Virginie Despentes’ queer crime fiction

Abstract

Virginie Despentes has become one of France’s most commercially successful and celebrated novelists. However, while the French press has often labelled Despentes’ novels as crime fiction (‘polars’), there has been little in-depth scholarly discussion of how her work engages and transforms the conventions of the genre. Studies of Despentes’ queer/feminist themes and rhetoric would benefit from a more sustained attention to her ambivalent appropriations of the masculinist tropes of brutal crime fiction, and studies of French crime fiction would benefit from considering Despentes as key figure in the development of French queer/feminist crime fiction. Examining novels ranging from Baise-moi to Apocalypse bébé, this article argues for the interest in reading them as crime fiction, and notably as works that underline the risks that accompany efforts to rewire masculinist genres from within and orient them towards feminist and queer concerns.

Keywords

crime fiction feminism masculinity polar pornography queer Virginie Despentes virility

In the spring 2019, Virginie Despentes was awarded the prix de la Bibliothèque nationale de France, whose recent recipients include Jean Echenoz, Pierre Guyotat, Patrick Modiano, and Michel Houellebecq. Already a laureate of the prix Renaudot in 2010 and a member of the Académie Goncourt since 2016, Despentes is now undeniably one of France’s most successful and celebrated authors. However, those who have followed her career since the 1990s might feel slightly disoriented to see Despentes – author of hyperviolent stories of degradation and excess inspired by Charles Bukowski, James Ellroy, and Philippe Djian – preside over gala diners for the Parisian literati. While the refined styles and metafictional strategies of writers like Paul Auster, Julia Deck, Echenoz, Modiano, or Thomas Pynchon signal the literariness of their appropriations of mystery and crime-fiction tropes, Despentes’ novels, particularly those of the first half of her career, seek out the shock effects of hyperviolent ‘low’ culture. As Debarati Sanyal (2006: 167) remarks of Despentes’ (1994) first novel, Baise-moi,

The gross, ‘trash’ scenes of violence parody the vocabulary of high art and its irrealization of what violence does to real bodies. Baise-moi enacts a revenge of content over form: it refuses the aesthetic comforts of distance and embeds the narrative in the concrete realities of the body’s vulnerability, desire, and death.

Interestingly, while the French press has often labelled Despentes’ novels as ‘polars’ (Brocas, 2010; Crom, 2010; Lançon, 1996; Lévy, 2010; Pliskin, 2010; Viviant, 1995), Anglophone scholarship on the French crime novel (Gorrara, 2003; Platten, 2011), on punk crime fiction (Lee, 2005), and on feminist crime fiction (Desnain, 2001; Gorrara, 2003) has to date had little to say about Despentes’ work.

Now that Despentes’ fiction has taken a Balzacian sociological turn in her Vernon Subutex cycle of novels, and has dialled down the gory and pornographic set pieces with which she made her name, it is even easier to read Despentes as a realist literary author sitting above the history of popular crime fiction. The BnF prize committee makes no mention of Despentes’ engagement with crime-fiction tropes, and instead characterises Despentes as ‘avant tout l’inventrice d’une langue puissante et poétique, à travers laquelle le mot, son rythme, donnent corps à un art jouissif de la narration’ (Press Release, 2019: n.p.). This depiction not only sanitises Despentes’ deliberately trashy prose, it also obscures the inventive work that she has done on and within the stylistic and thematic conventions of crime fiction. In this essay, I take up this subject to show how Despentes repurposes crime fiction’s gendered thematics and sadistic sexual politics, pulls it towards feminist and queer concerns, and in the process highlights some of the genre’s pitfalls.¹ As I argue, attending to this aspect of Despentes writing gives a fuller picture of her ambivalent work with masculinist tropes, and allows us to ask sharper questions about the efficacy of her subversive approach to crime fiction.

Crime fiction and feminist virility

In her 2006 essay King Kong théorie, Despentes (9) insists on the importance of female marginality in defining her intended audience and political aesthetic values: ‘j’écris de chez les moches, pour les moches, les vieilles, les camionneuses, les frigides, les mal baisées, les imbaisables, les hystériques, les tarées’. Despentes (2006: 10) associates this attitude with a broader sympathy for losers of all stripes: ‘la figure de la looseuse de la féminité m’est plus que sympathique, elle m’est essentielle. Exactement comme la figure du looser social, économique, ou politique’. Such statements reinforce Despentes’ self-styling as a writer who is ‘proche de la pensée 68, politiquement, artistiquement’ (Despentes, 2010b: n.p.), and also align her fiction with the noir novel’s emphasis on the problems of the oppressed and excluded. This is a natural association, for one of the cultural legacies of May 68 is a broad effort to imagine a new left crime fiction, a néo-polar. If what we call the noir novel is sometimes dismissed as merely a pessimistic subvariant of the thriller (Palmer, 1978), it is indeed because it has a tendency to replace the restorative justice of the mystery novel and the efficacious masculinity of the hard-boiled detective novel with more morose stories of society’s losers. As perhaps the most famous French crime novelist of the radical Left, Jean-Patrick Manchette (1982) once commented (p. 44) one of the key differences between his fictions and the Alain Delon’s macho crime films was that ‘[mes personnages] sont des “loosers” façon Huston’.

