When Virginie Despentes (1969) published her provocative debut novel Baise-moi [Rape Me] in 1994, no one could have anticipated how she would gradually become a literary, feminist, and punk icon. This book is the first to adopt a holistic, interdisciplinary approach to Despentes’s novels and evolution as an author.
Using feminist, queer, literary, and punk theories, the book examines how Despentes has developed and refined her Grrrl writing in Baise-moi, Les Chiennes savantes [The Learned Bitches, 1996], and Les Jolies choses [Pretty Things, 1998]. The study specifically illustrates how her unique authorial politics, infused with punk, genre- and genderbending praxes, have provided an acerbic critique of a still largely heteropatriarchal French society. Despentes’s Grrrl writing denounces how heteropatriarchy engenders and thrives on injustice and social inequities, but also how conventions at play in classic or populist literary genres can perpetuate oppression as well.