Feminist Manifesto or Hardcore Porn? Virginie

Feminist Manifesto or Hardcore Porn?
Virginie Despentes’s Transgression
Natalie Edwards
‘Moi qui ai connu l’inceste, je m’appelle Christine Angot’, writes
Christine Angot in Léonore, toujours.1 In a series of texts, she recounts
detailed accounts of incest, heterosexual sex and homosexual sex, in
the first person and written by a narrator named ‘Christine Angot’. The
provocative nature of her narrative resonates in recent French women’s
writing; as Angot’s contemporary Claire Legendre has commented, ‘tout
le monde en parle: c’est à la mode, le cul, ces derniers temps’.2 French
literature is known for its history of erotically transgressive writers, from
the Marquis de Sade, through Georges Bataille, Jean Genet to Michel
Houellebecq. Such writing is no less popular nowadays; Marie-Hélène
Bourcier even finds that ‘les années 90 en France ont été marquées par
une explosion de discours autour de la pornographie: psychologique,
politique […], médiatique, littéraire, artistique’.3 Yet one of the most
fascinating developments in recent French literature is that women are,
for the first time in such quantities, entering this domain. Although writers
such as Rachilde, Pauline Réage and Monique Wittig have previously
written erotic texts, 4 such transgressive works by women authors now
proliferate. Alongside Christine Angot’s sexually charged narratives,
Catherine Millet’s 2002 La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M contains
graphic group sex, masturbation and gratuitous violence.5 Annie Ernaux
1. Christine Angot, Léonore, toujours (Paris: Fayard, 1997), p. 49.
2. Olivier Bessard-Banquy, Sexe et littérature aujourd’hui (Paris: La Musardine, 2010),
p. 19.
3. Marie-Hélène Bourcier, ‘Pipe d’auteur: La ‘Nouvelle Vague pornographique française’
et ses intellectuels (avec Jean-Pierre Léaud et Ovidie, Catherine Millet et son mari et
toute la presse)’, L’Esprit créateur, 44.3 (2004), 13–26 (p. 13).
4. Examples include Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus (1884), Pauline Réage, Histoire d’O
(1954) and Monique Wittig, Le Corps lesbien (1973).
5. Catherine Millet, La Vie sexuelle de Catherine M (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
IJFrS 12 (2012)
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incorporates several descriptions of sex acts in works such as L’Usage
de la photo.6 Catherine Cusset includes vivid sex scenes in Jouir,7
and Marie Nimier in La Nouvelle Pornographie is concerned with the
writer of a book of erotica.8 In Viande, Claire Legendre depicts three
women experimenting in different ways with their desire.9 Christine
Jordis, Marie NDiaye and others have all published similarly explicit
work and this trend is also evident in the work of women filmmakers,
such as Catherine Breillat (Romance, 1999) and Claire Denis (Trouble
Every Day, 2001).
I do not mean to suggest that female writers have not been
transgressive in the past. Indeed, given the dominance of literature by
male writers, the very act of writing and publishing by women could
be viewed as transgressive. Furthermore, the act of writing intimate
experience, as in autobiographical work, has historically been a
transgressive act for women; since autobiography necessarily involves
confession, to some extent, drawing on both public and private spheres,
a woman who wrote ‘I’ often did so with difficulty.10 Other female
authors could certainly be labelled transgressive, if we understand the
term to be predicated upon defying the norms of accepted representation
and subverting established power relations; Hélène Cixous in her gender
play, Violette Leduc in her writing on female homosexuality, George
Sand in her treatment of female subjectivity, Simone de Beauvoir in
her representation of women’s lived experience, Marguerite Duras in
her sexual content and generic experimentation, for example. Yet what
is discernible now is a particular form of transgression in women’s
6. Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, L’Usage de la photo (Paris: Gallimard, 2005).
7. Catherine Cusset, Jouir (Paris: Gallimard, 1999).
8. Marie Nimier, La Nouvelle Pornographie (Paris: Gallimard, 2000).
9. Claire Legendre, Viande (Paris: Grasset, 1999).
10.Many female authors of life writing prior to the twentieth century did so through
personal diaries or letters. Those who wrote autobiographies often included prefaces
in which they explained their desire to publish their stories for the specific benefit of
their children, rather than for that of the general public. For more on the history of
women’s autobiography, see the introduction to Natalie Edwards, Shifting Subjects:
Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (Newark,
DE and London: University of Delaware Press, 2011).
