Virginie Despentes

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.

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."

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.

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.

After the release of the 1993 novel and the film adaptation, she became highly controversial.

In 1994, her first book Baise-moi was published.

The book focused 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 neighborhood in Lyon.

The neighborhood was hilly; "pente" is French for hill.

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.

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.

Later works such as Apocalypse Bébé (2010) and the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015–17) received many positive reviews.

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.