Jamie Hood at Bookforum:
IN A 2019 INTERVIEW with Lauren Elkin, the writer Virginie Despentes remarked of #MeToo that something was missing from the movement, “disconcerting” stories that didn’t fit into an increasingly streamlined regime of victimhood: “I want to see an uprising of loose women,” she said. “It’s really important to give voice to people practicing a sexuality that isn’t quite—correct.” Despentes broke onto the scene with 1993’s notorious Baise-moi (Fuck Me in English, though some markets have translated the title as Rape Me instead), an unhinged fever dream of a novel following two women—one a prostitute, the other the survivor of a gang rape loosely based on Despentes’s own—on a robbery, fucking, and killing spree. The movie, when Despentes adapted it with filmmaker and porn actress Coralie Trinh Thi in 2000, was the first to be banned in France in twenty-eight years. In response to accusations that the film wasn’t art but pornography, Trinh Thi scoffed that it couldn’t possibly be porn—it wasn’t produced “for masturbation.”
The protagonists of the novel, Nadine and Manu, react to their sexual and economic victimization not with shame or paralysis, but with a shocking torrent of morally unassimilable desire and force.
more here.
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