The simplest way to conceptualise feminist crime fiction is as a reversal of perspective that foregrounds oppressive structures rooted in misogyny, first of all, but also often in homophobia, transphobia, racism, and class prejudices. Discussions of French feminist crime fiction (Barfoot, 2007: 57; Desnain, 2001: 176; Gorrara, 2003: 111) accordingly often begin by emphasising the gradual inclusion of women’s voices in a genre from which they were both symbolically and materially excluded, and then analyse how such authors adopt, at the level of plot, the perspective of those victimised by White heteropatriarchal society (Gorrara, 2003: 116; Tabachnik, 1997: 125–126). Despentes is a tricky fit for this reading, for though she certainly makes violence against women and other marginalised subjects a central theme of her fiction, she also mobilises virile tropes and appropriates them for her female characters. She is a writer who seeks to occupy or colonise the ‘terrain [. . .] machiste et cynique’ (Viart and Vercier, 2008: 340) of brutal crime fiction. Virility is indeed one of the qualities of which Despentes (2006: 11) is the proudest:

Je parle de ma place de femme toujours trop tout ce qu’elle est, trop agressive, trop bruyante, trop grosse, trop brutale, trop hirsute, toujours trop virile, me dit-on. Ce sont pourtant mes qualités viriles qui font de moi autre chose qu’un cas social parmi les autres. Tout ce que j’aime de ma vie, tout ce qui m’a sauvée, je le dois à ma virilité.

Later in King Kong théorie (p. 128), Despentes (2006) enumerates the ‘qualités viriles’ that she says have been key to both her happiness and success:

Boire: viril. Avoir des potes: viril. Faire le pitre: viril. Gagner plein de thunes: viril. Avoir une grosse voiture: viril. Se tenir n’importe comment: viril. Ricaner en fumant des joints: viril. Avoir l’esprit de compétition: viril. Être agressif: viril. Vouloir baiser avec plein de monde: viril. Répondre avec brutalité a quelque chose qui vous menace: viril. Ne pas prendre le temps de s’arranger le matin: viril. Porter des fringues parce qu’elles sont pratiques: viril. Tout ce qui est marrant à faire est viril, tout ce qui permet de survivre est viril, tout ce qui fait gagner du terrain est viril.

Faced with the predictable litany of statements in the press (Iacub, 2006; Kaprièlian, 2010; Larminat, 2006; P, 2010) accusing her either of man-hating or of performing an unconvincing and gender-theory-inflected imitation of masculinity, Despentes (qtd in Savigneau, 2006: n.p.) has wryly observed that ‘chaque fois qu’[une femme] se comporte en être humain, on déclare donc qu’elle s’identifie aux mâles’.

Leaving aside the speculative question of identification, it is clear that Despentes’ fiction attempts to dissociate virility from biological maleness, creating a space for hybrid, polymorphous, nonbinary, and extreme identities. Most notably, in her work with crime fiction, Despentes’ commitment to exploring styles of female masculinity leads her to reimagine the ambivalent figures of the femme fatale and the ‘Sapphic slasher’ (Duggan, 2000).² These tropes have often been appropriated by queer authors,³ but, like corollary forms of ‘queer negativity’ that recuperate and reinvest homophobic stereotypes (e.g. homosexuality as anti-social ‘death drive’), the attempted subversive appropriation always risks reinforcing rather than destabilising the targeted stereotype (Kim, 2018: 30n66). This is, it is too seldom observed, a crucial issue for conceptualising whether and how it is possible to integrate queer and/or feminist perspectives into a genre – brutal crime fiction – which is massively invested in misogynistic and homophobic imaginaries. For this reason, Despentes represents not only an interesting feminist variant of the brutal crime novel but also an exemplary case for studying the tension between using a genre and being used (i.e. recuperated) by it.

