Grrrl Writing

I wish to thank my family for their unconditional support, and especially my husband, Jean-Philippe Tessonnier, and our child, Camille.

I am eternally grateful to a network of colleagues and friends, particularly from the organization Women in French, who provided suggestions for resources and assisted me in various ways: Christine Bard, Andra Castle, Dawn Cornelio, Wendy Delorme, Ilana Eloit, Diana Holmes, Marijn Kaplan, Audrey Lasserre, Erin M., Karen Offen, Valérie Rauzier, Annabelle Rea, Colette Trout, Rebecca Wilkin, and Leah Wilson.

My gratitude also goes to Emmanuel Bertomeu and Marie Kirschen, who shared hard-to-find material on Virginie Despentes with me. I am equally grateful to the Iowa State University Parks Library staff for accommodating all my interlibrary loans.

I wish to thank Brill and the Rocky Mountain Review for allowing me to use previously published scholarship that I adapted and/or translated to fit within the scope of this monograph. I am also grateful to the Feminist Press, Grasset, and Grove Press for granting me the rights to use citations from Despentes’s fiction in French and translation.

Finally, I am forever indebted to Prof. Gill Rye for offering to contribute this monograph to the Studies in Contemporary Women’s Writing series she has established at Peter Lang. I also wish to thank the current collection editors, Adalgisa Giorgio and Kathryn Robson, the two blind reviewers for their work and thoughtful suggestions, and my editor, Laurel Plapp, for her support, patience, and grace.

This book was made possible thanks to funds from the Iowa State University Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities.

As a scholar, I have been invited to participate in master’s and doctoral committees whose disciplines rely on qualitative or quantitative research methods. As is required, established scholars and students in these fields provide a “reflexivity and positionality” statement, where they disclose not only their personal and professional identities, but also their motivations and potential biases. While it is uncommon in literary studies, I nonetheless find that a similar statement would benefit our field, especially when a privileged person chooses to engage with marginalized perspectives or cultures that have been appropriated, whether through colonization or capitalism.

By this, I do not mean that one cannot or should not work on literature or art from cultures and communities to which one does not belong. Without idealizing art, as it can, sadly, also be the vector of oppression, I firmly believe that it remains a powerful tool to open doors and build bridges. Providing a “reflexivity and positionality” statement means understanding our own motivations and purposes as researchers to, hopefully, not perpetuate appropriation but instead establish alliances.

While self-identifying as a lesbian and of a working-class background, Virginie Despentes can no longer be fully considered a marginal author, since she is now canonized, at least to a certain degree. Nevertheless, she continues to draw criticism due to her perceived gender-based identity, her atypical background, and her confrontational writing style. She thus remains Othered in many ways. Additionally, in this monograph, I use terminology and concepts (heteropatriarchy, genderbending, and punk) initially developed by marginalized communities and/or sub- and countercultures to which I do not belong. In my career, and through my work on Despentes specifically, I have come across writing, performance pieces, scholarship, and other cultural items from, on, and by marginalized communities such as sex-positive and BIWOC (Black, Indigenous, Women of Color) feminisms, disability studies, LGBTIQAP+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual, Pansexual) perspectives, and critical race theory. All have challenged me in many positive ways and have made me realize and address covert biases that I did not know I harbored in me.

For this, I am deeply thankful.

As a privileged, white, straight, cisgender, able-bodied, middle-class, college-educated, Western woman, I hope that my scholarship on Despentes and my use of the concepts of heteropatriarchy, genderbending, and punk have been and remain, as Audre Lorde exhorts us (68), acts of alliance and not of appropriation.

In December 1995, on the Canal+ show Nulle part ailleurs [Nowhere Else],1 French mainstream audiences witnessed a young woman author’s first primetime interview for her debut novel, provocatively titled Baise-moi [Fuck Me] (1994).2 She had messy hair, was barely made-up, and was shy and obviously uncomfortable. She bit her fingernails and only provided short answers to questions. Virginie Despentes looked unlike any other literary guest at that time, and no one could have imagined that, thirty years later, she would be hailed as one of France’s greatest authors. Yet this interview marked the beginning of her long, rocky journey to acknowledgment by the French public and literary establishment. Her iconoclastic persona and authorial politics would eventually transition from experiencing visceral rejection to garnering dithyrambic praises. Nevertheless, although Despentes has become a major French and international literary, LGBTIQAP+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Queer/Questioning, Asexual, Pansexual), and feminist figure, no academic study has considered her fiction comprehensively.

Grrrl Writing: Virginie Despentes’s Authorial Politics is the first-ever holistic approach to Despentes’s evolution as an author and her eight novels to date. This monograph demonstrates how, from her first novel, Baise-moi, to her latest, Cher connard [Dear Dickhead, 2022], she has developed and refined a unique genre- and genderbending aesthetic informed by punk, queer, and feminist politics, yet also by various literary traditions such as crime fiction and fairy tales. Despentes’s Grrrl writing is also highly political since, in addition to questioning what makes gender-based identities, she provides her audience with an acerbic critique of contemporary French society and the mechanics of social oppression. In Grrrl Writing, I demonstrate that, for three decades, Despentes has addressed how an overall brutal heteropatriarchal system engenders, perpetuates, and thrives on injustice and social inequities, such as sexism, racism, classism, ageism, LGBTIQAP+-phobia, and financial vulnerability. Furthermore, since much of Despentes’s fiction proves self-reflexive, she also examines the tacit rules at stake in literary genres, especially formulaic ones. If authors uncritically embrace conventions instead of carefully pondering them as Despentes does, literature, too, can become an accomplice to oppressive systems.

