From stoned punk to literary rock star: Virginie Despentes, literature with a flamethrower
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Virginie Despentes at Théâtre 140 in Brussels, May 3, 2022. LYNN SK
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Portrait Both trashy and mainstream, punk and nuanced, the author of "Baise-moi," a precursor novel to #MeToo, has become a major figure in French literature, with her unconditional fans and her visceral detractors.
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“Sorry, I’m a little early.” Virginie Despentes enters, Paris at her feet. Dressed, at the end of summer 2022, in pants, a T-shirt, and glasses, all uniformly black. A yellow bag slung over her shoulder. Not “a grande dame Chanel bag,” like the one she had carried, some twenty years earlier, for her first date with Paul B. Preciado , the philosopher who would become one of the great loves of her life. They had met in the same place, in this Montmartre hotel whose terrace overlooks the capital. In “Testo Junkie” (2008), an essay on her gender transition, Preciado recounts: “We fuck at the Terrass’Hotel in the 18th arrondissement […] I feel that all my political history, all my years of feminism, advance directly towards the center of her body to pour there, as if they found on her skin their only, their true beach.”
Since "Baise-moi" in 1994, the stoned punkette of the early days, often scrutinized like a freak show because she stood out so much in the polished literary landscape, has left the margins to occupy a central place. Her essay "King Kong Theory" (2006), in which she evokes the rape she suffered at 17 ( "It is at the same time what disfigures me, and what constitutes me" ), made her the spokesperson for the feminist revival, well before #MeToo. Her trilogy...
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