Despentes’ fiction is, as I have begun to suggest, characterised by a risky appropriation of virility in both its ‘fun’ and its most brutal forms. Baise-moi, often hastily labelled a rape-revenge thriller,⁴ tells the story of two women, Nadine and Manu, who go on an unbridled sex and murder spree. That novel was a success, but it was its controversial film adaptation – co-directed by pornographic actress Coralie Trinh Thi and starring the pornographic actresses Karen Lancaume and Raffaëla Anderson – that solidified Despentes’ reputation as an extreme and provocative cultural figure. The clear proximity of Despentes’ fiction to the conventions of both pornography and crime fiction suggests the extent to which she is working with genres that have traditionally been marketed to men and aimed at the satisfaction and promotion of virile fantasies: competition, domination, power; sex, violence, money, alcohol, drugs.

This aspect of Despentes’ (2010a) fiction has naturally been remarked by critics and journalists. Apocalypse bébé received not only the prestigious Prix Renaudot but also the more obscure Prix Trop Virilo (n.d.), awarded to ‘un livre ou un essai qui doit sentir l’homme’ and that demonstrates ‘la plus belle poussée de testostérone (littéraire) parue dans l’année’ (p. n.p.). However, the implications of this appropriation for how we read Despentes’ novels as crime fiction remain curiously understudied. While there has been a great deal of descriptive scholarship (Barfoot, 2007; Desnain, 2001; Gorrara, 2003) on crime fiction written by women, the more prescriptive question of what constitutes a feminist intervention is relatively undertheorised in scholarship on French crime fiction. Indeed, despite her own self-identification both as a feminist (Despentes, 2006) and as a writer interested in crime fiction (Despentes, 2010b), Despentes remains a kind of duck-rabbit, visible as feminist fiction (Huffer, 2013; Schaal, 2017) or as crime fiction (Brocas, 2010; Lévy, 2010; Prince, 2019; Viart and Vercier, 2008: 340), but not as both at once. If the conventions of crime fiction are ultimately irreconcilable with violent feminist and queer writing – if that writing itself must be thought as something else than ‘crime fiction’ – then this disjunction is understandable and even desirable. However, to define the problems confronting queer and/or feminist crime fiction (both within and outside collections marketed as such), and to determine their implications for how we read authors like Despentes and the fictions which follow in her footsteps, we must seek a more sustained engagement between French feminist and queer studies scholarship and scholarship on French crime fiction.

Brutal crime fiction and the ‘protecting wall of play’

From the vantagepoint of the present, the critique of virility in crime fiction is far from an original gesture. Crime fiction’s thematics of constructive male violence and its macho styles, from Dashiell Hammett’s behaviourist masculine writing up through Mickey Spillane’s psychological portraits of tortured tough guys, have been read as naturally associated with competitive individualism (Palmer, 1978), with poujadist populism (Vernet, 1993: 18–19) and xenophobia (Breu, 2005; Palmer, 1978), and with sadism and political realism (Orwell, 2008: 245). These critiques are applicable to the French context as well, where crime fiction is influenced by abundant translations of American and British authors as well as by the naturalist and poetic realist traditions. Manchette (1974: 22) quipped that early and mid-twentieth-century French crime fiction had been characterised by ‘une mentalité “machiste” assez répugnante: Jean Gabin plus l’argot’. However, anticipating the eventual arguments of scholarship in cultural studies (Radway, 1984) more attuned to the possibility of resistant modes of reception, Northrop Frye (1971: 47) once argued that as easily as the brutal thriller might be read as ‘advance propaganda for the police state’, such fictions are in fact largely consumed ironically, from behind ‘the protecting wall of play’. It is difficult to account for this kind of reception, particularly given the current pervasiveness of bad faith strategies of ironic disavowal that demand we sanction offensive and violent material, provided it is positioned as a joke. The wall of play clearly protects some better than others, and the safety it affords is often differently perceived when one resembles the victim rather than the perpetrator of imagined violence. It is noteworthy, however, that at the same time as scenes like the bourgeois home invasion in Baise-moi critique the ‘comforts of distance’ and the ‘irrealization’ of violence (Sanyal, 2006: 167), Despentes’ descriptions of crime fiction and in particular of pornography also insist on play and fantasy as distancing mechanisms. Despentes’ anarchist individualist streak and her investment in the freedom to explore violent fantasies go some way towards explaining her interest in both ‘hard’ crime fiction and pornography, the latter of which she defends as ‘un cinéma de genre’ like any other (Savigneau, 2006: 91).