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
11
writing and filmmaking that insists upon pushing the boundaries
of representation of sex, desire, sexual pleasure and sexual violence
on the level of content, and upon narrative strategies that destabilize
multiple literary genres on the level of form. This transgression, in
form and content, asks probing questions about feminism, femininity
and the representation of women’s lived experience in France today.
This trend also heralds a new, populist stream in French feminism, a
field that has traditionally been reserved for the academic arena and that
has had limited resonance in France itself. To what extent can female
sexuality in all of its myriad variations be inscribed in narrative in the
twenty-first century? Where are the boundaries of propriety for female
confession in contemporary society? How do these texts comment upon
the consequences of first- and second-wave feminism, and in which
direction do they take feminist thought?
In this article, I take as a case study one of the most provocative of
these women writers and filmmakers in France today. Virginie Despentes
has become notorious for her shocking work, beginning with the novel
Baise-moi in 1993.11 The movie that was made of this novel was the
first film to be banned in France for twenty-eight years. Born in 1969,
Despentes has published to date six other novels, an essay (King Kong
Théorie), a collection of short stories (Mordre au travers), journalism,
translations and song lyrics.12 Her cinema is perhaps her best-known
work, beginning with her adaptation of her first novel, followed by a
documentary (Mutantes Féminisme Porno Punk) and, most recently,
Bye Bye Blondie, starring Emanuelle Béart. She currently has four
literary prizes to her name: the Prix de Flore and the Prix Saint-Valentin
for Les Jolies Choses and the Prix Trop Virilo and the Prix Renaudot for
Apocalypse bébé.13
The texture of Despentes’s work is very particular, and has earned
her virulent critique as well as enthusiastic support. She plays with the
11.Virginie Despentes, Baise-moi (Paris: Florent-Massot, 1993).
12.Virginie Despentes, King Kong Théorie (Paris: Grasset, 2006), hereafter KKT in the
text. Virginie Despentes, Mordre de travers (Paris: Librio, 1999).
13.Virginie Despentes, Les Jolies Choses (Paris: Grasset, 1998) and Virginie Despentes,
Apocalypse bébé (Paris: Grasset, 2010), hereafter AB in the text.
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notion of trash literature, writing unconventional heroines in brash,
explicit tales in a style that is informed by slang, street language and
obscenity. Her characters, most but not all of whom are female, are
generally working-class women who speak in a variety of voices and
subject positions, often within the same text. The multiplicity of voices
lends a depth to Despentes’s texts, as they refuse a focal protagonist
and represent a broad spectrum of female experience; indeed, Hélène
Sicard-Cowan situates the main force of Despentes’s feminism in her
development of ‘[des] héroïnes qui ne peuvent pas être fusionnées en
un sujet féminin unitaire’.14 Similarly, the content of Despentes’s work
is provocative, incorporating fictional and autobiographical accounts of
pornography, sex work, desire, sexual violence, rape, lesbianism and drug
culture, for example. Part crime fiction, part detective novel, part road
movie, part trash, part romance, part thriller, her texts sit uncomfortably
between genres and refuse any static labels or identifications. In this
article, I firstly analyse the transgressive underpinnings of Despentes’s
theoretical text King Kong Théorie, then concentrate on the transgression
at work in her most recent novel, Apocalypse bébé. If we accept that ‘to
transgress limits is to enter a domain where power and mastery cease
to be primary exigencies’, Despentes’s subversion of patriarchal power,
norms and expectations places her among the most transgressive writers
in France today.15
Theoretical Transgression: ‘King Kong Théorie’
‘J’écris de chez les moches, pour les moches’ begins King Kong
Théorie (KKT 9), in an opening that announces Despentes’s intention
to associate this book with herself, to place herself within a community
of women whom she may represent in some sense, and to write a
loud and forceful ‘I’. This text marks a departure from Despentes’s
14.Hélène Sicard-Cowan, ‘Le Féminisme de Virginie Despentes à l’étude dans le roman
Baise-moi’, Women in French Studies, 17 (2008), 64–72 (p. 64).
15.John Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 15.
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
13
cinematic and fictional work and constitutes an important element of
her unconventional, subversive role in contemporary French literature.
Part autobiography, part theory, this text subverts literary norms due to
its blend of genres, its arguments regarding the female condition and its
shamelessly confessional tone.
Despentes pushes boundaries in this text in the way she conceives
of feminist theory, both in terms of what she writes and how she does
so. The most shocking parts of her theory in King Kong Théorie are the
sections relating to prostitution and pornography but one should not
overlook the main premise of her theorization, which rests upon a very
materialist approach to feminism. Rather than adopt the psychoanalytic
approaches that dominated French feminism of the 1970s, Despentes
theorizes women as a class, and links material status to lived experience.
