[Reading Group] Lesbian Peoples: materials for a dictionary

Join us for a summer reading group taking place on Tuesday evenings in July. Over the three sessions we will read through the wildly poetic and radically political Lesbian Peoples: materials for a dictionary written by Monique Wittig and Sandie Zeig in 1976. The reading will be held in english, french editions will be available. No prior study or reading necessary. 

Time: 18:30-20:00
Dates: Tuesday 15th, 22nd, 29th July. 

Register here to receive the reading materials. 

About Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary
[by chloe chignell]
Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary stages a scene of dissociation from the ordinary, an act of lexical disorientation. Written by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, this dictionary, a hybrid of speculative fiction, poetic prose and mythic historiography, does not so much catalog meaning as it disorients meaning’s hold. It performs a dismantling of the hegemonic semantic field, the everyday contract of intelligibility under heteropatriarchy and what Wittig terms ‘the straight mind’, and in its place offers an unstable architecture of a world rooted in lesbian subjectivity. It uses the dictionary as a weapon against itself to cast forth another order: the dream of a lesbian social. 

Wittig and Zeig’s project operates in a register of estrangement–radical, utopian, but never naive. What they give us is no representation but the infrastructure of a different affective economy, one whose signs are invented, recursive, lacunary and polysemous. The dictionary form promises order, and yet delivers sedimented fragments, surreal etymologies and speculative ruins. The book performs the inevitable failure to systematically capture and catalogue language and in so doing renders the dictionary literature amongst literature. 

This is not simply an exercise in lesbian-feminist world-building, though it is that too. It is a world that metabolises the violence of language and offers up a counter-discourse saturated with the pleasure and difficulty of disorientation and disidentification. There is no straight line of meaning here. Instead, the reader is asked to inhabit the broken rhythm of an alternate semiotics–one shaped by a lesbian imaginary that does not attempt to be a mirror to reality but a site of sensual resistance to it. 

Lesbian Peoples is this an archive of a negated sociality, a fantasy that thickens in the absence of legibility. It is affective not because it overflows with sensuality, but because it registers the impasse of being intelligible within a language that was never intended for you to speak. It is awkward, lush, deliberately excessive and self aware. It insists on the sensual labor of reading differently, of touching language differently, of being moved by the erotics of word-dismantling. 

In this way, Lesbian Peoples is not a relic of radical feminism’s past, but a living document of how literature can be a form of political work. It is less concerned with what lesbians are than with what lesbianism does: as an interruption, as an atmosphere, as an unruly archive of possibility.