Virginie Despentes

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." ==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." 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. 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 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. 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". 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. ==Bibliography==