds us that ‘unchallenged, mainstream film coded the erotic into the language of the dominant patriarchal order’ (Mulvey, 1975: 30). Many critics (including Mulvey herself) have revised this perspective, and stressed that female spectators have the capacity to challenge the representations of characters on screen. However, I would argue that women in many movies, especially lesbians, are still for the most part erotically encoded to please male spectators – whether or not it pleases female spectators – at the production end of the creative process. Mainstream movies grant erotic agency to heterosexual men regardless of whether this agency can or cannot be appropriated by women. Indirectly corroborating this point, Doane asserts that ‘[in] the close-up, the cinema plays simultaneously with the desire for totalization and its impossibility’ (Doane, 1975: 109). There is indeed, present in the close-up, a desire to read, to grasp or appropriate the meaning of what fills the screen (regardless of whether or not this desire will be fulfilled – its ‘impossibility’): the close-up is really the site of a power-knowledge contest. Zeig both acknowledges and challenges this male-oriented interpretation of the close-up when she films lesbian bodies with close-ups so extreme that we cannot make sense of what we see unless we have a sensorial experience/knowledge of what we see. Zeig, much like Wittig's ideal writer/meaning-maker, blocks the male gaze by filming this sex scene in a way that makes it unintelligible to the ‘Straight Mind’ – thus contesting classic cinematic erotic codes. She respatializes lesbian love, not by hiding it, but by sheltering it with her camera.

And yet, lesbian love never completely overcomes the Straight Mind in the hotel room. As I pointed out earlier, this is a space where points of view and power constantly shift. Men can storm in at any time -penetrate it at any time; the Painter is aware of the presence of men with the Girl when she is away. The fluidity that characterizes the movements of their bodies during erotic scenes is soon countered by the growing tension that arises between the women and the Man. The hotel room is really the nexus of the tension between the straight mind and the lesbian body.

The Narrator's Studio

The Painter's studio, unlike the two previous locations in the movie, is a lesbian space. It remains impervious to the ‘Straight Mind’. There, the process of abstraction-materialization takes shape on the Painter's canvas the way it occurred through Zeig's camera. This mise-en-abîme (Zeig's camera work frames the Painter's work on canvas) of creative approaches that give shape to the body engenders a mirror connection between the movie director and her character. Both visual artists explicitly and in practice claim to proceed from concreteness to abstraction in order to rematerialize the lesbian body: ‘Start with a concrete figure and arrive at an abstraction with no correction possible’, says the Painter. Similarly, Wittig in her writings places her characters outside of realistic sociohistorical contexts in order to extract them from hetero-patriarchal and capitalistic norms. Her narratives often take place in mythical times (Les Guérillères) or out of time (The Lesbian Body, Across the Acheron).

The Painter starts from the concrete figure of the Girl, which she sketches when they are together at the hotel or in the Girl's dressing room at the jazz club. Then, she abstracts that figure – ex-tracts it – when she paints it on canvas. Paintings (and film) become a meta-language figuring new possibilities of ‘mediations between the symbolic and the real, language and the flesh’ (De Lauretis, 1988: 165), and suggest different ways to understand the matter (i.e. materiality) of bodies:

Here, De Lauretis advocates the search for a completely new way to conceive the body. On a similar quest within the movie's narrative, the Painter does not paint the female body as it is commonly represented, but instead composes abstract and open depictions of a new subject.

At this point, it is important not to confuse abstraction with invisibility or evanescence. Women do not disappear; they are not Terry Castle's lesbians any more, standing ‘in the shadows, in the margins, hidden from history, out of sight, out of mind …’ (Castle, 1993: 2). When the Painter works on abstraction, on re-creating the Girl's body outside of normative representations, she does so by reaching for flesh, not by retreating to her ‘inner-self. In quite the same way, Zeig attains abstraction by bringing her camera closer to the skin. The Painter's ascetic brush strokes strip female bodies from historical ‘domestication’ to give way for lesbian desire. Bodies lay bare like a canvas waiting to be touched, loved, and coloured.