This is not to say that she dismisses 1970s feminism; instead, she
situates her own story in a specific historical moment, stating that she
was born in 1969 and was able to experience certain things ¾ even
take for granted certain things ¾ due to the progress made by women
before her: opening a bank account, sleeping with a large number of
men without getting pregnant, and knowing where to get an abortion,
for example. She recognizes that, in terms of women’s progress ‘des
horizons se sont déployés, territoires brutalement ouverts, comme s’ils
l’avaient toujours été’ (KKT 11). Yet she insists upon the materialist
approach to women’s experience in France in the twenty-first century,
positing capitalism as the root of oppression, and French governments
as the knowing conspirators. This stance recalls the formulations of
Monique Wittig, who critiqued psychoanalytic approaches to feminism
and gender in essays such as ‘The Straight Mind’ and Le Corps lesbien.
Although Wittig was more interested in language as a means of denoting
the interpolation involved in sexual difference, positing famously that
‘lesbians are not women’ due to the way in which the word ‘woman’ is
constructed, one of her main concerns was how power structures order
sexuality.16 The ‘heterosexual society’ that she theorized ‘oppresses
16.Monique Wittig, ‘The Straight Mind’, Feminist Issues, 1 (1980), 103–11 (p. 110).
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all women and many categories of men, and all those who are in the
position of the dominated’ through its institutions that consciously forbid
identity formulations that are other to a heteronormative patriarchy.17
Despentes tells of her own experience of living in (relative)
poverty and uses her socio-economic situation to propel her argument
regarding prostitution, and herein lie some of the most provocative parts
of her theorizations. She opens this section of the text with a discussion
of the reactions of other women, particularly middle-class women, who
are, she hints, unconsciously complicit in the system: ‘depuis dix ans,
ça m’est souvent arrivé d’être dans un beau salon, en compagnie de
dames qui ont toujours été entretenues via le contrat marital […] et qui
sans l’ombre d’un doute m’expliquent, à moi, que la prostitution est en
soi une chose mauvaise pour les femmes. Elles savent intuitivement
que ce travail-là est plus dégradant qu’un autre’ (KKT 57–58). By
recounting her own experience of sex work, Despentes argues that there
is a pressing need for government and for society at large to rethink the
accepted; not just to introduce measures to protect the safety, or the
health, of prostitutes, but to recognize the place of prostitution in the
economy and to accept that women may choose to make a living from it.
In another rapprochement between women and social class, Despentes
writes of her experience of working in a supermarket at twenty-two,
realizing her limited socio-economic prospects, and slowly making
contact with men in search of prostitutes on Minitel (the French protointernet service). From the perspective of having worked as a prostitute,
and having met several others in this position, she dismantles several
of the taboos associated with prostitution. The prostitutes who figure
on television documentaries, for example, are always the most abused
and lacking in rights, working in the most sordid conditions, and this
rhetoric, she claims, serves to reinforce a binary in which women should
never equate money with sex, and men should understand the violence
of their desire; she writes that this is ‘également une façon de leur
rappeler que leur sexualité est forcément monstrueuse, fait des victimes,
17.Wittig, ‘The Straight Mind’, p. 108.
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
15
détruit des vies. Car la sexualité masculine doit rester criminalisée,
dangereuse, asociale et menaçante’ (KKT 80). What Despentes sees at
work in society is a concerted effort to police desire and sexuality, to
limit women to the home space and to reinforce the marriage contract
that keeps them there. This strategy is ‘une vaste hypocrisie’ (KKT 69),
she claims, since society prevents women from making a decent living,
so many women have chosen sex work to earn money, and, moreover,
female seduction has become such an important part of interactions
between men and women that involve power and money, that ‘de la
séduction à la prostitution la limite est floue’ (KKT 69–70). Crucially,
she links her experience of rape to prostitution in an idea that confronts
many taboos simultaneously; she claims that her experience of rape at
the age of seventeen may have disempowered her, but that by using her
body to make her living, she recovers something of the agency denied
to her by the rapists.
Despentes’s stance on pornography is similarly provocative.
Pornography has been the subject of many debates in feminist theory,
in particular since the Americans Andrea Dworkin and Catherine
MacKinnon aimed to introduce legislation to censor certain types of
pornography, only to be opposed by feminists who were troubled by
placing restrictions on desire and sexuality.18 Pornography arouses such
hatred and discomfort, Despentes argues, precisely because of its ability
to destabilize one’s (repressed) understanding of oneself: ‘le problème
que pose le porno, c’est d’abord qu’il tape dans l’angle mort de la raison.
