GENDER TROUBLE 189

Gender Trouble the focus of Wittig’s most recent theoretical work,50 although present in her theoretical essays all along.51 Unspoken but always operative, the heterosexual contract cannot be reduced to any of its empirical appearances.Wittig writes: I confront a nonexistent object, a fetish, an ideological form which cannot be grasped in reality, except through its effects, whose existence lies in the mind of people, but in a way that affects their whole life, the way they act, the way they move, the way they think So we are dealing with an object both imaginary and real.52 As in Lacan, the idealization of heterosexuality appears even within Wittig’s own formulation to exercise a control over the bodies of practicing heterosexuals that is finally impossible, indeed, that is bound to falter on its own impossibility Wittig appears to believe that only the radical departure from heterosexual contexts—namely becoming lesbian or gay—can bring about the downfall of this heterosexual regime But this political consequence follows only if one understands all “participation” in heterosexuality to be a repetition and consolidation of heterosexual oppression.The possibilities of resignifying heterosexuality itself are refused precisely because heterosexuality is understood as a total system that requires a thoroughgoing displacement The political options that follow from such a totalizing view of heterosexist power are (a) radical conformity or (b) radical revolution Assuming the systemic integrity of heterosexuality is extremely problematic both for Wittig’s understanding of heterosexual practice and for her conception of homosexuality and lesbianism As radically “outside” the heterosexual matrix, homosexuality is conceived as radically unconditioned by heterosexual norms.This purification of homosexuality, a kind of lesbian modernism, is currently contested by numerous lesbian and gay discourses that understand lesbian and gay culture as embedded in the larger structures of heterosexuality even as they are positioned in subversive or resignificatory relationships to heterosexual cultural configurations.Wittig’s view refuses the possibil154