Exploring Lesbian Literature Through Writings of French Feminist Authors

This event will be in English and held at the Alliance Francaise of Washington DC

This event is in collaboration with the Capital Pride Alliance and Winter Editions

This event is part of the “Language Without Borders”

Join us at the Alliance Française of Washington DC for an evening of literary conversation exploring two powerful writers of French queer literature: Monique Wittig and Mireille Best.

Bringing together translators, scholars, and critics, this book talk centers on how lesbian relationships are imagined, narrated, and translated across linguistic and cultural contexts. From Wittig’s empowered linguistic and political interventions to Best’s intimate portrayal of coming-of-age in postwar France, these texts open up voices of the past and discussions in the present on the lesbian experience.

The evening will feature a lively conversation with Alice Centamore (Winter Editions), Dr. Stephanie Schechner (translator and Professor Emerita of French, Widener University), and Dr. Miléna Santoro (Georgetown University), who will moderate the discussion. Together, they will reflect on the challenges and possibilities of translating queer experience, across languages, and literarily, across narrative form.

Wittig, a foundational figure in lesbian feminist thought, reshaped contemporary theory through her critique of heteronormative language and her experimental fiction. Best, writing from within working-class postwar France, offers deeply textured portraits of lesbian adolescence, desire, and constraint, marked by humor, emotional nuance, and narrative boldness. In dialogue, their works illuminate different but complementary ways of representing lesbian lives and relationships in literature.

This event offers a rare opportunity to engage with French feminist literary history, translation practice, and queer storytelling in conversation with leading scholars and translators, all in time for Capital Pride.

About the Authors

Mireille Best - Author

Mireille Best is the pseudonym of Mireille Lemarchand (1943-2005), who was born and raised in a working-class family in Le Havre, France. Unable to pursue university studies due to health problems, Best worked in a plastics factory after high school and later as a civil servant. Published by the prestigious French press Gallimard, Best wrote four volumes of short stories and three novels.

Monique Wittig – Author

Monique Wittig (1935–2003) was an influential French avant-garde novelist, lesbian feminist, and activist who challenged heteronormativity and the role of language in sustaining gender oppression. Her debut novel, L’Opoponax (1964), won the Prix Médicis and introduced her experimental, nontraditional style. A key figure in the Mouvement de libération des femmes and cofounder of the Gouines Rouges, Wittig pushed for lesbian visibility within feminist and gay movements. After moving to the U.S. in 1976 she published The Straight Mind (1992), arguing that heterosexuality functions as a system of oppression and critiquing how language constructs gender.

About the Speakers:

Stephanie Schechner - Translator

Stephanie Schechner is a Professor Emerita of French at Widener University, Pennsylvania, and has published extensively on Mireille Best as well as on other French and Francophone women writers including Jovette Marchessault, Colette, Nathalie Sarraute, Rachilde, Marguerite Duras and Jocelyne François. She has previously published a translation of Mireille Best’s novel Camille in October.

Alice Centamore – Translator

Alice Centamore is a researcher, editor, and occasional translator whose work explores the material and literary articulations of queer communal life through poetry, prose, and experimental forms. While completing their MA at the EHESS in Paris, they discovered the work of Monique Wittig. Years later, they co-edited and revised the English translations of two of her books, The Lesbian Body (1973) and Across the Acheron (1985), now republished by Winter Editions. Alice is currently working on a facsimile edition of The Blatant Image, a 1980s feminist photographic magazine, as well as a volume on writer and reproductive health activist Judith Arcana, while pursuing graduate work in the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago.

Miléna Santoro - Moderator

Miléna Santoro is a longtime professor at Georgetown University, where she teaches Quebec Studies and Film and Media Studies and is a founding member of the Americas Initiative. Her work focuses on transnational connections between Quebec’s literature and film and the broader Francophone world. An internationally recognized scholar, she has published widely and received numerous honors, including awards from Liverpool University Press (2016), the Médaille hommage 50e, the Grand Prix de la Francophonie (2017), the Prix du Québec (2018), and the Ordre des Francophones d’Amérique (2019). She serves on several editorial boards and professional associations. Her recent work includes the co-edited book Touching Beauty: The Poetics of Kim Thúy (2023) and a 2025 special issue of L’esprit créateur on Indigenous creativity in Quebec.

Book summaries

Hymn to Moray Eels (2025) – Mireille Best, Translated by Stephanie Schechner

Set in a 1950s girls’ sanatorium in France, the novel follows Mila, a young lesbian coping with illness, separation from her family, and the emotional turbulence of adolescence. Surrounded by a lively cast of girls and staff, she navigates friendships, humor, and desire—especially her complicated relationship with Paule. When a rival appears, Mila must confront jealousy and find her own emotional strength in this witty, tender coming-of-age story.

Camille in October (2019) – Mireille Best, Translated by Stephanie Schechner

This novel traces Camille’s coming of age as a young lesbian in a working-class coastal town in 1950s France. Living in a tense family shaped by violence, silence, and hardship, she turns inward until a transformative relationship awakens her intellectual and sexual identity. Blending dark possibilities with sharp insight, the story explores identity, family, and the struggle to reconcile one’s origins with personal freedom.

The Lesbian Body (1973) – Monique Wittig, Revised Translation by Alice Centamore

In this experimental novel, Monique Wittig challenges traditional ideas of gender, identity, and the body through a fragmented, multi-voiced narrator. Rejecting essentialist feminism and heterosexual norms, she reimagines subjectivity and desire as fluid and political. The text serves as both a radical literary work and a critique of patriarchal systems, pushing the boundaries of language and feminist thought.

Across the Acheron (1985) – Monique Wittig, Revised Translation by Alice Centamore

A darkly comic reinterpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, this novel follows a fictionalized Wittig and her guide through a surreal, lesbian feminist underworld inspired by 1980s San Francisco. Moving through spaces like bars and laundromats, they encounter strange creatures and lost souls, as the book playfully subverts traditional narratives, gender roles, and literary conventions.

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Host or Publisher Alliance Française de Washington, DC (AFDC)