Should we then speak of the ‘protecting wall of play’ when describing, for example, the opening scene of Baise-moi, where Nadine masturbates to a pornographic video showing a woman handcuffed in a stairwell and forced to fellate a stranger? Before rushing to answer, we might note that Nadine’s enjoyment of violent pornography is complicated by the parallelism between this handcuffed woman and the scene that ends the novel, where Nadine is herself handcuffed and held down by the police. It is tempting to read this parallelism as an equivalency which, in a manner reminiscent of Andrea Dworkin (1981) or Monique Wittig (2017: 61), would critique pornography as a concerted strategy of humiliation and violence, a crime against women’s humanity. In that reading, there is no wall of play, only a single extended violent game played with and on women’s bodies, and in these conditions, Nadine and Manu revolt by stealing guns from men (all the novel’s firearms initially belong to men) and playing the game backwards. However, following Despentes’ explicit statements about pornography, that scene could also be read as underlining an essential difference – perhaps real if not absolute – between the fantasmatic pleasure in the consumption of violence and the real corporeal violence of gendered oppression. Whichever reading one prefers, this parallelism points to the tension between the resistant use of cultural forms – the attempt to find a pleasurable space within or at the margins of oppressive structures – and the risk of being subject to variants of those violent fantasies in real life.

Despentes (2006: 29) explicitly states that her appropriation of virility is a step towards ‘l’inconnu qu’est la révolution des genres’. But how exactly does this radical leap into the unknown express itself as and in relation to crime fiction? How might Despentes’ fictional ‘play’ with virility figure or prefigure the possibility of escaping from the gender and sexual binarism that defines so much crime fiction, and that Despentes decries? One answer to this question is found in Despentes’ reading of King Kong, which insists that the ape is not an expression of savage male strength, but instead a hybrid and unassigned body. Despentes (2006: 112) notes that the great ape has ‘ni bite, ni couilles, ni seins’ and occupies a liminal space ‘à la charnière, entre l’homme et l’animal, l’adulte et l’enfant, le bon et le méchant, le primitif et le civilisé, le blanc et le noir’. King Kong is thus ‘hybride, avant l’obligation du binaire’, and the island he rules represents ‘une forme de sexualité polymorphe et hyperpuissante’ (Despentes, 2006: 112). Apocalypse bébé, the novel that I will now briefly discuss, was written right after King Kong théorie, and there is a strong case to be made for reading it as an attempt to graft this hybridity and polymorphous sexuality onto the gendered tropes of crime fiction.

Apocalypse bébé: queer crime fiction

In an interview after the publication of Apocalypse bébé, Despentes (2010b: n.p.) noted that she is part of a larger group of writers ‘[qui] tourn[ent] autour du polar’ without having the ambition to work directly in the genre or to write a ‘polar classique’. Apocalypse bébé is, on its surface, very much a detective novel. Its protagonist and sometime narrator, Lucie Tolédo is a private detective who teams up with the much more competent, dynamic, and violent La Hyène to find a missing 15-year old, Valentine. References to classic detective fiction abound in the story: Lucie works for the Reldanch agency (an anagram for Chandler) and the novel includes casual references to James Bond, Clint Eastwood, Maigret, Sherlock Holmes, and Starsky and Hutch. As Gerald Prince (2019) notes (p. 4), however, Apocalypse bébé is a very odd crime novel. Its most glaring deficiency from the point of view of the genre is the weakness of its central enigma: it is obvious to everyone involved, including the family members who have hired Lucie and La Hyène, that Valentine has run off to Barcelona to find her mother. From a narrative standpoint, the novel eschews the dynamic and strong voices of classic detective narrators, and instead emphasises a plurality of perspectives. A good part of the novel is focalised by characters other than Lucie, and Lucie is, for the most part, resolutely passive, following others and receiving explanations from them (Prince, 2019: 5). In the second half of the story, the central mystery is increasingly sidelined (Despentes, 2010a: 272, 274) to allow the narrative to focus on Lucie’s attraction to a young woman named Zoska. The ending of the novel abruptly transforms the story into a dystopian fiction of totalitarian state surveillance. This pivot, and Lucie’s lack of comprehension faced with it, sharply distinguishes Apocalypse bébé from both the classic rational detective story, which brings the reader through catharsis to a state of ‘true innocence’ (Auden, 1948) and the Chandlerian hard-boiled detective novel, which confirms the stability of an immoral social order that the hero’s moral energy defies but does not defeat.

In distinction to the fully formed intellect of the great rational detectives and the fully formed masculinity of the great tough-guy detectives, Despentes’ protagonists are often negotiating and reimagining their identities as the story progresses. As Prince (2019: 4–5) notes, Apocalypse bébé stands as perhaps the only example in French literature of a female buddy-detective partnership.⁵ This is not a minor detail: the representation of femininity in works like Baise-moi, Apocalypse bébé, and (although it is not really crime fiction) Les Jolies Choses (Despentes, 1998) is always tied to a figuration of initiation, of mimetic mirroring, or of mutual provocation. Femininity, in these novels, is thus approached by means of an appropriation not only of crime fiction and pornography but also crucially of the traditionally masculine genre of the bildungsroman (Schaal, 2017: 100, 136–137). Baise-moi, Les Jolies Choses, and Apocalypse bébé are, upon close inspection, explorations of three different kinds of education, each of which is an exercise in identity construction. In Baise-moi, the education is in violence and hedonistic pleasure: Manu leads Nadine through a systematic transgression of all limits imposed by morality or good taste (the novel features, among other things, an apology for incest and a casual murder of a small child). In Les Jolies Choses, the education is in hyperfemininity and self-objectification, as Pauline decides, after her twin sister’s suicide, to assume her sister’s sexualised identity and profit from it (the novel features scenes of learning how to walk in heels, learning how to adapt to the attention you get when wearing a mini-skirt, etc.).⁶

