Reading group: Try to remember, or failing that, invent.

DATE
TUESDAYS
13, 20, 27 JANUARY 2025
6:30PM-8PM

LOCATION
THE DRILL HALL, CRITICAL PATH
1C NEW BEACH ROAD, DARLING POINT, NSW, 2027
GADIGAL & BIRRABIRRAGAL COUNTRY

FREE REGISTRATION

Join us for a summer reading group gathering on Tuesday evenings throughout January, where we will collectively read Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary (1976) by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, a novel whose unruly poetics and radical politics reimagines the history of language.

Across three sessions, we’ll explore how the text retools the dictionary form to unmake patriarchal grammar, to conjure futures and ancestries, and to insist on lesbian as a world-making force rather than an identity category. We’ll read aloud, follow the text’s strange leaps, consider its visions and contradictions, and ask what it means to invent language when the available ones fail.

The sessions will be facilitated by Chloe Chignell, a choreographer and writer. S/he will guide sessions and the conversation between close reading and open speculation.

No prior study or preparation is necessary.

The reading will be held in English, and French editions will be available for those who wish to move between versions or listen for echoes of the original text.

About Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary

[by chloe chignell]

Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary stages a scene of dissociation from the ordinary, an act of lexical disorientation. Written by Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig, this dictionary, a hybrid of speculative fiction, poetic prose and mythic historiography, does not so much catalog meaning as it disorients meaning’s hold. It performs a dismantling of the hegemonic semantic field, the everyday contract of intelligibility under heteropatriarchy and what Wittig terms ‘the straight mind’, and in its place offers an unstable architecture of a world rooted in lesbian subjectivity. It uses the dictionary as a weapon against itself to cast forth another order: the dream of a lesbian social.

Wittig and Zeig’s project operates in a register of estrangement–radical, utopian, but never naive. What they give us is no representation but the infrastructure of a different affective economy, one whose signs are invented, recursive, lacunary and polysemous. The dictionary form promises order, and yet delivers sedimented fragments, surreal etymologies and speculative ruins. The book performs the inevitable failure to systematically capture and catalogue language and in so doing renders the dictionary literature amongst literature.

This is not simply an exercise in lesbian-feminist world-building, though it is that too. It is a world that metabolises the violence of language and offers up a counter-discourse saturated with the pleasure and difficulty of disorientation and disidentification. There is no straight line of meaning here. Instead, the reader is asked to inhabit the broken rhythm of an alternate semiotics–one shaped by a lesbian imaginary that does not attempt to be a mirror to reality but a site of sensual resistance to it.

Lesbian Peoples is an archive of a negated sociality, a fantasy that thickens in the absence of legibility. It is affective not because it overflows with sensuality, but because it registers the impasse of being intelligible within a language that was never intended for you to speak. It is awkward, lush, deliberately excessive and self aware. It insists on the sensual labor of reading differently, of touching language differently, of being moved by the erotics of word-dismantling.

In this way, Lesbian Peoples is not a relic of radical feminism’s past, but a living document of how literature can be a form of political work. It is less concerned with what lesbians are than with what lesbianism does: as an interruption, as an atmosphere, as an unruly archive of possibility.

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Critical Path respectfully acknowledges the Gadigal and Birrabirragal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional owners of the land where the organisation is based.
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IMAGE CREDIT: Chloe Chignell, SUNCUT: a lover's dictionary, photo by Stine Sampers, June 2025.

IMAGE ID: An image of a person performing. They are curled up in a ball, with the crown of their head resting into the floor. Their hands are visible with one pressing into the back of their head and the other pressing into their shoulder.

Contact the host of READING GROUP with Chloe Chignell