Il s’adresse directement aux centres des fantasmes, sans passer par la
parole, ni par la réflexion. D’abord on bande ou on mouille, ensuite
on peut demander pourquoi’ (KKT 91). Yet Despentes goes further in
her critique of contemporary discourse surrounding pornography by
linking this to power. She again talks about her own experience of
working in the pornography industry, so links the theoretical with the
18.For more on the ordinances that Dworkin and MacKinnon fought to enact in several
cities in the United States, and which were later deemed to be unconstitutional, see
Drucilla Cornell’s thorough discussion in Feminism and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000).
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autobiographical, and argues that the industry is censored to keep it
under control, to enable middle class sexual repression and to prevent
the disadvantaged from making a decent living out of it. Writing of
the censorship of pornographic films, she believes that ‘il est crucial
pour la politique d’enfermer la représentation visuelle du sexe dans
des ghettos délimités, clairement séparé du reste de l’industrie afin de
cantonner le X dans un Lumpen Proletariat du spectacle’ (KKT 97). For
Despentes, sexuality is subject to control by government in a wilfully
undemocratic way that guarantees a class structure based upon the
power of the privileged and the lack of choice of the impoverished.
Throughout this text, the author displays a concerted effort to rethink
power and its effects on people’s ¾ and particularly on women’s ¾
lives. Since Despentes is now a well-known writer in France, whose
work is published by Grasset and whose books are guaranteed to sell,
the fact that she writes theoretically of such provocative notions is
surely a potentially transgressive move.
Her feminist theory, therefore, makes a break with much of what
has come before in terms of its content; she does not align herself with
any of the prominent strands of French feminism from the 1970s, nor
with any of the groups that have followed since. Firmly materialist in
her stance, she does not go near the psychoanalytic feminism for which
France is so famous abroad and uses a populist vocabulary of class
struggle to take feminist theory out of the academy. French feminism,
particularly its psychoanalytic strands, has been criticized for its
essentialism and its elitism, and Despentes’s thinking is fervently antiessentialist and anti-elitist. Furthermore, her style of writing fosters
such an approach. She refuses academic style and peppers her text with
expletives, slang and trash talk. Yet she cites a number of contemporary
thinkers, many of whom are American, in a way that substantiates and
legitimizes her arguments.19 The autobiographical sections, thrust in
19.Despentes’s bibliography numbers fifty-two entries, and includes French thinkers such
as Simone de Beauvoir, Michèle Le Dœuff and Monique Wittig, and US-based scholars
such as Teresa de Lauretis, Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell (KKT 147–51). Michèle
Schaal argues that Despentes’s feminism is closer to American third-wave feminist
theory ‘thematically and aesthetically’ than to French feminist theory. Michèle A.
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
17
the reader’s face from the very first line, add a confessional aspect to
the book that at once emphasizes the proximity of its arguments to lived
experience, yet also makes it so intimate that it is at times disturbing.
This text is ‘theory’ that makes the reader uncomfortable, due to its
personal content and the extent of its confession. Despentes writes of
her mental problems and institutionalization (KKT 32), for example,
and admits how she struggled to write her experiences as a prostitute
(KKT 49). The ideas presented in King Kong Théorie may not always
be coherent or well-reasoned, but the tenets of her theory and the
way in which she presents them demonstrate a much-needed voice of
protest. Despentes’s transgressive ‘I’ cuts across the expectations of
autobiography and of feminist theory, and is testament to how far the
field of women’s life-writing has developed. Furthermore, it shows how
feminist thought is still present and required in contemporary France,
and reflects how overdue a provocative, materialist, non-academic
discussion of the female condition really is.
Fictional Transgression: ‘Apocalypse bébé’
The feminist transgression that is evident in King Kong Théorie
is foregrounded in Despentes’s most recent novel, Apocalypse bébé.
In this text, the author presents us with a low-paid, mundane, female
detective who is in search of the mysterious disappeared teenager
Valentine. Lucie’s search takes her from the underworld of Paris to
similar parts of Barcelona, in the company of her unlikely companion
La Hyène. Along the way, the pair come into contact with a variety of
female characters who are the main motors of the plot, and the reader
follows the development of Lucie from an uninteresting, ordinary, selfeffacing woman into something quite different. In this section I focus
first upon the way in which this text opens up new possibilities for
female subjectivity, imagining characters that provide different forms
Schaal, ‘Virginie Despentes or a French Third Wave of Feminism’, in Cherchez la
femme: Women and Values in the Francophone World, ed. by Adrienne Angelo and
Erika Fülöp (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2011), pp. 39–55 (p. 39).