At first, it appears that Apocalypse bébé will be a kind of a toned-down version of Baise-moi, with La Hyène educating Lucie in the kind of virility necessary to be a detective. La Hyène is perfectly cast for this role: she has short hair and ‘un énorme clit’ (Despentes, 2010a: 112); she’s compared to Hulk (Despentes, 2010a: 26) and Clint Eastwood (Despentes, 2010a: 145); and her gestures – from the way she sits legs apart (Despentes, 2010a: 137) to the way she tips her head back abruptly to drink the last drops of a cup of coffee (Despentes, 2010a: 148) – are coded masculine. By her own admission, La Hyène plays the role of ‘la gouine telle que la rêvent les hétéros: brute, marginale et capable de couper la bite à n’importe qui’ (Despentes, 2010a: 243). La Hyène is thus the stereotypical lesbian ‘fatal woman’, who overtly appropriates the ‘verifying mark[s] of masculinity’ that are desire and aggression (Hart, 1994: x). La Hyène catcalls women (Despentes, 2010a: 59) and participates in wild sex orgies, but she also hurts men and threatens them with rape. In a scene where she is interrogating a right-wing punk rocker, she strikes him, throws him face-down into the dirt, and threatens him with anal rape: ‘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?’ (Despentes, 2010a: 121–122). In this scene, Despentes insists on sadistic enjoyment – ‘la jouissance’ (Despentes, 2010a: 124) – and deploys the tropes of rape language: ‘Détends-toi, tu vas voir, ça va te plaire’ (Despentes, 2010a: 122). In a characteristically polemical mode, Despentes (2006: 50) argues that ‘le viol, c’est le propre de l’homme, non pas la guerre, la chasse, le désir cru, la violence ou la barbarie, mais bien le viol, que les femmes – jusqu’à présent – ne se sont jamais approprié’. In Apocalypse bébé, however, this is not a scene of appropriative initiation: Lucie never becomes violent or seems like she is learning to enjoy violence. Instead, after witnessing this, she shakes and cries on the car ride home. This prompts La Hyène to apologise, before remarking that ‘même institutrice, il faut être plus dure que tu ne l’es’ (Despentes, 2010a: 129). In Apocalypse bébé, the violent education never happens, and Lucie instead has an awakening prompted by meeting and falling in love with Zoska.

Prince (2019: 6–7) remarks that for all the negative portraits and critical commentary in Apocalypse bébé, the novel’s real target seems to be the heterosexual couple, which is always represented as failed or failing. For La Hyène, heterosexuality is ‘aussi naturel que l’enclos électrique dans lequel on parque les vaches’ (Despentes, 2010a: 275). In this sense, Apocalypse bébé reads as a complementary novel to Baise-moi, one which pivots from virile ultra-violence to a lesbian sentimental education. This contrast with the infernal amoralism of Despentes’ early fiction can also be seen in the choice of the protagonist’s name: Lucie Tolédo recalls Louise Cypher (Lucifer → Lucie), the gritty sex worker anti-heroine of Despentes’ (1997) Les Chiennes savantes. In Apocalypse bébé, however, the last name Tolédo evokes maternal darkness and the negativity of female sexuality rather than infernal light and reproductive heterosexuality. These associations are established in two ways. First, in a novel which multiplies references to the Virgin Mary and to Black Madonnas, the name Tolédo evokes the Black Madonna statue of ‘The Enslavement to our Lady of the Tabernacle’ in the Toledo cathedral in Spain. Valentine, the lost girl, is seen by one of her lovers as ‘une Vierge noire’ (Despentes, 2010a: 143), and her sexuality is characterised as a ‘force démesurée’ (Despentes, 2010a: 143), ‘[une] obscurité, enfouie en elle, qui ne demandait qu’à exploser’ (Despentes, 2010a: 142). Second, and relatedly, in a novel which is about a troubled adolescent, which returns time and again to the subject of generational conflict and estrangement, and in which there is an off-handed reference to the famous French paediatrician and psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (Despentes, 2010a: 33), Tolédo reads as an anagram for Dolto(e) (or for é/et Dolto, Tolédo et Dolto). To read this novel as a critique of the heterosexual couple by no means obliges us to position it, as some corners of the French press were content to do, as a man-hating, straight-hating lesbian-feminist conversion fantasy. Rather, it might be better seen as a reflection on the dominant sexual-social order and its incapacity to care for, among others but above all, young women.

