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Centre for the Study of Contemporary Women's Writing (CCWW)

Virginie Despentes

Virginie_Despentes_2012 (Georges Biard WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0).jpg
Virginie Despentes at the 'Bye Bye Blondie' preview in 2012 (photo Georges Biard via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 3.0)

Virginie Despentes was born on 3 June 1969 in Nancy. Despentes is not her real name, but a pseudonym she took when she turned 25, at the time of the publication of her novel Baise-moi, to protect her privacy. It refers to the neighbourhood ‘des pentes de la Croix-rousse’ in Lyon, where she used to live.

Her parents were both unionized civil servants and she grew up accustomed to taking part in strikes and protests. At 15, she was confined to a mental institution against her will for two months. After this, she left secondary school and lived on her own. She led a rather marginal life for years suffering from alcoholism, and working as a prostitute in Lyon and Paris. She also worked as a critic of pornographic films during those years. Her experience of underground circles, notably Punk and post-Punk, and of the world of prostitution feeds her creative process. In King Kong théorie, a feminist manifesto she wrote in 2006, she states her literary intention: ‘J’écris de chez les moches, pour les moches, les vieilles, les camonieuses, les frigides, les mal baisées, les imbaisables, les hystériques, les tarées, toutes les exclues du grand marché de la bonne meuf’. Marginalization, social exclusion and inequality related to gender and class are indeed central themes in her writing and filmmaking.

Despentes often problematizes gendered expectations in a transgressive way, borrowing from genres such as pornography, noir and, to some extent, horror. Violence in all its forms, and female violence and violence against women in particular, is a topic relentlessly addressed in Despentes’s work. Her first novel Baise-moi (1993) was rejected by nine publishers before one of Despentes’s friends sent it to Florent Massot, who agreed to publish it. The novel tells the story of Manu, an alcoholic and occasional porn actress, and Nadine, a prostitute, and their pathway to violence. It instantly became a huge success and propelled Despentes to literary stardom. In 2000, Despentes directed a film adaptation of Baise-moi in collaboration with porn actress Coralie Trin Thi. The rape and revenge narrative depicting extreme violence and explicit sex on-screen immediately sparked a reaction of catholic conservative circles, far-right protesters, feminists and the media alike. The intervention of the catholic conservative organization Promouvoir resulted in the film losing its screening licence  – the first such case in France in 28 years – and being awarded an 18 rating.

Despentes’s second novel, Les Chiennes savantes (1996), is a reappropriation of noir clichés in a female universe. The narrative takes place in and around the bleak atmosphere of a strip club where a series of murders occur. Similarly, the short story ‘A terme’ from her collection Mordre au travers (1999) is probably one of the most disturbing explorations of infanticide in contemporary French literature. In 2002, Despentes published a graphic novel in collaboration with Nora Hamdi, in which they portray sexual harassment against women and female violence, through characters reminding us of the heroines of Baise-moi. More recently, in Apocalypse Bébé (2010), Despentes explores the theme of religious and class exclusion as well as violence, manifested in the form of suicide attack and mass murder. The novel was awarded the Prix Trop Virilo and the Prix Renaudot.

The construction and the difficulties of socialization are also haunting themes in her work. In 1999, her novel Les Jolies Choses, which examines the construction and the performance of femininity, won the Prix de Flore and the Prix littéraire Saint-Valentin. By this time, Florent Massot had declared bankruptcy and major publisher Grasset approached Despentes. Her fourth novel Teen Spirit (2002) tells the story of a male protagonist’s path to fatherhood and, to a certain extent, adulthood. In Bye Bye Blondie, two years later, she explores anew the theme of social exclusion and paradoxically of the alienation one experiences to achieve social success. The novel also tells a love story between the protagonists Gloria and Eric, concluding with a rather traditional happy ending. On adapting the novel for film in 2011, Eric becomes Frances. Béatrice Dalle and Emmanuelle Béart were chosen to play the passionate couple, utilizing these familiar faces of French cinema to embody a not so familiar relationship on-screen.

Between 2006 and 2009, Despentes published and directed two major non-fictional works, King Kong théorie, an autobiographic essay, and a documentary, Mutantes, féminisme post-punk. Prostitution and pornography are central themes addressed in both works. King Kong théorie also tackles the question of rape. Despentes, herself a victim of rape, reflects on the trauma she experienced and also discusses the representational void surrounding the subject in literature and cinema.

The urban setting is also central to Despentes’s imagination. She delivers an impressive exploration of Paris and its different arrondissements in her most recent novel, Vernon Subutex. The novel’s tri-partite narrative is probably her most accomplished work and delivers an incredibly elaborate portrayal of contemporary life in Paris, following the eponymous hero and his descent into precarity. The novel’s use of dialogues and interior monologues, techniques often employed by Despentes, allows her to depict a vast range of characters - from former porn star actress, now transgender man Daniel, to cocaine addict and trader Koko, to homeless social justice champion Olga - with an unprecedented complexity and depth. These features won the trilogy national and international acclaim. The first volume was awarded the Prix Anaïs Nin, the Prix Landerneau, the Prix Roman-News and the Prix La Couple among others, and it was shortlisted for the International Man Booker Prize in the UK. In 2019, Despentes received the Prix de la BnF for her work.

Currently, Despentes lives and writes in Paris. If her work was once associated with scandal and received a mixed reception, she is today considered one of the most important voices of the contemporary literary scene. Previously a member of the jury of the Prix Femina, she joined the Académie Goncourt in 2016, which she left in January 2020 to devote herself to writing. 

Compiled by Dominique Carlini Versini (Durham)