Readers may be surprised that I chose not to provide a chapter on Despentes’s seminal feminist non-fiction King Kong théorie (2006). Although her essay partakes in her Grrrl authorial politics, her novels best illustrate Despentes’s growth as a writer of fiction. The novel format also allows for greater flexibility when playing with various literary genres. This is not to say that non-fiction and the other artistic media Despentes has experimented with do not. They do so differently, and one must consider their specificities when studying them. Additionally, for commentators and scholars, King Kong théorie remains an essentially elusive narrative as far as genre is concerned (Schaal “Affirmation” 73–75). Despentes’s non-fiction and other artistic productions would thus deserve a monograph of their own. Readers should also note that this book is the first of two planned volumes. This first volume of Grrrl Writing covers Despentes’s fiction in the 1990s, and the second one will tackle her novels published in the 2000s and beyond.

Before delving, in this volume, into Despentes’s first three novels and how they articulate her Grrrl authorial politics, it is necessary to contextualize her work (including King Kong théorie and her other artistic endeavors) and reception. Chapter 1 provides Despentes’s biography and charts her evolution as an author from Baise-moi to Cher connard. While authors can never be reduced to their lived experiences, those experiences nonetheless influence and even shape artists’ politics and standpoints. Despentes underwent several formative events in her childhood and adolescence that informed her career and her Grrrl writing. Additionally, while I approach her evolution as an artist chronologically, I acknowledge how the different stages in her career overlap. Chapter 1, in fact, highlights paradoxes at stake in her literary reception and persona that critics and scholars have generally overlooked. Chapter 2 offers a brief, interdisciplinary introduction to three concepts at stake in Despentes’s Grrrl writing and my approach to her work: heteropatriarchy, genderbending, and punk.

Subsequent chapters in this first volume of Grrrl Writing are organized chronologically based on the novels’ publication dates. However, each chapter may be read independently. All examine how Despentes claims, overtly and covertly, a specific literary genre or trend to issue her critique of heteropatriarchy. Chapter 3 situates her debut novel, Baise-moi, in the picaresque tradition. Drawing on the genre’s traveling and Bildung topoi, Despentes takes her readers on a journey into heteropatriarchy, providing an unfiltered portrayal of how toxic this system is for marginalized folks like her neopícaras Manu and Nadine. The protagonists experience physical, gender-based, symbolic, and epistemic violence, just as they have internalized their status as expendable Others. As a neopicaresque narrative, Baise-moi concurrently centers the vulnerable, thus challenging her protagonists’ silencing and making readers experience their situation from their standpoint. Despentes also has Manu and Nadine’s sexual and bloody odyssey across France double as a transgressive path to subjectivity and emancipation from heteropatriarchy. When Baise-moi concludes, order appears to be restored, since the neopícaras’ journey ends with their punishment. However, Despentes’s self-reflexivity contradicts this seemingly conservative ending. Manu’s and Nadine’s perspectives in the narrative repeatedly stand for Despentes’s purpose with Baise-moi: her debut novel is an intentional resistance to hegemony.

Chapter 4 explores how Les Chiennes savantes [The Learned Bicthes, 1996] bends the conventions of hardboiled/noir crime fiction to perform a symbolic investigation of heteropatriarchy and how the latter system is the true, unresolved crime committed against women. Despentes centers Louise, a female informal investigator, and L’Orga, a mafia-like women-centric alternative society, to first provide a complex portrayal of women beyond the sexist, misogynist clichés typically conveyed by conventional hardboiled/noir fiction. Despentes’s Grrrl writing next explores heteropatriarchy’s harmful consequences on women through, as in Baise-moi, a raw depiction of endemic gender-based violence, including a gruesome portrayal of rape and an investigation of what it does physically and emotionally to survivors and perpetrators alike. Despentes also explores how heteropatriarchy becomes inescapable and always triumphs over women because everyone internalizes the latter system’s standards. As Louise and all female characters do, women become accomplices to heteropatriarchy by unquestioningly embracing heterosexuality and renouncing solidarity and women-centric relationships.

The fifth and final chapter approaches Les Jolies choses [Pretty Things, 1998] from the legacy of women-authored Bildungsromane. Despentes’s Grrrl writing exposes what it entails to come of age under heteropatriarchy. Education, in its broadest sense, is wielded as a heteropatriarchal technology of gender in childhood and adolescence, ruthlessly training Pauline and Claudine, the twin protagonists, to socialize in the dominant system. That formation prevents them from developing any sense of agency or establishing sisterhood, neither as kinship nor as symbolizing solidarity against adversity. Nevertheless, to impersonate her dead twin, an adult Pauline needs to learn and embody Claudine’s heteropatriarchal, sexualized femininity, thus exposing this expression of gender-based identity as a mandatory performance that reduces women to nothing but pretty things. Such an epiphany enables Pauline to develop empathy for women like her twin and, building on her newfound knowledge, develop a Grrrl agency, or an iconoclastic b(l)ending of norms imposed on and expected from women, to fight heteropatriarchal fire with fire.

Finally, Grrrl Writing also features an extensive—but not exhaustive—bibliography designed to be a resource for academics and readers. This bibliography features, to the best of my knowledge, all of Despentes’s publications and artistic productions, numerous press articles in French, and scholarship on her work in French and in English.