Subversion or submission?

While this concern for young women without mothers might be read as a conservative turn in Despentes’ fiction, it is arguably intertwined with the thematics of violent revolt that permeate Despentes’ (2006) early novels and her call for a feminist revolution (p. 145). The dark, explosive, powerful, hybrid sexuality that fascinates Despentes could indeed be considered an ideal of non-violence situated on the other side of violent conditions eliciting violent reactions. In a short reflection titled ‘Transgression de la transgression’, Roland Barthes (2002: 645) wrote that the endpoint of the sexual revolution, the ultimate transgression, would be the reintroduction of ‘un brin de sentimentalité’ into the ‘champ politico-sexuel’. Barthes (2002: 645) concluded that ‘en fin de compte ce serait l’amour: qui reviendrait: mais à une autre place’. As Lynne Huffer (2013: 175) notes, surprising flickers of tenderness punctuate Baise-moi’s ultraviolent scenes: ‘what I find in Baise-moi’s violence, unexpectedly, is tenderness. It is a fleeting tenderness that appears intermittently, like a palimpsest or the scars Manu reads on Nadine’s back’. Huffer, insisting more than Despentes on the corporeal and psychic damage of pornography, locates this tenderness ‘after sex’, on the other side of the pornographic violence that the text traverses. Thinking in these terms, it is the symbolic murder of the child performed in Baise-moi which authorises us to imagine the ideal of motherhood returning, but in a radically different place: a queer (read: different) motherhood and tenderness situated somewhere beyond the straight minds of the novel’s bad mothers.

The dystopian ending of Apocalypse bébé is tied to a hypocritical religious version of motherhood: Valentine is recruited as a terrorist by a nun who is an agent of the state, by another kind of Black Madonna who enslaves. This woman holds Valentine, gives her love, brainwashes her, and sends her to set off the apocalypse. Valentine returns to Paris and detonate a bomb in her vagina, a literal explosion that is the dystopian negative image of other explosions in the book, notably the ‘bombe tranquille’ of Lucie’s first kiss with Zoska (Despentes, 2010a: 270). This terrorist act is a ‘false flag’ operation allowing for a massive programme of state repression, and the end of the book is about the state taking over. Apocalypse bébé thus gestures towards the possibility of freedom, only to show that road blocked off by a victory of the panoptic spirit of the detective novel, by apocalyptic revelation – ‘le voile levé sur la chose’ (Derrida, 1983: 13), ‘vérité de la vérité’ (Derrida, 1983: 69) – by the enforcement of identities and roles. That is the dystopia that Despentes (29) imagines in King Kong théorie as well, where she writes that if we do not go towards the unknown that is the feminist gender revolution, we will inevitably regress back to a biopolitical dystopia that exacerbates and universalises the oppression of women: ‘un État tout-puissant qui nous infantalise, intervient dans toutes nos décisions, pour notre propre bien’.

We can see in this fantasy the ambivalence of Despentes’ political position, not only on the level of her professed opinions but also in terms of how her fiction mobilises the tones and themes associated with anarchist, libertarian, and populist-individualist rhetoric. As much as Despentes might be aligned with figures on the radical cultural Left, her fiction also mobilises the alluring tropes of transgressive violent individualism in a manner reminiscent of right-wing crime fiction or even of the anti-political thought of Ayn Rand or the Marquis de Sade. While scholars such as Michèle A. Schaal (2017: 104) have inscribed Despentes in the lineage of second-wave materialist feminism, Despentes’ positions on subjects like pornography and prostitution put her at odds with some prominent thinkers of that period. At the level of her queer and feminist rhetorics as well as at the level of her popular cultural appropriations, Despentes thus represents, as Sanyal (2006: 172) has argued, a writer whose negativity ‘challenge[s] straightforward ideological recuperations of [her] work’. It is nevertheless clear that there is a critical intent in Despentes’ fiction, one which takes aim at ‘classic’ crime fiction. For at the same time as she mobilises virile paradigms of desire and pleasure, Despentes critiques the policing of traditional identities that occurs in crime fiction’s superficially subversive fantasies of masculine marginality.

