Of Bodies and Nature: Monique Wittig’s The Lesbian Body

This article analyzes Monique Wittig’s engagement with life beyond the human-animal divide, focusing on transformation and cross-pollination in The Lesbian Body. Wittig describes erotic encounters involving plants and animals—like “spores that start at your epidermis” or the touch of an octopus. I argue that the body writ large—and the lesbian body as a conceptual tool that rejects normative embodiment—is inherently entangled with the natural world across genus and species. Attending to this world, of which humans are a part, is essential to understanding Wittig’s reimagining of embodiment beyond rigid human/animal binaries.