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of understanding of women’s lived experience in contemporary France.
I then analyse the twin themes of female violence and female sexuality
and the transgression with which both are inscribed in this novel.
One of the most striking elements of Apocalypse bébé is how many
of its characters are female. The text presents the reader with an array
of characters who each lead Lucie and La Hyène’s search in a different
direction. Valentine’s father François is one of the few male characters
to whom a chapter is devoted, but he is styled as a dull, feeble, insecure,
middle-aged writer who has little bearing on the women around him
and no bearing on the plot of the novel. Yacine, Valentine’s cousin with
whom she has explicit sexual relations, is similarly accorded a short
chapter but its main content is how La Hyène dominates this strongwilled, fierce, knife-wielding man into giving her the information she
wants. The twin investigators come into contact with a succession of
female characters: Antonella, a former journalist who parades around
the city in pink boots extracting information from men who find her
sexually irresistible; Claire, who is conventionally middle-class and
desperately unhappy; Vanessa, who changes her name to hide her North
African origins and who abandons her child and family to pursue her
dreams of sexual and financial fulfilment, and a nun, who is one of the
main organizers of an international crime ring.
Several of these female characters stand out as particularly
challenging to societal ¾ and both literary and feminist ¾ norms. The
text opens with a female narrator who writes in the first person of her
current situation, as a woman of about forty who is single, plain and
employed but not professionally successful. Lucie’s role as a private
detective in a firm is hardly a glamorous one; she earns little more than
she did ten years previously, is treated poorly by her colleagues ¾ even
the secretary ¾ and is given mundane, uninteresting tasks like tracking
disobedient teenagers. Her personal life is lonely and unfulfilling, and
her comments reveal chronically low self-esteem. Rather than paint a
portrait of a capable heroine, Despentes insists upon the mediocrity of
her protagonist; in terms of her socio-economic status, her professional
situation, her appearance, her education and her personal life, Lucie
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
19
has had few opportunities, and does not possess the personal skills, the
imagination or the self-belief to alter her life. She has understood her
mediocrity and has become comfortable with being ignored; she claims
tellingly that ‘j’ai l’habitude de provoquer chez les gens une légère
répulsion, je crois que ça tient à ce que je suis tellement mal à l’aise qu’ils
préfèrent, si c’est possible, éviter de se confronter à moi’ (AB 61). She
is one of the forgotten majority, the women who are overlooked by the
system, and who are doubly oppressed by their class and their gender.
Lucie’s inexperience and lack of self confidence in her task of
finding Valentine lead her to enlist the help of La Hyène, the first of a
series of female characters who defy stereotypes of femininity. Feline
and ferocious, as her name suggests, this woman is Lucie’s antithesis
as she is brash, violent, aggressive and lesbian but, predictably perhaps,
she becomes Lucie’s mentor in some respects as the two embark upon
the road trip to Barcelona. La Hyène inhabits the margins of society,
since she lives a clandestine life financed by her work as an aggressor
who threatens men to force them into paying their debts and/or giving
over information. In an unsubtle rebuff of stereotypical femininity, she
does the job better than does her male counterpart, who is shown to have
too many feelings for the harshness of the job. As Lucie and La Hyène
begin their work together, La Hyène shows herself to be immediately
more competent due to her lack of trust in other people. She openly
mocks Lucie for her lack of understanding of detective work, and for
her uptight attitudes; when she whistles and calls to young women on
the street and Lucie frostily voices her discomfort, La Hyène comments:
‘putain, ça doit pas être facile, d’être toi’ (AB 60). Yet La Hyène is not
devoid of feelings, and the two women share moments of tenderness
and understanding despite their seemingly incompatible backgrounds.
La Hyène lives beyond society, but has found a way of circumventing
it to ensure her own survival, and the comparison between these two
main characters ¾ thrown together by circumstance into a Thelma and
Louise relationship that is not based upon friendship but on need on
Lucie’s part, and curiosity on La Hyène’s ¾ is that La Hyène is the
happier, more self-assured of the two.
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One of the most interesting aspects of this text is how the
narrative point of view changes in each chapter, revealing the backstory
of several characters who are associated with the search for Valentine.