Working from a drawing of the Girl, the Painter applies large strokes on the canvas that blur the contours of the body as she moves from a concrete figure to abstraction. Against logic, some might say, viewers are little by little deprived of the usual referents that tell them this is the body of the Girl but know however that they are looking at a (freed) woman's body. She metamorphoses under the Painter's brush: ‘I learn that if I look long enough, if I fumble long enough, a form will slowly develop’. This blurred form made of colours transcends gendered representations, not through verbal language this time but through visual symbolism. The process of abstraction channels bodies to the ‘unadorned deserted space’, where the Painter dreams of being transported with the Girl. When abstracted, the Girl is no longer a ‘woman’ but becomes a ‘lesbian’.

In The Girl, we see the theoretical framework of Monique Wittig's lifetime's work. Perhaps it is difficult in a cinematographic artefact to look beyond the characters and their interactions to see how close Wittig comes to visually embodying her theories, which is why reading her other texts along with viewing The Girl gives a much deeper understanding of the movie. With this background, we become aware of all the underlying concepts addressed on screen through the images: the de-spatialization of gender, the rematerialization of the body outside of hetero-normative conventions, and a reconfiguration of human relationships that refuses the inevitability of social and amorous hierarchies, and that shifts the representation of the erotic from possessiveness to disinterested reciprocity.

The Painter also paints her lesbian lover Bu Savé applying ‘haptic’ techniques. In a sensual scene, the Painter, eyes closed, is touching Bu Savé's naked body with her left hand and drawing with her right hand. Is vision considered treacherous? Why paint what she feels instead of what she sees? We never see the result of this drawing of Bu Savé, but we can imagine that, to our eye, it may not show the classic representation of the body of a woman, but perhaps strange or unexpected lines. However, for the artist, to come back to Marks’ theory of haptic visuality, this technique may be more appropriate and effective to reach towards the authenticity or the ‘reality’ of a woman than a more historically conventional representation of the female body. Once again, abstraction, the result of haptic representative techniques, is a way to rematerialize the body another way. Still, one may ask, how much can we abstract the female body without risking losing it altogether – making it invisible again? One way to explore this essential question is to look more closely at the character of Bu Savé.

Bu Savé is the only black woman in the movie among an all-white cast. She is also the only one with a name. For French ears, her name resembles the words bouche (mouth), suave (suave), saveur (flavour) or even savoir (to know, as in vous savez – you know) – words and sounds that carry sensual connotations, and in the case of ‘savoir’, the possibility that she possesses some form of knowledge or wisdom. In English, her name, if read, evokes ‘you save’, another trait of her character, as she is the one who provides the Painter with a gun with which the Girl will shoot the Man. I could not find any meaning for her name in any language; therefore all is conjecture here. However, it seems fair to say that her name could carry connotations of otherness, and that it raises the question of the ‘racial other’, especially in a film noir and in the French context, burdened by its colonial past. Is Bu Savé part of the abstraction-rematerialization processes at work in the movie? How much can one abstract the lesbian body, or, to be consistent with my argument, ex-tract it from the socio-historical context of the heterosexual regime that is racialized as much as gendered? Classic films noirs traditionally encode black characters as either bad (the dark side of man, the murderer), or artistic (jazz singers or musicians usually) – two categories that designate marginality. Yet, in The Girl, the jazz singer is white. Bu Savé is also a musician, but composes her own music, and this is not the focal point of the narrative. In her paper on race in film noir, E. Ann Kaplan starts off with the following assumption: ‘Race is film noir's repressed unconscious signifier’ (Kaplan, 1998: 183). Is Bu Savé a way for Zeig and Wittig to bring the character away from stereotypes of classic roles for black women in the 1940s and recast her as a Wittigian lesbian, altruistic and free? Usually, in Wittig's texts, the relationship between representations and external reality is allegorical or metaphorical. Is Bu Saé an allegory? And if so, of what?

