I discovered Monique Wittig quite by accident in the 1980s while on a trip to Northern California. Actually, I think it was at Nepenthe's in Big Sur where they had a selection of “new age” trinkets and books. I picked up a copy of Les Guérillères and began perusing the pages and was immediately taken by the way she wrote, stylistically. I subsequently found her other novels and read them all. At a PMLA convention in Minneapolis I attended a lecture on feminist fiction. Curiously, no one mentioned Wittig throughout the session; during the question and answer portion I asked a question about her. I recall that no fewer than three women turned and looked at me. After the session was over, the same three women approached me and asked me if I'd have a coffee with them to talk about my interest in Wittig's writing. What I recall of that coffee klatch was that we were all in agreement about the brilliance of Wittig's prose, even in translation—how she reinterprets tradition, creating a kind of alternative symbolism that, as Lucy Sargisson writes, “positively represents the female body” (208). At the same time, her work also explores notions of the masculine, if only through their absence.

Wittig herself describes the structure of Les Guérillères as

The title may or may not be a neologism, but that's not the point. What is more to the point is how the novel establishes certain notions of the masculine: “the collective hero elles fight a revolution against ils and, having vanquished maledominated society, proceed to create a new civilization” (Shaktini, 72).