Rather than proclaiming a vision of utopia, Les guérillères pushes back against the very idea of a "future" to be eventually arrived at, challenging rhetorics of revolution based on progression towards a common, collective goal. Wittig manages to blur the line between two camps –that of the dialectical revolution and that of the deconstructive revolution – and thus serves to parody both.
In fact, both a dialectical and deconstructive readings of Les guérillères are possible, and coexist in tension. But the circles marking the beginning of each section, as well as Wittig’s statement about how the text “should” be read – that is, with the chronological end of the narrative at the locational beginning of the book – makes it hard to find a beginning or an end at all, calling to mind the “always already” of deconstruction. Les guérillères’s three-part, dialectical structure, as well as its status as radical feminist science fiction, at first suggests a utopian vision of a future synthesis born of a revolutionary women’s struggle, and indeed it has been read that way (Chisolm, Nelson-McDermott, etc). Taking as my object the Monique Wittig’s 1969 novel Les guérillères, I mean to explore the difficulties of ambiguously “utopian” science fiction, especially with regard to the intersection and tensions between French “postmodern” and “feminist” political strategies in the early seventies.
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