Virginie Despentes (born 13 June 1969) is a French writer, novelist, and filmmaker. She is known for her work exploring gender, sexuality, and people who live in poverty or other marginalised conditions.

Work

Despentes' work is an inventory of youth marginalization; it pertains to the sexual revolution lived by Generation X and to the acclimation of pornography in public spaces through new communication techniques. With a transgressive exploration of obscenity's limits, as a novelist or a film-maker she proposes social critique and an antidote to the new moral order. Her characters deal with misery and injustice, self-violence such as drug addiction, or violence towards others such as rape or terrorism, violence she has also suffered from. She is one of the most popular French authors from this era. Her book King Kong Theory is sometimes taught in gender studies and "often passed down to millennial women as a recommendation from a cool, not-that-much-older mentor." For years after the release of her 1993 novel Rape Me, she was depicted by French literary institutions as an outsider or "enfant terrible", and drew criticism from both the political left and right. Later works such as Apocalypse Bébé (2010) and the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015–17) received many positive reviews.

Life and career

Virginie Despentes was born as Virginie Daget in 1969. She grew up in Nancy, France, in a working-class family. Her parents were postal workers. At age 15, she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital against her will by her parents. She later noted, "I’m sure now that I would never have been locked up if I had been born a boy. The antics that caused me to end up in a psych ward were not that feral." When she was age 17, Despentes left her home and abandoned her schooling. As a teenager, she was a hitchhiker and followed rock bands. While hitchhiking with a friend at age 17, Despentes was threatened by three young men with a rifle and then gang-raped. She had a switchblade in her pocket, but she was too scared to use it. Despentes settled in Lyon, where she worked as a maid, a prostitute in "massage parlors" and peep shows, a sales clerk in a record store, a freelance rock journalist, and a pornographic film critic. In 1994, her first book Baise-moi was published. The book focuses on two female sex workers who go on a killing spree after one of them is gang-raped. For the book, she had taken the pen name Despentes, which was inspired by La Croix-Rousse, her old neighbourhood in Lyon. The neighbourhood was hilly; "pente" is French for hill. (Des pentes means 'from the hills') She had chosen the pen name so that her family could have some distance from the book. Despentes moved to Paris. In 2000, she directed the film Baise-moi, an adaptation of her own novel, co-directed with former pornographic actress Coralie Trinh Thi. It starred Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla Anderson. Baise-moi is a contemporary example of a rape and revenge film, an exploitation films genre. After the release of the 1993 novel and the film adaptation, she became highly controversial. When discussing her life and work, Despentes explained,"I became a prostitute and walked the streets in low-cut tops and high-heeled shoes owing no one an explanation, and I kept and spent every penny I earned. I hitchhiked, I was raped, I hitchhiked again. I wrote a first novel and published it under my own, clearly female first name, not imagining for a second that when it came out I’d be continually lectured to about all the boundaries that should never be crossed...I wanted to live like a man, so I lived like a man."Her novel Les Jolies Choses was adapted for the screen in 2001 by Gilles Paquet-Brenner, with Marion Cotillard and Stomy Bugsy in the lead roles. The film was awarded the Michel d'Ornano prize at the 2001 Deauville American Film Festival. From 2004 to 2005, she wrote a blog that documented her daily life. Around this time she began identifying as a lesbian and started to date Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado before he transitioned to male. In 2005, she wrote three songs for the album Va Chercher la Police for the group A.S. Dragon. In 2006, she published the non-fiction work King Kong Theory. It recounts her experiences in the French sex industry as well as the infamy and praise she experienced for writing Baise-Moi. In 2009 she directed the documentary Mutantes (Féminisme Porno Punk), broadcast on TV Pink. In 2010, her novel Apocalypse bébé was awarded the Renaudot prize. Bye Bye Blondie was adapted for film with Béatrice Dalle and Emmanuelle Béart. Cecilia Backes and Salima Boutebal produced a stage adaptation of King Kong Theory during the "Outside" Festival d'Avignon. In 2011, her commentary on Dominique Strauss-Kahn appeared in The Guardian. The English translation of her novel Vernon Subutex 1 was shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. On 18 August 2023, she was a guest celebrity judge in the episode of the Season 2 titled Showtime! of the French language reality television series Drag Race France broadcast on France.tv Slash.

Reception

In 2018, Lauren Elkin discussed her early dislike of Despentes and other writers such as Kathy Acker, writing about Rape Me: "There was an anger and a sarcasm in the writing that I turned away from. I felt too much empathy for [Séverine] to mock her. Despentes seemed content to judge Séverine superficially, and it felt to me like a betrayal of the novelist’s task to render some human truth on the page. [...] The book reads as if Despentes had a personal score to settle with some phantom woman offstage. [...] It felt to me like Acker and Despentes were jutting out their chins trying to prove they could produce work that was as ugly and aggressive as a man’s". She noted that critics also "derided Despentes for lacking a 'literary style'". Elkin highly praised the later Despentes books Pretty Things, King Kong Theory, and Vernon Subutex, saying that Pretty Things "wickedly refutes the stereotype of the chic French girl and exposes the sham at the heart of femininity. And it shows our complicity, male and female, individual and corporate, in keeping the sham of femininity alive." Pretty Things was also praised by multiple critics after Emma Ramadan's translation. Anthony Cummins, reviewing Vernon Subutex 3, wrote that "the novel’s real energy, somewhere between contrarian op-ed and off-colour standup, lies in how Despentes stays out of the picture to let the story unfold through the thoughts of its large, 20-plus cast...it’s a dark story of how violence can be turned to entertainment for the sake of profit. It can be exhausting, but it’s also invigorating, and there isn’t really anything else like it right now."

Awards and distinctions

Despentes won the 1998 Prix de Flore, the 1999 Prix Saint-Valentin for Les Jolies Choses and the 2010 Prix Renaudot for Apocalypse Bébé. She was named a member of the Académie Goncourt on 5 January 2016. Despentes resigned from this position on 5 January 2020 in order to dedicate more time to writing. In 2018, Despentes was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize, for Vernon Subutex 1, translated into English by Frank Wynne.

Novels

Stories