Lucie narrates the first and final chapters, and several in between, but
other characters’ stories are narrated by an omniscient third-person
narrator in chapters devoted to each of them in turn. In each of these
chapters, we read the point-of-view narration of these characters in
free indirect style, allowing access to the perspective of each one on
their lives, their relationships, their backgrounds and their relationship
with Valentine. They all live in the underworld, in the margins, or in
the forgotten sectors of society; even middle-class Claire is neglected
by her husband, ignored by her parents and patronized by her motherin-law. Their lives are hard, and the main thing that they have in
common is that they are overlooked or downtrodden by society. But,
these (nearly all female) characters forge their own ways of survival,
using their bodies, their ability to change their image, their desire, or
their adoption of unconventional feminine traits in order to propel
themselves forward. These characters are not simply unconventional;
they offer a transgressive portrait of an alternative sector of society that
is not represented within mainstream literary culture.
The connected themes of female violence and female sexuality
provide the transgressive thematic content of these characters’ stories.
Female sexuality is represented through the lens of homosexual,
heterosexual and bisexual relationships, and Despentes writes about
these in a way that challenges the complacency of women in matters of
sex and desire. Her female characters experience desire, and they find
ways to express this desire and achieve sexual satisfaction in a variety of
relationships, thus rejecting any approach to sexuality that concentrates
upon male satisfaction and male domination. Moreover, some of these
relationships are formed in the underworld areas of cities, and others
in middle-class homes with characters who proclaim themselves to be
normal. Valentine’s stepmother Claire, for example, has two daughters
from her first marriage, during which she forced herself to be the perfect
wife and mother: devout, submissive and loyal, writing lists of tasks to
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
21
perform to ensure her perfection and her role among ‘les femmes normales,
comme elle’ (AB 90). Claire enjoyed sex with her husband, but what she
enjoyed was the intimacy rather than the pleasure and she thought that
this was what she should expect. Yet with François, Valentine’s father,
she discovers the world of sado-masochism and is amazed by reaching
orgasm for the first time. Valentine herself is similarly experimental with
her heterosexual desire. Although only fifteen years old, she has had a
variety of sexual experiences. Lucie has taken photographs of her in sexual
situations, such as performing oral sex on a man in a park, and Yacine in
his point-of-view narration recounts their violent sexual encounters and
Valentine’s knowledge of positions from pornographic films. Valentine
in her point-of-view narration in the penultimate chapter of the novel
confesses how she talks to men during intercourse to encourage their
pleasure, and she shows a short story about sado-masochistic sex to
Claire. This text thus presents female heterosexual desire as challenging
and complex, and women in heterosexual couples as just as desiring
as their male counterparts, even if these relationships themselves are
always shown to be ultimately unsuccessful. Thus Despentes is intent on
portraying heterosexuality not as a norm against which other sexualities
should be defined, but as a spectrum of identities, desires and behaviours
that range from the normative to the transgressive. Since Anne Koedt
outlined the ‘myth of the vaginal orgasm’ in 1968, positing that locating
the vagina as the site of female sexual pleasure is anatomically incorrect
and a way of securing male pleasure exclusively, heterosexuality as a
simple, monolithic practice has been questioned by researchers across
disciplines.20 Sociologist and theorist of sexuality Sue Scott argues that
heterosexuality (like homosexuality, lesbianism and bisexuality) does not
correspond to any single form and Judith Butler, for example, writes that
‘permutations of gender which do not fit the binary are as much a part of
gender as its most normative instance’.21 Despentes’s representation of
20.Anne Koedt, ‘The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm’, in Notes from the First Year, ed. by
The New York Radical Women (New York: The New York Radical Women, 1968),
p. 11.
21.Sue Scott, Theorising Sexuality (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2010) and Judith
Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 42.
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heterosexuality thus refuses any normative, and now outdated, approach
to heterosexuality and to female pleasure within this configuration.
Other forms of female sexuality besides heterosexuality are also
depicted in Apocalypse bébé. La Hyène’s homosexuality is evident to
Lucie from their first encounter, and La Hyène is overt and assertive
about her desire. She claims: ‘j’aime bien les filles. J’aime trop les filles.
Je préfère les gouines, évidemment, mais j’aime bien toutes les filles’
(AB 59). This character is never represented as being ashamed in any
way of her sexuality, and is assertive in her quest for sexual partners.