First, Bu Saé does not fit the common stereotypes of black African women as represented by European (colonial) history's construction; that is, hypersexual, or on the contrary, desexualized, ‘there to serve the interests of white women and men’ (young, 1996: 176). She is a lesbian, and unlike the Painter, she remains in the lesbian sphere and never crosses over to the heterosexual world. Second, Bu Saé is always shot in daylight, whereas the Girl is often present in night scenes, as she works late at the club. Considering how much Zeig plays on light in the movie to represent the passage of time but also the separation between the Painter's two relationships, we could assume that the filmmaker wants to challenge the film noir's dichotomy of good/bad through darkness and light by reversing it. I would argue that Bu Saé is an uncompromising protagonist who epitomizes the Wittigian ‘lesbian’ because she is the ultimate ‘companion lover’ described in Wittig and Zeig's Dictionary: she represents desire without possessiveness; a fighting spirit without aggressiveness, and in that, she is the opposite of the Man. Bu Saé introduces a behavioural binary in the scenario: one (the Man) enslaves, the other (the lesbian) frees; one hurts, the other protects. But without more at our disposal than mere subjective hypothesis, we should still wonder whether the creation of her character does not also testify to an exoticizing dimension in the Utopian egalitarian world of Monique Wittig. The narrator painting Bu Saé with her eyes closed may especially be interpreted as an attempt to resist Bu Saé's racialization to paint her solely as a woman, as a lesbian, or even as a genderless body. But is ignoring socially constructed categories in this narrative a realistic path to abolishing them? Bu Saé's character disrupts the image of the femme fatale in the film noir genre that runs on sex and greed, but she never enters into direct contact with the Man or the Girl; she is always in the background, always protecting, never jealous, genderless and without a race label attached to her.

The number of questions that the presence of a black woman raises is exacerbated by the lack of relief given to her character in the narrative, and thus readings are limited. This proves problematic for the Wittigian effort to free the lesbian from the oppression of the ‘Straight Mind’ if only because it eschews the problem of (racial) bias within the lesbian community itself.

Conclusion

There are limitations to the validity of the theories that I have shown are explored in The Girl. I believe that Wittig's sincere crusade to give back freedom and agency to the lesbian through words and images – means of representation historically dominated by what she calls the hetero-patriarchal regime – may rely too much on binaries. The Man and Bu Saé in particular never evolve in the narrative. Their relations to other characters never shift. They represent a clear case of bad guy/good guy. And yet, as I have demonstrated, binaries are not always as fixed as we think they are, and rather than denying the oppressive power of these binaries, Wittig chooses to tackle them, reverse them, and disturb them in order to destabilize the oppressing regime from the inside, as a Trojan horse.

In her essay ‘The Mark of Gender’, Monique Wittig argues that ‘the universal has been, and is continually, at every moment, appropriated by men’ (Wittig, [1985] 1992: 66). The naturalized appropriation of language by men denies women the possibility of investing space as freely as men do. As Leslie Kanes Weisman explains, the dispossession of women takes place at the earliest age: ‘Boys are raised in our society to be spatially dominant …. Girls are raised in our society to expect and accept spatial limitations …. They are taught to occupy but not to control space’ (Weisman, 1994: 24). In the movie, the Girl occupies the public space of the nightclub but has no power in it. Even in her hotel room where she pretends to assert her freedom of choice (‘I can fuck whoever I want to!’), the Man is a constant presence, barging in when he pleases to wield his authority. This is clearly evoked by the camera work that constantly puts spaces in opposition with one another. Wittig's position on male social domination is not one of compromise. In the end, the Girl eliminates the Man to free the space of his presence, symbolically as much as physically.

