"The Straight Mind" by M. Wittig

Summary by Michelle Attebury and Kate Wunsch

• The straight mind is the mind that has throughly internalized the ideas produced by the thought of dominance ("The Category of Sex") and applies to every field. As Wittig wrote, "I can only underlinmce the oppressice character that the straight mind is clothed in its tendancy to immediately universalize ots production of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all societies all epochs, all indiviuals. Thus one speaks of the exchange of women, the difference between the sexes, the symbolic order, the Unconcious, Desire, Jouissance, Culture, History, giving absolute meaning to these concepts when they are only categories founded upon heterosexuality, or thought which produces the difference between the sexes as political ans philosophicla dogma." (146).
• The obligatory social relationship between men and women is the heterosexual relationship. This relationship is necessary for society to run as all of society's institutions are based on it-family, work, etc. That is why dominate ideologies ordain heterosexuality as 'natural' and acknowledge homosexuality as 'other', as it is seen as a threat to the order. This naturlaization of heterosexuality is called compulsory heterosexuality.
• For example in psychoanalysis, all of the symbols in the Unconcious (like the Oedipus complex, castration, murder-or-death-of-the-father, the exchange of men, etc.) assume every person is heterosexual, misogynistic, and that they were born with this Unconcious. The Unconcious is supposedly 'universal', across all cultures. In actuality, these theories were produced by straight minds to silence homosexuality and to make heterosexuality the law. As Wittig says, "No wonder then that there is only one

Unconcious, and that it is heterosexual. It is an Unconcious which looks too conciously after the interests of the masters." (148).

Opinions

-I think Wittig has some very good and valid points, but at times I think she gets a bit carried with herself. In her other piece that we read she talks about the "...class struggle between men and women, which should be undertaken by all women..." and goes on to say "Women do not know that they are totally dominated by ne, and when they acknowledge that fact, they can 'hardly believe it'," ("The Category of Sex" pg 25). I think comments like these are overly dramatic and don't pertain to all, or any?, women. However, I do like the work she does showing the built in assumptions in psychoanalysis.