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. Work 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, violences 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." 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. Later works such as Apocalypse Bébé (2010) and the Vernon Subutex trilogy (2015–17) received many positive reviews. 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 fifteen years of age, 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 seventeen years old, 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 seventeen, 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.