Grrrl Writing

"This excellent volume—the first book-length study in English on Despentes’s writing—is rich, timely and insightful. Schaal’s rigorous analysis contextualises Despentes’s work carefully in relation to contemporary writing and thought, highlighting its intersections with gender theory, in particular. The book is the fruit of extensive knowledge of Despentes’s work across several media and will be of interest to students and scholars in gender studies, literary studies and contemporary cultural studies." (Professor Natalie Edwards, Head of the School of Modern Languages and Professor of Literature in French, University of Bristol)

"Schaal’s academic treatment of Despentes’s work manages to maintain the appealing edge of the author’s approach while exercising impressive critical astuteness. The book is thoughtfully considered: from the Reflexivity and Positionality Statement that opens the book to the pedagogically minded vast bibliography at the end. Grrrl Writing will appeal to scholars and students interested in Despentes, French feminisms, political fiction, and women writers in an increasingly self-reflexive literary economy." (Anne Brancky, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Vassar College)

"Schaal offers us a very exhaustive study of Despentes’s novels from Baise-moi to Cher connard. The author engages with all current criticism (in French and English) to demonstrate the evolution of the politics and aesthetics of protest that Despentes’s novels perform. Questions of social vulnerability and fragility assigned by (sexual or racial) identities are at the center of Schaal’s reflections. This book is a must-read if you want to undertake research on the author Despentes and the French feminist protest novel." (Catherine Mavrikakis, Professor, Département des littératures de langue française, Université de Montreal)

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.