In the decade since the publication of Apocalypse bébé, Despentes’ fiction has turned increasingly towards the sociological, multiplying voices and figuring mini-utopias (which look something like gender-bending dance parties).⁷ Perhaps as a result of this turn towards a more overt thematics of tenderness, Despentes is no longer imagining her feminism as crime fiction. She remains, however, a writer who helps us ask the difficult question of what a queer feminist spin on brutal crime fiction might look like, and what forms we can imagine it taking in the future. Though there is no evidence that Despentes is familiar with English-language lesbian detective fiction (e.g. M. F. Beal’s Angel Dance [1977], Sarah Schulman’s Maggie Terry [2018]), Apocalypse bébé now represents a significant entry in that small but fascinating corpus. When one surveys the landscape of popular crime fiction today, Despentes’ violent heroines could also be considered spiritual precursors to the perverse and playful female criminals of Céline Minard’s (2019) Bacchantes, and, at the other end of the spectrum, to the literally disposable life of the ‘fatal woman’ of Coralie Fargeat’s (2017) gory rape-revenge film Revenge. Such fictions suggest the enduring interest in the forms of resistant excess explored by Despentes, excess which is coded female though not necessarily feminine, and which attempts to trouble from within the sadistic enjoyment that violent crime fiction persists in offering to its readers and viewers.

The question of whether this resistance is effective – or if, regardless of its intentions, it is instead destined to be recuperated as masculinist spectacle – remains very much open. The recent establishment of the Staunch Book Prize (n.d.), ‘awarded to a novel in the thriller genre in which no woman is beaten, stalked, sexually exploited, raped or murdered’ (p. n.p.), is but one example of an effort to break crime fiction’s singular fascination with gendered and sexual violence. That prize has been accused of failing to account for the difference between voyeuristic male-authored fictions and resistant feminist approaches,⁸ but arguably its point is to try to think outside this binary, outside the repetitive fixation with representations of violence against women. Is the house of brutal crime fiction now a renovation job or a tear-down? Wherever one falls on this issue, it is clear that for today’s feminist writers and directors as much as for 1970s Marxian efforts to imagine a néo-polar, brutal crime fiction represents both an alluring medium for cultural contestation and a test case for whether that contestation can truly rewire from within such a regressive genre.

Footnotes

ORCID iD

Lucas Hollister

Notes

Author biography

Lucas Hollister is an associate professor of French at Dartmouth College. A specialist of French prose fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, his research spans a variety of topics related to genre fiction, popular culture, critical theory, ecocriticism, gender, and sexuality. He is the author of Beyond Return: Genre and Cultural Politics in Contemporary French Fiction (Liverpool UP, 2019) and of articles in journals such as PMLA, Genre, Romanic Review, The French Review, French Forum, Fixxion, and Contemporary French and Francophone Studies.

References

Armstrong

(2019) Maps and Territories: Global Positioning in the Contemporary French Novel. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Auden

(1948) The Guilty Vicarage: notes on the detective story, by an Addict. Harper’s Magazine, May, p. n.p. Available at: https://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/ (accessed 15 November 2019).

Barfoot

(2007) Frauenkrimi/Polar Féminin: Generic Expectations and the Reception of Recent French and German Crime Novels by Women. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.

Barthes

(2002) Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes. In: Marty

(ed) Œuvres complètes, IV (1972–1976). Paris: Seuil, pp. 575–772.

Beal

(1977) Angel Dance. New York: Daughters Publishing Co.

Breu

(2005) Hard-boiled Masculinities. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Brocas

(2010) Polar transgenre. Le Magazine littéraire, September, p. 500.

Crom

(2010) La dynamique Despentes. Télérama, 25 August. Available at: https://www.telerama.fr/livre/la-dynamique-despentes,59340.php

Derrida

(1983) D’un ton apocalyptique adopté naguère en philosophie. Paris: Galilée.

10.

Desnain

(2001) “La femelle de l’espèce”: women in contemporary French Crime Fiction. French Cultural Studies 12(2): 175–192.

11.

Despentes

(1994) Baise-moi. Paris: Florent Massot.

12.

Despentes

(1997) Les Chiennes savantes. Paris: Florent Massot.

13.

Despentes

(1998) Les Jolies Choses. Paris: Grasset.

14.

Despentes

(2006) King Kong théorie. Paris: Grasset.

15.

Despentes

(2010a) Apocalypse bébé. Paris: Grasset.

16.

Despentes

(2010b) Je ne suis pas encore très disciplinée, mais j’essaie. Lemonde.fr , 27 August. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2010/08/26/virginie-despentes-je-ne-suis-pas-encore-tres-disciplinee-mais-j-essaie_1402874_3260.html (accessed 12 May 2021).

17.

Doane

(1991) Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.

18.

Duggan

(2000) Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

19.

Dworkin

(1981) Pornography: Men Possessing Women. New York: Perigee Books.

20.

Fargeat

(dir) (2017) Revenge. Shudder, Neon, MES Productions, Monkey Pack Films.

21.

Frye

(1971) Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

22.

