Abstract: This article examines Monique Wittig’s radical critique of work and its entanglement with the category of ‘woman’ in Brouillon pour un dictionnaire des amantes (1976). Arguing that Wittig’s materialist feminism rejects not just the gendered division of labor but work itself, I position her alongside French anti-work traditions, particularly Charles Fourier’s utopian socialism and Paul Lafargue’s Le droit à la paresse (1883). Through speculative fiction, Wittig and Zeig imagine a post-work utopia where sex, as an economic relation, dissolves. However, Wittig’s single-axis analysis of work as it relates to sex neglects a systematic analysis of race, a limitation highlighted via colonial critiques and Black feminist thought. The article underscores speculative fiction’s power to destabilize essen-tialist categories.
Elliot Evans (Sun,) studied this question.