Reinvesting space is as important as transforming language because there is no other place to be. One can only run so far before conventions catch up. As Foucault explains, ‘there is no escaping from power … it is always-already present’ (Foucault, [1976] 1990: 83). Nevertheless, from within the web of power, there is room for agency. In cities, several worlds coexist and sometimes collide. In this urban environment, where the freedom of women can be perceived as a threat, there can also be change. In The Girl, the city becomes the contested space of patriarchal norms where the lesbian Painter stands as a heroic figure, travelling between spaces, transgressing boundaries, and thwarting man's ‘natural’ jurisdiction, in control. She carves a space for agency within the web of power relations. She refuses to accept that the streets belong to men, and especially that the Girl belongs to the Man. However, it is up to the Girl, not the Painter, to reject the Man's authority (not only pretend to). Zeig and Wittig's return to stasis is radical: the Man gets killed. Yet, in the light of Wittig's other productions, it is possible to understand this killing as the symbol of a new order that the movie is striving to create. This is not about the elimination of a heterosexual man in order for two women to be together. The killing is a symbolic act that allows for the universalization of the lesbian point of view and the destruction of gender. The Man symbolizes oppression wherever it comes from, not only oppression from straight male individuals. Let's remember, in her essays, Wittig refers to ‘man’ and ‘woman’ as socially constructed categories that make sense only when placed in opposition by the ‘Straight Mind’ or heterosexually understood society. Men can be lesbians too:

‘Lesbian’ becomes stripped of its female seme (‘lesbian meant she …’ – past tense). A lesbian is now a non-gendered ‘companion lover’. If ‘woman’ is a political category that stands for those who are under the influence of ‘heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems’ (Wittig, 1980, 1992: 32), then ‘lesbian’ is the political category of those who are not under the control of these same systems. ‘Lesbian’ therefore does not mean ‘a woman who desires only women’ but an individual whose coherence comes into being outside the ‘Straight Mind’. The storyline of The Girl stages the love of two women whose sexuality is fluid, and open to the unknown. If we look at gender the way Foucault looked at power (i.e. a web of interacting gender positions out of which no one can stand), gender subversion within this web becomes not only possible, but inevitable. Read this way, Wittig's position is quite ‘queer’. Marie-Hélène Bourcier, in Queer Zones, defines queer theory in the twenty-first century as follows:

Monique Wittig politicizes sexuality and certainly questions the epistemological oppressiveness of sexual categories. Her standpoint is always political. She questions knowledge as it is conveyed through language and its relation to power; her characters and her stories are not as one-sided as some critics interpret them to be. In short, though it might look like an old-fashioned crusade against patriarchy, Wittig's creative and theoretical work relentlessly questions and innovates.

Some might view her approach as too theoretical, perhaps too rhetorical, and thus less effective. And yet, hasn't rhetoric proven effective in shaping political opinion? In my view, The Girl underscores Wittig's attempts to universalize the lesbian point of view and to provocatively expound the problematic within the ubiquitous ‘Straight Mind’. Wittig is a ‘territorial materialist’. She envisages writing and loving in spatial terms, and does not believe that ‘lesbians’ will be granted freedom by ‘men’ in the land of hetero-patriarchy. They need to take it, to make a place for themselves, by radically disturbing, as Butler states, ‘the globalizing heterosexist episteme’ ([1990] 1999: 153), and opening the door to a reshaping of social norms with regard to the expression of human desire. As a fiction writer as well as a theorist, Wittig uses her characters as vectors of her beliefs as much as protagonists in a narrative. Her endeavour to lesbianize the world need not be read as the teleological core of her argument; it is the weapon to achieve equality among all forms of humanness. Butler writes in Gender Trouble that ‘[the] ideal of a coherent heterosexuality that Wittig describes as the norm and standard of the heterosexual contract is an impossible ideal’ (Butler, [1990] 1999: 155) and undoubtedly, the norms that govern gendered behaviours are impossible to embody, but one must contest them all the same. Wittig does not strive to destroy heterosexuality as the expression of one's sexuality, but as a political regime, which constitutes an essential intervention in the field of Women's and Gender Studies and beyond. She fights against an impossible ideal of ‘coherent heterosexuality’ (as well as an impossible ideal of coherent lesbianism) because ideals underpin oppression, not their impossible actualizations.