Gorrara

(2003) The Roman Noir in Post-war French Culture: Dark Fictions. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

23.

Halberstam

(1998) Female Masculinity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

24.

Hart

(1994) Fatal Women: Lesbian Sexuality and the Mark of Aggression. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

25.

Huffer

(2013) Are the Lips a Grave? A Queer Feminist on the Ethics of Sex. New York: Columbia University Press.

26.

Iacub

(2006) En finir avec le viol. Lemonde.fr, 6 October. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2006/10/05/en-finir-avec-le-viol-par-marcela-iacub_820113_3260.html (accessed 12 May 2021).

27.

Kaprièlian

(2010) Chasse à l’homme. Les inrockuptibles 769: 63.

28.

Kim

(2018) Unbecoming Language: Anti-identitarian French Feminist Fictions. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press.

29.

Lançon

(1996) Baise-moi et marche. Libération.fr, 22 January. Available at: https://www.liberation.fr/portrait/1996/01/22/virginie-despentes-26-ans-auteur-d-un-polar-violent-et-hors-normes-baise-moi-va-publier-son-second-r_159585/ (accessed 12 May 2021).

30.

Larminat

(2006) Laide et fière de l’être. Lefigaro.fr, 16 November. Available at: https://www.lefigaro.fr/livres/2006/11/16/03005-20061116ARTFIG90166-laide_et_fiere_de_l_etre.php (accessed 12 May 2021).

31.

Leduc

(1966) Thérèse et Isabelle. Paris: Gallimard.

32.

Lee

(2005) Punk “Noir”: anarchy in two idioms. Yale French Studies 108(“Crime Fictions”): 177–188.

33.

Lévy

(2010) Despentes sur la (dé)route. Le Point, 16 August.

34.

Manchette

(1974) Interview. Le Monde, 17 May, p. 22.

35.

Manchette

(1982) Le roman noir reprend des couleurs. Les Nouvelles littéraires 2821: 44–45.

36.

Martinelli

(2019) Why an award for books without violence against women is so controversial. Slate.com , 5 July, p. n.p. Available at: https://slate.com/culture/2019/07/staunch-prize-violence-against-women-controversy.html (accessed 15 November 2019).

37.

Minard

(2019) Bacchantes. Paris: Rivages.

38.

Orwell

(2008) Raffles and Miss Blandish. In: G

Orwell

(ed.) All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, pp. 232–247.

39.

(2010) À boire et à manger. Le Figaro Magazine, 28 August: 77.

40.

Palmer

(1978) Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London: Arnold.

41.

Platten

(2011) The Pleasures of Crime: Reading Modern French Crime Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

42.

Pliskin

(2010) Virginie, ange gardien. Le Nouvel Observateur, 2–8 September, p. 89.

43.

Press Release (2019) Virginie Despentes reçoit le prix de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. France 24, 6 June, p. n.p. Available at: https://www.france24.com/fr/20190606-virginie-despentes-recoit-le-prix-bibliotheque-nationale-france (accessed 15 November 2019).

44.

Prince

(2019) Apocalypse bébé et l’inversion. Conference paper delivered at the 20th and 21st-century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium. Reproduced by permission of the author.

45.

Prix Trop Virilo (n.d.) Available at: https://leprixvirilo.com/qui-sommes-nous/quid-du-prix-trop-virilo/ (accessed 15 November 2019).

46.

Radway

(1984) Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

47.

Sanyal

(2006) The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP.

48.

Savigneau

(2006) Despentes, un cri pour les femmes. Le Monde, 5 October. Available at: https://www.lemonde.fr/livres/article/2006/10/05/virginie-despentes-un-cri-pour-les-femmes_820112_3260.html

49.

Schaal

(2017) Une troisième vague féministe et littéraire: Les femmes de lettres de la nouvelle génération. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

50.

Schulman

(2018) Maggie Terry. New York: Feminist Press at the City University of New York.

51.

Staunch Book Prize (n.d.) Available at: http://staunchbookprize.com/ (accessed 15 November 2019).

52.

Tabachnik

(1997) Remarques sur la non-place des femmes dans le roman noir. Les Temps Modernes 595: 122–129.

53.

Vernet

(1993) Film Noir on the Edge of Doom (trans. Swenson

). In: J

Copjec

(ed.) Shades of Noir: A Reader. London: Verso, pp. 1–31.

54.

Viart

Vercier

(2008) La littérature française au présent, 2e éd. Paris: Bordas.

55.

Viviant

(1995) Sexe, crime et chocolat. 2 March. Available at: https://www.liberation.fr/livres/1995/03/02/sexe-crime-et-chocolat-baise-moi_128444/ (accessed 12 May 2021).

56.

Wittig

(2017) La Pensée straight. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, pp. 57–67.