Feminist Manifesto or Hardcore Porn? Virginie Despentes\'s Trangression

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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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).

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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?

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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