Beautiful War explores the interdependent political, linguistic, and erotic registers of lesbian feminism in Monique Wittig's novels, querying in particular how they function collectively to destabilize male hegemony and heterosexism. Beginning with the assertion that Wittig expressly dismantles the Classical veneration of la belle femme in order to create an agent more capable of social change (la femme belliqueuse), the author traces the permutations of violence through her four novels, L'Opoponax, Les Guérillères, Le Corps Lesbien, and Virgile, Non and examines the relevance of brutality to Wittig's feminist agenda. Drawing on literary criticism, intellectual and political history, queer theory, and feminist theory in his readings of the primary texts, the author argues that Wittig's oeuvre constitutes a progressive textual actualization of paradigm shifts toward gender parity and a permanent banishment of the primacy of male and heterosexist political and sexual discourse.

The Author: James D. Davis, Jr. is Assistant Professor of Spanish and French at Western Carolina University. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Georgia in Romance languages, with a primary emphasis on twentieth-century French and Latin American literature. He is the co-winner of the 2005 Prix Fetkann for his contributions to Hurricane: Cris d'insulaires. His literary research focuses primarily on gender and queer studies in twentieth-century French and Latin American literature, and he also studies the effects of service learning on bigotry and language acquisition.