
Wittig's prose is methodical and aggressive, combative and dense.

For women, she concludes, lesbianism is the logical escape from patriarchal domination. There is but sex that is oppressed and sex that oppresses.'' Drawing on de Beauvoir, Wittig strenuously resists both biological determinism and its twin, essentialism, arguing that sex itself is a social, ergo ideological, construct and that man and woman are not eternal categories. Half of the nine essays in this brief collection deal directly with the politics of gender, a battlefield on which Wittig has staked out a nearly unique position: ``There is no sex.

Wittig ( The Lesbian Body ) is a key figure in French feminism, perhaps the foremost theorist of a profoundly radical lesbianism.