When Lucie and La Hyène arrive in Barcelona, they stay with some
French friends of La Hyène, and Lucie is surprised to awake from a
siesta on the first evening to find an orgy taking place in her host’s living
room. The innocent Lucie first believes she is hallucinating as she sees
‘un amas de corps nus’ (AB 159). Two men are involved, one looking on
as the other’s body appears to be wounded by Zoska, whom we see in
sexual situations with both men and women. All other participants are
female, however, and the text contains graphic accounts of their sexual
acts. One woman holds another’s face to the floor, for example, and
‘toute sa main et une partie de l’avant-bras ont disparu dans le ventre de
l’autre’ (AB 159). Others are hitting or slapping each other, and Lucie
notes that most participants, including La Hyène, are wearing latex
gloves. Despentes has previously written of female bodily fluid,22 and
continues to do so here; saliva flows from one woman’s mouth onto the
face of another, and another screams in pleasure as ‘de sa chatte rasée
jaillissent de longs jets de liquide transparent, qui ne ressemble pas à
l’urine’ (AB 159). Again, given Despentes’s name and notoriety, this
representation of female sexuality is not to be found in a ‘gay literature’
shelf in a bookshop, but brings homosexual erotica into the mainstream,
with the backing of a major Parisian publishing house and coverage in
the most high-brow newspapers and journals in the country.
The lesbian desire that is recounted continually throughout the
text is a subject of growing fascination to Lucie, and the reader follows
22.In Baise-moi, for example, Despentes writes detailed descriptions of vomit and blood
and devotes a whole chapter to menstrual blood in particular (pp. 152–54).
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
23
her through her discovery of her own sexuality. As she approaches
middle age, Lucie’s journey to Barcelona and the female characters
she meets there lead to a curiosity that culminates in a homosexual
relationship with Zoska. In addition to showing that all women have
fantasy, sexuality and desire, and that many social factors contribute
to the repression of these, the relationship between Lucie and Zoska is
the most successful of all relationships portrayed in the novel. The two
women form a bond beyond their desire, and in the final chapter of the
text, they are to be found in the Spanish countryside, living in exile in a
loving, faithful idyll. In this sense, the road trip in pursuit of an elusive
teenager has become a Bildungsroman for Lucie, but not one that works
according to the motif of a young, male protagonist moving from the
provinces to the urban centre and undergoing experiences that solidify
his growing character. Instead, middle-aged Lucie is brought into
circumstances that force her to unlearn what she has previously learned
about intimacy, desire and sentiment, and lead her to reject modes of
identity upon which she has previously rested. Her life is strained due
to the fact that she lives clandestinely after Valentine commits a terrorist
attack in which Lucie is suspected of complicity, but she is reconciled
with her story and declares that Zoska is ‘la meilleure amante, pote,
frangine et complice qu’on puisse imaginer. Je n’ai parlé qu’avec elle
pendant des mois. […] Sa compagnie me suffit’ (AB 342).
Closely linked to the transgressive representation of female
sexuality is Despentes’s rendering of female violence, and these two
themes are linked specifically through the character of La Hyène. In the
chapter devoted to La Hyène, the narration takes the reader back to this
character’s adolescence, as she grew up in an average family and learned
to repel attitudes about her homosexuality. In particular, we read of how
she performed her first murder (the reader presumes that there have
been others) while still at school. The victim was an older man who
was physically abusing his wife and daughter, La Hyène’s love interest
at the time. The battering and bruising of Loraine and her mother are
recounted in detail, and La Hyène, whom we never hear referred to by
any other name, aims to confront the father and talk to him, but hits him
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with a bag containing a glass bottle and kills him. Her only emotion
afterwards is not remorse but fear of being caught, and particularly fear
of Loraine finding out that she performed the act. La Hyène is therefore
a self-styled defender of women’s rights from an early age, and is not
afraid to use violence and force in her pursuits. We see her continually
threatening people physically, including several men. She throws a
male member of the interestingly-named popular music band ‘Panique
Dans Ton Cul’ to the floor, straddles him and yells: ‘Tu doutes encore
cinq minutes et je t’ouvre l’anus avec mon poing. Tu sais que je vais te
faire super mal quand je vais te fister jusqu’au coude?’ (AB 121) Lucie
cries after having witnessed La Hyène’s violence and La Hyène, in a
very tender moment between the two characters, embraces Lucie and
says: ‘Écoute, Lucie, j’y peux rien; c’est comme ça qu’on fait parler
les gens. Sinon, ils t’envoient chier, direct. Y a rien qui marche comme
la violence, pour bien communiquer’ (AB 128). These moments of
sensitivity, accompanied by the story of her background narrated in the
chapter devoted to her, create sympathy towards her on the part of the
reader. Despite her violence, her underworld connections, her position
on the margins of society and her murderous criminality, she is one of
the ‘good guys’ in terms of crime fiction. La Hyène stands up for what
she believes is right, as we see in particular with her encounter with
Valentine, who introduces the most salient example of female violence
in the text.23
In the penultimate chapter of the novel, Valentine’s story is finally
recounted, and the reader learns of how she knew Lucie was following
her and evaded her in order to find her mother. She is an obviously
vulnerable target, friendless and abandoned by her mother in Barcelona,
and is soon recruited by a nun, Sœur Elisabeth. The nun offers kindness
and understanding but, as the reader learns in the final pages, persuades
23.It should be noted, however, that there are significantly fewer incidents of violence
in this text compared to the rest of Despentes’s corpus. Shirley Jordan has written
at length on the violence evident in her other novels, showing how they ‘expand the
repertoire of violence in women’s writing [and] show sickening violence perpetrated
by women’. Shirley Ann Jordan, Contemporary French Women’s Writing: Women’s
Visions, Women’s Voices, Women’s Lives (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2004), p. 125.
