Subversive Bodily Acts appear to enact a different kind of political strategy than the one for which she explicitly calls in her theoretical essays In The Lesbian Body and in Les Guérillères, the narrative strategy through which political transformation is articulated makes use of redeployment and transvaluation time and again both to make use of originally oppressive terms and to deprive them of their legitimating functions Although Wittig herself is a “materialist,” the term has a specific meaning within her theoretical framework She wants to overcome the split between materiality and representation that characterizes “straight” thinking Materialism implies neither a reduction of ideas to matter nor the view of theory as a reflection of its economic base, strictly conceived.Wittig’s materialism takes social institutions and practices, in particular, the institution of heterosexuality, as the basis of critical analysis In “The Straight Mind” and “On the Social Contract,”53 she understands the institution of heterosexuality as the founding basis of the male-dominated social orders “Nature” and the domain of materiality are ideas, ideological constructs, produced by these social institutions to support the political interests of the heterosexual contract In this sense, Wittig is a classic idealist for whom nature is understood as a mental representation.A language of compulsory meanings produces this representation of nature to further the political strategy of sexual domination and to rationalize the institution of compulsory heterosexuality Unlike Beauvoir,Wittig sees nature not as a resistant materiality, a medium, surface, or an object; it is an “idea” generated and sustained for the purposes of social control The very elasticity of the ostensible materiality of the body is shown in The Lesbian Body as language figures and refigures the parts of the body into radically new social configurations of form (and antiform) Like those mundane and scientific languages that circulate the idea of “nature” and so produce the naturalized conception of discretely sexed bodies, Wittig’s own language enacts an alternative disfiguring and refiguring of bodies Her aim is to expose the idea of a natural body as a construction and to offer a deconstructive/reconstructive set of strategies for configuring 159