FEMINIST MANIFESTO OR HARDCORE PORN?
25
Valentine to commit an act of terrorism. Not even nuns are spared
Despentes’s ire; La Hyène compares Elisabeth to Mother Theresa thus:
‘[Elle] n’a peut-être pas la stature de Mère Teresa, mais c’est le même
genre de croyante. À gros compte en banque, mais qui trouve la misère
seyante seulement chez les autres’ (AB 316). La Hyène understands that
Valentine has been manipulated and challenges Sœur Elisabeth directly.
She then turns to Valentine during the journey back to Paris, explaining
to her that Elisabeth ‘fait le même taf que moi’ (AB 316); she claims
that Elisabeth is using Valentine for money, and that women like her are
‘des belles salopes, dociles, sélectionnées parce qu’on sait bien entuber
les gens’ (AB 316). La Hyène states: ‘j’ai jamais eu d’éthique, je n’ai
aucune passion pour le bien. Je ne sais pas si c’est l’âge, l’usure ou ta
gueule d’ange… Mais je ne peux pas te laisser rentrer chez toi sans
rien dire’ (AB 315). La Hyène is the closest thing to a heroine in this
text, and this underworld, marginalized female solicits disgust but also
sympathy, humour and understanding from the reader.
Yet La Hyène fails in making Valentine confess the plan that Sœur
Elisabeth has persuaded her to carry out. Valentine films herself inserting
a bomb into her vagina, which she posts on YouTube. She then goes to
the Palais Royal where her father is being awarded a literary prize, and
blows herself up. This young, female suicide bomber destroys the Palais
and kills dozens of people. She says on the YouTube clip, ‘je veux le
faire juste pour le fun’ (AB 328). This is a very rich image that could be
interpreted in a number of ways. Despentes’s emphasis on youth culture
and youth rebellion are clear, and this is emphasized through the use of
technology; although she has previously renounced mobile phones and
deleted her Facebook page, Valentine uses an iPhone to upload her film
onto YouTube. What she is protesting against is not clear, but it is a very
female protest: instigated by a nun, carried out by a female and through
a bomb inserted into the vagina. The terrorist attack could be interpreted
as a response to rape, since Valentine, as the band member of ‘Panique
Dans Ton Cul’ eventually admits, was gang-raped by the members of
the group. By using her vagina for a different purpose, she in effect
returns her autonomy and her independence to her body, and uses what
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can be penetrated forcibly by another for her own alternative ends: a
testament, perhaps, to how females may use their bodies as a source
of power, and of destructive power at that. Although Valentine’s act of
terrorism originates in Sœur Elisabeth’s manipulation of her, Valentine
is presented as having a choice; she may have been influenced by the
nun, yet she acts independently and autonomously on the day of the
tragedy, thus restoring agency to herself and to her female body.
Taken together, these two texts, bridging theory, autobiography
and several genres of fiction, constitute a refusal of established forms
of female subjectivity, of desire, of socio-economic stratification, of
censorship, of anti-homosexual prejudice, of academic style, of literary
language and of theoretical argumentation. Despentes’s work may
be viewed as an onslaught against the establishment, and most of all
because of its sustained critique of power. Despentes continually points
up, through her theoretical argument and her fictional text, the abuses of
power wielded by the middle classes and by the agents of government
upon the individual, and particularly upon the socially disadvantaged
female. Her work thus goes beyond a subversion of stereotypes, or a
defiance of convention or a refusal to conform. Instead, it constitutes
an act of transgression due to the ways in which it explicitly challenges
the workings of power and authority in contemporary society. Although
Apocalypse bébé ends in destruction, this text, especially read in
conjunction with King Kong Théorie, maps out new forms of social
relations and identity formations that tend toward utopia.
The University of Adelaide